The Expat Facebook Group Is Not Your Community
Every moving abroad guide tells you to join an expat group, but nobody tells you the group will probably make you feel more alone.
I’ve had many conversations with different people for this project and I can tell you only a handful of people found a community through the Facebook expat group.
They found jobs there sometimes, tips about which neighborhood to avoid, which lawyer not to hire, which grocery store they were looking for—useful, practical, transactional information. But community? Belonging? The feeling that you are not completely alone in a brand new country? Almost never through the group.
Roamer 1 moved from New York to Costa Rica after years of survival mode, a premature baby, $500 ER visits nine times in one winter and $3,600 a month for daycare and a hospital bed. When she got to Costa Rica, she did what everyone does. She joined the expat Facebook groups, but ended up describing them as toxic.
She posted once about finding Meyer lemons at the grocery store and got shredded. “That’s too expensive. Why are you shopping there? That packaging isn’t recyclable.”
She was just trying to help people make a damn pie.
So she left the groups and her actual community came from farmers markets, other parents, recurring faces, small interactions and people who became friends just by existing in the same space repeatedly. Her daughter was, as she put it, her cheat code — a small kid automatically creates connections with other parents that no expat groups can replicate. But beyond that, the expats she actually bonded with were people who were in the same boat like her—looking for connection. Which meant when you were in, you were really in.
When you move abroad, you expect it to be lonely. Everyone drums it into your ears. But what we don’t talk about is that the specific way the infrastructure built to solve that loneliness often makes it worse.
The Facebook group model promises community, but falls short, because everyone is looking for the same thing. And groups built around questions and complaints rather than actual shared experience doesn’t create the conditions for real connection. It creates the conditions for information exchange with occasional hostility.
Roamer 13 spent fifteen years in Norway and had one Norwegian friend. She had other people she cared about, but they were almost other South Europeans and South Americans. Other people who had also moved for economic reasons and found each other because they were all equally outside Norwegian social life. The Facebook group version of that is everyone in the expat group being equally outside, but never quite getting to know each other.
Roamer 15 admitted he hadn’t put himself out there as much as he should have in Australia. He was working, building social media content and maybe had two free hours a day. He couldn’t join a football club because his rota kept changing. The friends he had were from work and from his housemates. He said: “I wouldn’t say it’s been a fairy tale. I thought I’d move over, form a big friendship group and get a hot surfer girlfriend or anything like that.”
It’s funny but it’s also just true. The version of moving abroad that lives in our heads — the instant community, the group of expats who become your found family within the first month — almost never materializes. And when it doesn’t, people assume they did something wrong. They weren’t social enough, open enough, brave enough. They take the loneliness personally. But it’s not personal. It’s structural.
Think about how you actually made your closest friends. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t through a group you joined explicitly to make friends. It was through forced proximity over time. School, because you were in the same classroom for years. Work, because you spent maybe forty hours a week together. A sports team, a dance class, a neighborhood, a building.
Moving abroad breaks that structure. You arrive with no existing proximity, no shared history, no recurring spaces yet. So, you join a Facebook group full of other people who also have none of those things, and you expect connection to happen.
It doesn’t work like that.
Roamer 14 lived off the beaten path in Nicaragua. He had almost no gringo friends nearby and he watched, from a distance, what happened to the ones who moved to Mexico and clustered in the expat zones.
They came full of excitement. They joined the groups. They went to the expat bars. They found each other immediately — other Americans, other Canadians, other people who spoke their language and got their references and didn’t require the work of cultural translation. Eventually, alot of them went home because what they’d found wasn’t community. It was a bubble. A comfortable simulation of the life they’d left, transplanted to a sunnier location and when the novelty wore off, the bubble didn’t have enough substance to hold them.
The people who stayed — in his observation — were the ones who found their way into something local. A job that required real integration. A relationship with someone from the country. A neighborhood where they were the only foreigner and had to figure it out. You can’t become part of a place from inside a Facebook group.
Roamer 16 fell in love with Málaga the moment she arrived. The warmth of the people, the way a stranger at a bakery calls you cariña before she knows your name. She described it as a special vibe she could hardly explain. She’s right that it’s hard to explain, because what she was describing isn’t a feature of Málaga that you can look up in an expat group. It’s something you absorb through presence. Through going to the same bakery enough times that the woman knows your face. Through existing in a place rather than observing it.
Roamer 17 spent years in a Spanish coastal town before driving 30 kilometres to a new one where she didn’t know anyone. She wasn’t prepared, neither did she do any Facebook group research. She just moved and started all over again, finally finding what she was looking for, by showing up and being present in a new place until it became familiar enough to feel like hers.
I hope you can see the pattern now. Real belonging comes from small, repeated, unplanned interactions
I think about this a lot in the context of what it would actually take to make moving abroad easier and it’s not just the visa part, the housing search and the documents — but the loneliness part. The part where you get to somewhere new and have to rebuild a social world from nothing, usually while also dealing with bureaucracy, language barriers and the load of figuring out how everything works.
The honest answer is that the loneliness is probably irreducible to some degree. You can’t shortcut the time it takes to become a recurring face somewhere and to actually belong.
What you can do is stop expecting the Facebook group to do something it was never designed to do. Stop treating the expat community as a destination and start treating it as, at best, a first week resource. Find the farmers market. Take the class. Walk to the same coffee shop until the person behind the counter knows your order.
Do the boring, slow, unsexy work of just showing up somewhere until somewhere starts to feel like home.
The Roamer series is an ongoing collection of interviews with people who have moved abroad, what drove them there, what the process actually cost them, and what they found on the other side.
There is a special brand of poison that powers these "expat" (immigrant groups. Avoid them like syphilis!
I've attended only one 'expat' group gathering in the two years since I moved abroad. What you've written sums it up!