I haven’t had an online or in-person friend in maybe 2 years. I had a friend maybe a few years ago that I drifted away from due to us losing interest. It’s really wearing on me. The only person outside my family that I speak to often is an old bud, but that’s limited to sharing memes and not much else. I’m in a place where I want to branch out to others but… they may reject me, lose interest in me, not treat my feelings with respect, or confront and dominate me. That fear entirely spoils any motivation I have to talk to new people. It just feels like any interaction I might have will place me in a worse state than I already am, which is kind of like a neutral zone. I always feel funny because it’s like I’m dying of thirst but am scared of water.
You need to make it as easy and safe as possible for yourself to find people. You’re essentially doing it right now by making this post, which is great! You just need to keep at it :)
Basically figure out the way of doing this that is most comfortable and least scary. You need to be a bit creative for it, because only you can figure out what exactly that means. Maybe that means just more commenting on some Lemmy posts. Maybe you could private message someone whose comments you like and ask if they’d like to talk a bit. Maybe there’s a chat in a community of some of your interest where people casually talk online, like a Matrix or Discord server, and you could join that and do some talking. You can also go outside to some event or whatever with the sole goal of observing and not interacting, just to get some feel for a place/group, ideally with a way to easily and quickly leave.
Most important of all is to be kind to yourself, this kind of thing is super hard to overcome and you’re doing great in even attempting it! I had to go through a similar thing, I was extremely lonely however luckily never completely alone, but I remember how hard it was for me. It’s still hard but not crippling anymore :)
If you want to talk, sure, otherwise I wish you so much luck and success and just the best experiences possible for you :)