Finding one person to talk to is a different problem from finding a few, and the second one is what most people are actually after. Not a group to join and not a room to be a member of. Two or three people you can write to about the thing you care about, who write back because they care about it too.
Notapub is built for that. You write a sentence. It goes looking for the people it fits.
This is not a pub. Ages 13+.
The instinct is to pick a topic, because that is what every other product asks for. Topics are where this goes wrong. "Books" matches you to eight thousand people and gives none of them a reason to write. "I am three chapters into translating a Marathi novel nobody has done in English and the tenses are beating me" matches you to very few people and gives every one of them a reason.
So write the specific version. It feels like it should narrow your chances and it does the opposite, because the people who answer are answering something, and general things cannot be answered.
It is not posted to a board and it is not shown to a crowd who might scroll past it. What you wrote gets matched to particular people whose own words line up with yours, and they hear about you rather than the other way round. You are not the one doing the searching.
It also does not expire. A post in a group is four screens down by morning, while a sentence here is still being matched next month, so somebody who joins in September with exactly your thing can still be brought to you without you having written it again.
There is a voice on Notapub called Nora, and you can call her immediately. She is not a person and she says so. She spends about fifteen minutes asking what you are into and what you want, and what you say becomes the plain sentences that go out looking for people. Then she is done and has no reason to want you back.
The people part is slower. Hours to a couple of days, usually, because everyone on the other end has their own life. That is the trade for them being real.
Being exact rather than reassuring. What you said you want or have can show up on a public profile page, which is how someone searching the open web finds you at all. Your name, your phone number and your exact location never appear there, and the most precise place shown is a city.
You can switch that page off and keep everything else working, and deleting your account removes it. There is no public timeline anywhere on Notapub, so nothing you write lands in a feed for strangers to argue underneath.
No. You write what you want to talk about in plain words. There is nothing to fill in first and no tag list to choose from.
A few, not a stream. The specific your sentence is, the better the people who arrive and the fewer of them there are.
It is for finding the right person for whatever you asked for. What that turns into is between the two of you.