Mostly only answering the short question, but: most of my friends are from reddit. This is super convenient, and I'd be very hesitant to move somewhere that didn't have a similar ready-made community for me.
(But I don't know how I'd tell. I imagine only a handful of cities worldwide have a suitable subreddit, and a handful have large rationalist communities. Beyond that, I'd want to check for sunday assembly and for Meetup groups. But I guess not every community of suitable size and demographic will be a good fit for me, and I don't know how I'd test that in advance.)
London also makes it easy to take up hobbies, and I imagine that would be more consistent in big cities. Your current location might not lack anything you currently want, but that may be partly because you haven't had a chance to discover you want them.
London also makes it easy to take up hobbies, and I imagine that would be more consistent in big cities.
I'm in NYC, and hobbies here are INSANELY expensive. Sure, there multiple makerspaces, but their memberships are all $400/mo+. Classes are expensive. Rent is so high that no one has room for hobby equipment. I would like to try brewing, but have nowhere to put a big jug. There are a lot of hobbies I would like to try but I have to space for it. Also, there's not a lot of free and open space for hobbyist groups.
Contrarily, I've also lived in the Midw...
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