I'm going to take this line by line, because there's a lot to unpack here.
"if i was chilling at a table talking with my friends and some rando walked up and said "may i join you?" i would be offended and creeped out"
So, look: given that the rest of your post situates you as a lonely person struggling to find connection - and given, crucially, your subsequent comment that "if there's a cool group of people talking, i'm never going to walk up and bother them" - I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that, rather than being a statement of personal intent, this comment expresses what you assume strangers think of you. Which... I don't know how old you are, but this smacks of high school logic. Yes, adults can also be assholes, but we're expressly talking about events like conferences, conventions and university club events, where the entire point is to meet people. Kill the cop in your head that says you can't approach the Cool Kids! You absolutely can!
so much of that post and especially the reblog are placing all the onus on the lonely people. all the work of seeking out connection is being placed at the feet of the people with the least social power and wherewithal. why should that be how it works
I'm going to come back to "people with the least social power and wherewithal" in a moment, because there's a lot of very wrong assumptions encoded in this language, but to put it simply: if you're lonely and want friends, the onus is on you to seek out connection for the same reason that, if you're hungry and want food, the onus is on you to find something to eat. In terms of both food and companionship, the job of a healthy community is to provide you with opportunities to meet your needs, and as far as our stated example goes - attending something like a university club - the existence of the event itself is the provision of opportunity. That being so, expecting strangers to do all the work of befriending you at an open event is like walking into a supermarket and expecting someone else to put groceries in your basket. You're still responsible for your own needs!
if there's a cool group of people talking, i'm never going to walk up and bother them. they're the ones with a solid social footing and comfortable position, they're the ones who can afford to invite me in to what they're doing if they want to.
Again, the logic you're deploying here smacks of high school. Why are you assigning strangers a context-specific social status simply because they're talking in a group? They could've met five minutes ago! But even if they are established friends, socialization is a mutual affair. For all they know, you're perfectly happy on your own and any social overture on their part would be unwelcome. Your loneliness has not magically become their responsibility just because they arrived before you!
if i'm new at college and I go to a club meeting, it's not my job as the newcomer to start conversations! I've got no social capital, if I try to start conversations I'm being intrusive and rude! It's their club and I'm some rando who wandered in! If I'm the newcomer it's their job to be welcoming if they want new people. I should be humble and wait, and they should be inviting me in and making me part of what's going on.
Framing this in terms of whose job it is to talk first entirely misses the point of socializing for fun, which is that none of you have to do anything. If you show up to an open event that's expressly intended to bring strangers together, then politely approaching people isn't being "intrusive and rude" - it's participating. Similarly, if you show up to your regular social event and only talk to your existing friends, that's also participating! You're not obliged to talk to strangers, just as strangers aren't obliged to talk to you. Friendship requires both parties to make an effort, and if you decline to make any beyond simply being a body in a room, then while it might hurt your feelings to be excluded, you cannot rightly get mad at strangers for failing to take the extra step you refused to take yourself.
Which doesn't mean we have no communal responsibility to one other. Ideally, we should always strive to be welcoming! But community, by definition, goes both ways, and if you're thinking foremost about what you need or want from strangers, and not what they might need or want from you, then you likely won't get very far.
all of this follows from the basic fact that our society is structured to reward pushiness and arrogance, and expects people to "assert themselves" and "put themselves out there" and look after their own interests. that's what we admire and that's what we expect, and even OP, firmly goodhearted and wanting to help these people, is seeing it as a failure on their parts that they're not pushy and rude enough to make friends.
Here's the thing: if it's fundamentally pushy/arrogant/rude to approach a stranger for potential friendship purposes, then that holds true regardless of whether they're part of a group or standing by themselves. Right? You're framing this as though there's some profound difference between you, a solo person, daring to talk to a group of strangers, and a group of strangers daring to talk to you, a solo person, but there's not. Regardless of who initiates things, in order for a conversation to take place, someone has to take that first step! Someone has to submit themselves to the mortifying ordeal!
You're assigning a negative moral value to the act of talking to strangers to explain why you shouldn't have to do it, but your strategy ultimately depends on strangers talking to you. You've attempted to justify this contradiction by saying "well, those Cool Kids have social capital and I don't," but this literally just something you've made up in your head, not because social capital doesn't exist, but because you're assigning it equally to these hypothetical strangers based purely on the fact that they're already talking to each other, and not because you've got any actual insight into the social dynamics at play. For all you know, these people just met and are equally new to the space you're in; alternatively, they might be its founders, possessed of complex, deeply internecine relationships that it'd take three hours, a box of wine and a string board to unpack - but just by looking, at the moment you first walk in, you don't know which is which.
the work of fixing loneliness should be done by people who aren't lonely; they're the ones with the power to do so.
Wrong: you also have this power! You're an autonomous human being! I'm not saying it's never difficult or scary or that nobody can ever face specific challenges that make socialization harder for them than others, but to insist as a general point that lonely people don't or shouldn't bear the lion's share of responsibility for making themselves un-lonely is the voice of learned helplessness talking. You can be made a friend by someone proactive, but you can also make friends, too. There's no shame in preferring the former, but there's no moral dimension to the preference, and it's not the same as being incapable of the latter. And at a certain point, if just waiting for someone to notice you isn't working and you're unhappy with the outcome, then the onus is indeed on you to make a change - because it's your life.
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