Personally, I just haven’t had a good experience playing online at all. That’s on me, I’m playing a boardgame with maps, while most of the others are ‘acting’ roles and have forgotten to move on the board altogether. As a DM, I try to offer both stage-like moments to accept the game-hook, transitional moments for ‘prep’ chatter, red-line travel, and then a conflict map commonly called a dungeon.
I learned DnDv01 and ADnD but changed mine to Science Ficktion by jumping systems. Traveller became my long-running campaign that slowly became so altered, I call it a home-brew. This was called the LBB system, as there were substantial changes and editions over the years [something like 5 editions total]. The game became ‘space pirates’ themed. When I moved, face-to-face dropped off and replacements hard to find.
So. Game clubs are a great way to meet people in a new area and there were several and FLGS with game rooms to play and recruit. I ran into a broad range of gamers this way and attended their conventions and games. Warhammer40k was great fun. Star Wars too. The people wanting to join in the outer space game were horror players. They like words like ‘grimdark’ and applied them to my Kafka-esque space pirates.