Have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks?(theguardian.com) |
Have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks?(theguardian.com) |
I don't know, but has anyone tried using Tinder in the US recently? Just scammers, crazies, wackos and strange people - if you can get a match. Tinder has gotten totally useless, in fact, it has become a marketplace for lemons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
Your chance of finding a decent date would be bigger on a Hire a dog walker app or hire a cleaner app. Some years ago, I was told that Couch Surfing is a dating app. Kind of.
Good luck.
Supposed name was my name K: kandfriends
The real "killer app" is Trailforks.
Reddit is perhaps the mother of all hobby social networks. You can not beat Reddit at least not yet or as long as majority of users are indeed humans.
Hookup culture just isn't for everyone, and the notion that it is has been the cause of a lot of grief and agony.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
Most kids have a third place growing up, being an extension of school or another place like the skate park. If you leave school and don't find a new third place, finding new friendships becomes difficult.
I agree, and that's why I find it important to study and understand the social dynamics of hookup culture through research [1].
[1] What is Hooking Up? Examining Definitions of Hooking Up in Relation to Behavior and Normative Perceptions: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3546226/
That said, bars are a great way to expand that circle. Dating is just one aspect of socializing. People who go to bars specifically just to "pick up" are creepy.
I'm sorry, but how could you possibly think this is the case? Hookup culture is still very fringe, wildly looked down upon.
Humanity has had a purity culture for the past few hundred years. Sex has been a tool to oppress and shame. To this day, this purity culture continues. Women are slut shamed. Gay men are perceived as disgusting by proxy of their sexual inclinations. Kinks must never be spoken out loud.
Sex is still not talked about. We bead around the bush, play innuendos. Speaking directly about what you desire in the bedroom is almost unthinkable. Some married people endure years of subpar sex, when simple communication could fix it.
Where is this hookup culture? Because if I talk to 10 random people about my hookups, in even a very surface-level amount of detail, what responses would I get?
I get disgust, pearl-clutching. I am a whore, a slut, no cleaner than a pig and practically begging to get AIDS. In fact, AIDS might just be a good thing, to rid the world of immoral scum.
Do you see that same level of reaction to proclaims of marriage and romance? Because I don't. Not sure where you live, but if this is your definition of "hookup culture" and you truly believe it's been pushed on everyone... maybe I should move to wherever you are. But I've never seen or heard of such a place.
A lot of interests need a common space.
This is the problem with the tech world. They are so preoccupied with whether they can, they don’t stop to think if they should.
Yes, that's from Jurassic Park.
I'm sorry, but I think you may be spending too much time online.
Reddit has worked around their lack of it to some degree with location-based subreddits like r/AtlFilmmakers. But subreddits are high maintenance, and they isolate content. Plus, the naming conventions aren't standard. Maybe there's r/AtlFilmmakers for filmmakers in Atlanta, but another subreddit for musicians uses the state in the name instead of a city.
It's a bit like folders vs. tags. It would be nicer to have a single filmmaking subreddit with the option to filter on users' locations -- and default filtering out of location-specific posts in other places.
That wouldn't just make for better dating, though it probably would compared to something like Tinder. It could also lead to stronger local communities and better health outcomes.
Better than any app, go get a hobby in person and get out there to meet people who are into it. Chances are you present yourself way better in the real world vs online. Online dating, especially the Tinder variety, really skews to work for some demographics and not others (I am not talking about gender here so much as age, location, etc.).
> Because hobby apps are nicer places to exist, people spend more time on them – and they can eventually turn into services that are more than advertised. That includes finding like-minded people with whom you’d want to spend your time romantically.
> One reason that people may be starting to find love on apps not explicitly designed for that purpose is because the expectations are lower – and as such, the atmosphere is less sexually charged.
I feel an 'Ask HN' coming on: "have you found love on HN?"
We try to search for meaningful relationships, which socials stole from us apparently, by switching to different socials, pretending they're going to do better than the previous ones.
Wouldn't ditching socials altogether get us in a better place on this matter? It is utopia at this point I guess. Some socials could actually be useful to make new friends/relationships but it seems to me that the very people that constantly complain about the "anti-social" aspect that our lives have taken are the ones that go on and try 1000 different dating apps, give up on friends after a couple of months to try and find new "better" ones.
Granted, as a professional loser I'd like to find someone that likes cycling too, though cycling alone is great too - still, I'd rather find that person in one of those rides than in some weird thing like Strava fly-by's or something.
Strava looks great for some sport activities, but I’d like to meet other nerds into 80s computing, hobby electronics, comics, sci-fi, home automation, kayaking, city exploration, etc
You invariably end up with lical Facebook groups, which are just a flow of posts, and require a FB account, or some non local reddit group, or small scale website you have no idea exists.
Something is missing. It sure would require mass appeal to be useful, but a ‘Tinder for your hobbies’ might be nice. Get matches from people near you who enjoy a cross-section of the same stuff.
Add some social aspects for those who like to show off or share (don’t force it though), make discovery easy, let people organise events…
It sounds to me like what is missing is community.
Around here, if you go outside you're soon going to learn who the like-minded nerds are. Even if you don't chance-encounter them directly, the people you do encounter are apt to know them and let you know about them. From there, you can reach out. Connection made.
In fact, I was just having a conversation with an old friend who recently moved to my area and he noted how everyone is out there talking to each other and finding out about each other, which felt foreign to him. He says where he moved from he was effectively anonymous. I suspect your living arrangement is more like his previously was.
Perhaps the solution isn't tech-based, but simply for us to be more neighbourly the old fashioned way?
Typical social network dopamine hits probably aren’t great for your health, but when it’s paired with 100 miles of exercise, I think it has a net positive. I’ll definitely admit to pushing myself further than I typically would for those Strava kudos.
That said, I don’t think something like Strava is particularly useful without the in person aspect to go along with it. Heck I don’t even know how you’d gain followers without doing group rides.
Anybody here from Germany who would share practical experiences with such apps?
I'm quite apprehensive of the idea that this is now how you meet people. Of course it doesn't necessarily have to be but myself being in my early forties, single, few friends, full time computer job have to say that it is a challenge.
It isn’t surprising at all that focusing on real life shared interests and values first instead of sex first would be a good strategy for finding a long term partner.
The issue is that a long term relationship (and sex) is often considered creepy to pursue in venues not designated for that.
https://discollect.app my public profile: https://discollect.app/profile/clo0oz2hw0005fv02qbxn866c
Also, is there a way to find who else has listened to what I've listened to?
Right now the only way to see if you have common discs with someone else is to directly visit their profile and a "Discs In Common" section will show up. But that's sort of impossible to stumble upon since user discovery is non-existent at the moment. Will be improving this in the near future (others who've collected this disc, etc).
I'll come up with an actual roadmap this week, but here's a few ideas that will be on it:
- Bio, messaging, full location, profile photos - Album reviews (only after collection) - Improved empty state and onboarding - Folders to organize your collection - Readable profile links
Appreciate the great feedback!
(Not to say that there aren't a large number of great projects off the main path.)
> It's a cycle
Lrf, guvf vf n cha.
And here with the birth of broadband I thought we'd moved past the age of line noise.
If you could somehow solve 2, 3 and 4, I assume there'd be many thriving topical communities in parallel, just like the forums of yore that you speak of.
The popular saying on the chats was "Give a man a chat server and he chats for a day. Give him a Go server and he chats for life."
I moved to a new city in 2015 and made a handful of long term friend groups, all started from meetup. I moved to a new city in 2024 and it's basically empty... except for some Wiccan book clubs, or MLM pyramid schemes or whatever.
I don't get it. Seems like there would be competition in this space to replace Meetup, but there's nothing? Or did we all just collectively give up on meeting strangers.
I'm quite of an introvert. And all my long term friendships have faded or my friends have moved cities or countries.
But around lockdown I took up miniature painting and started watching a bunch of 50 to 100 viewer channels about the hobby. With those numbers the streamer knows you by name by the second time you show up and you soon bond with others in chat.
This got me in contact with the small local hobby club, but also by the time I could attend an in person nationwide convention my family was astounded: dozens of people they knew nothing about were greeting me, stopping for hugs and chats, giving me stuff from their stands...
I've seen both romantic and business relationships emerge in that environment.
I think the "activities" part plays a role. I think a lot of men today struggle with socializing, especially with groups that have a good chunk of women. They feel like they don't belong and are acutely aware of how they can be perceived.
The gym, on the other hand, is a pretty isolated thing.
A very attractive mild acquaintance was either bored or lonely or whatever and set up her own run club, one guy showed up. Without wishing to think like a PUA these are good odds.
Paste in a list of your interests (maybe use a list of subreddits you’re subscribed to, or you X inferred interest list)
And it will suggest people to chat with ranked by most common interests.
Could be a weekend project. Anyone want to team up?
Something like feeding your Reddit username to
And suggest other users to chat to based on the analysis
Apparently it was and is used by married people who seek affairs or in another words people who want to cheat on their partner. If you can build community and business around that then you can build community and business around anything.
Btw I think dating sites invented the whole chatbot affair thing because Ashley Madison was using fake chatbot accounts to catfish and lure people into buying Ashley Madison membership or whatever they use to monetize their product.
No, this "article" as far as I saw was simply conjecture.
If there's any amount of this happening - it's hellishly small or limited to people who don't go out at all. If you didn't meet the love of your life in college, dating apps still seem to be the reigning king of the well educated white collar professional (HN audience). I think I've only met one couple that met at a club/bar - almost all others met through a shared hobby (where they met face to face originally) or at a party with mutual friends. By far the leading one though is college + dating apps. IRL meeting as a way to form a relationship after college seems pretty uncommon for my well off and well educated crowd.
I’m still trying to figure out how to sound casual and just interested in chatting and not having the first message sound too weird.
But I’ve made a couple friends and had a bunch of good chats.
I wish reddit, X, and even HN would be more encouraging of direct messaging people. That would mimic real world networking better where you’re usually breaking off into one on one or small groups.
Of course, this doesn't mean that it can be monetized easily.
Does not belong in quotes.
His view of free speech is different to the majority of people reading that article, seems reasonable to put quotes around it.
Funny this got mentioned as France just successfully got that very feature removed from Telegram by arresting the founder and citing that feature as the one being used most for abuse.
Bunch of sources about that here: https://ground.news/article/telegram-to-start-moderating-pri...
After some backlash about safety/privacy, it was disabled on everyone's account and required people to manually opt-in:
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2020/10/strava-flyby-feature.htm...
Very few people opted back in so the feature became useless.
Most people still have the setting that matches them with people who have run with them on a group run (same exact route at the same time).
Honestly, though, there are easier ways to determine where you live and your routine, e.g. address books + parking a car outside of your house & observing.
I mean given sattelite imagery is a thing I doubt army bases are secret, but that was still a bit of a whoopsie, on both the personnel's part and the app's.
If you’re looking for someone, these features often make finding the names of their new accounts trivial. It also tells you that person is within the app’s range.
My suggestion is get a hobby that you explicitly are interested in, but don't go in with an expectation that you'll find someone, or make that your primary goal.
> Chances are you present yourself way better in the real world vs online
For many of us I don't think this is true
The issue here is that you need to have hobbies that are explicitly good for finding partners. For instance, I love riding motorcycles. I am happy to do group oriented aspects of the hobby like track days or group rides, etc. The amount of women in that activity is near zero. The same is true for cars. It's almost entirely men. Even if you say there's 10% women showing up - that's still a horrific 9:1 ratio.
I find it super annoying because my hobbies are so masculine and male dominated. I have to actually go out and do things that I'm not really that passionate about or interested in as a way to meet women - and then I have to be really good at said hobbies.
Fortunately, I am someone who is able and willing to suffer through things that I don't enjoy for a goal but it is going to contradict all the most popular advice out there of "do what you love and love will follow". It's just simply not true. All the women I've met were through activities or hobbies that I had no real interest in doing. I was simply doing them to improve my odds in regards to dating women.
Who cares if you're interested. Just do the fucking work.
In this sense hookup culture can relieve such pressure and allows for decoupling the sexual needs, and romantic ones even - personal note: I think it's weird how people online talk as if it's mandatory to mistreat/abandon the people you hook up with. I build a small but nice network of "friends with benefits" which for me are simply friends who enjoy a specific activity. Like, exactly the inverse of what everyone is recomending and it worked for me.
I am sure many people's brain are wired differently and things "just happen" for them but I need to be more explicit to make anything happen. It also feels boundary crossing, especially with activities where there is physical contact. And even if you take a rejection well, I imagine it doesn't feel great for the other side to get unwanted romantic attraction. It has so much potential to create unnecessary drama.
I wish there were places you could just got to find romantic partners. Not like speed dating but where you can casually hang out. Sure bars and clubs do work for a certain crowd but are not that great if you are not into the "party scene" and lots of people there don't really want to meet other people but just party with friends.
Probably depends on the details of the online communication.
A video call, a synchronous one on one text chat, an asynchronous one on one text chat, and a public broadcast like HN or Twitter all create very different experiences.
HN’s format makes it easy to show aloof, professional detachment and conceals my age and looks. For dating, though? That ain’t an advantage.
That's because they're primarily filled with old people, with "old" interests. Short of a coordinated visit, you'll always be in the minority. Heck, I'm in the minority, and I'm in my 40's the few times I accept an invitation to go to one of these places.
There's also the occasional left-over haughtiness about the value of being let into the club. Left over from when they were exceptionally popular. This can push people away too.
This depends a lot on the person.
The problem with Letterboxd that it's gamified and there is an incredible amount of noise and it's getting worse.
Top reviews are all just copy paste like baits.
"Me when watching a Ghibli film :cryingemoji:" 20k likes
"Yes I'd let Ethan Hawke visit me every single night" 10k likes
etc
It's a good site but also must users are writing dogshit
Just look at the popular reviews page https://letterboxd.com/reviews/popular/this/week/
“Yeah I’d let Jim Keller design my CPU” 200 karma
On Zwift your followers can be automatically notified when you start a ride, and you have zero control over them receiving that notification.
It's creepy how much they push the social aspect.
I've found that it's really what you make of it. My city has a bunch of cycling subcultures - social slow rolls, fast road riding, sightseeing and exploration, commuting and errand-running - and different people like to see and talk about different types of rides and sometimes dabble in different subcultures, but generally people care way more about seeing the rides, and whatever fun banter or background context you add when you post it, than analyzing your speed and elevation.
I really love the social aspect of Strava because I'm friends with all the other people I follow on it. In some way I think it is more intimate than traditional social media. You could get a better picture of my life and how I spend my time from seeing my physical displacements during the day than by seeing the super filtered Instagram stuff that I only choose to share when I'm having a good time and doing something interesting.
Also the watch reminds you to move from time to time.
Komoot is great for planning of "trips" and "stealing" other people's routes. I've done couple of them and you kind of never know what you're gonna see there (hopefully not agressive dogs), all of them were pretty enjoyable. It has a bit of a social aspect, but barely anyone uses it where I live, so IDK how it is.
One thing I miss from Strava are segments (or whatever they're called) - short parts of your route with it's own leader-board. Has "speedrun, but IRL" vibes, which is pretty cool IMO.
It also has a great route builder.
$ echo Lrf, guvf vf n cha. | rot13
Yes, this is a pun.Some people are great communicators over text but really struggle with in person communication. And vice versa.
We still don't have a Goodreads for film
One thing I find odd about having problems finding partners/establishing relationships, it's that for every other psychological problem, say, addictions, depression, et cetera, one thing people always says to be of utmost importance is to acknowledge the problem itself. To not pretend it's nothing, or that it's something else. With relationship-making there's a complete reversal on that. Default advice it's to forget it and delude yourself pretending you're trying just to do some hobbies.
Lengthy romantic relationship dry spells aren't "the problem", but rather typically a symptom of other issues, and often issues that are exacerbated by putting sex and relationships on a pedestal.
The best thing you can do in order to find a romantic relationship is to just be a well functioning person that has their shit together. Have friends, have interests, get out of the apartment, do stuff with your life. Incel brainrot never got anyone laid.
For example, If you are a gym rat in the morning you can still do that yourself without the other person and then later in the day do the new things you never done before. The other person benefits as well. You don’t always have to be glued to the hip of the other.
No one is arguing that you should spend every minute with your partner, but if you want to spend time together, you should have an activity that you both enjoy (which might be exploring new things!), otherwise the relationship will be hard.
That assumes your friends have friends to introduce you too. Mine almost never have.
What does that mean?
And it's kind of weird to just go to a bar, alone, and try and find other lonely people to fuck for a single night.
But hey, that's what some people are looking for.
we need a new woke meme to shame people who shit on people who don't have friends
So a meaningless statement then. By that definition North Korea has free speech.
You can only have a stupid, ugly or wrong opinion so long as Musk shares it. Luckily Musk is uniquely dumb, so that covers most awful takes you can have, perhaps giving the perception of free speech.
You have the right to be an antisemite. But just please not in my house, I may ask you to leave.
He, Musk, argues you can say whatever you want on X. This is not true plainly - he is lying. This isn't up for debate so don't bother trying.
That's fine, and is why "free speech" is in quotes
The only hobbies I know of that are female dominated is Yoga and crafts. All the others are more evenly spilt between the genders (like book clubs, dancing, cooking, gardening). If you are looking to find a romantic partner the majority of people who are into crafts are married.
I don’t know if there is any evidence to support or refute my claims, but that is how I see things.
I do agree with you that if you want to find a romantic partner of the other sex you should optimize your activities. Unless you are gay or a woman you will never meet a romantic partner at the local car meetup or magic the gathering tournament.
I think it is pretty strongly the latter.
> All sports are male dominated to the point where female only activities are sanctioned
No, they aren't, and gender-specific sporting activites are not because the activities are, as hobbies, male dominated.
> The only hobbies I know of that are female dominated is Yoga and crafts. All the others are more evenly spilt between the genders (like book clubs, dancing, cooking, gardening).
Pretty sure that most of the things you list as "more evenly split" are pretty female heavy. Dancing certainly is, ranging between female-heavy in the forms which would ideally be balanced (most partner dancing -- particularly things like amateur ballroom competition; male amateur comp partners are always in high demand), to wildly female dominated where balance matters less, to, well, pole.
For some of the hobbies I have, you'll find that there's very few single women but a massive amount of single men.
At the early stages of TikTok there was some controversy that diverse, disabled, marginalized etc people were being underrepresented compared to other platforms and we now see how that turned out.
I don’t necessarily think it’s a good idea to give people what they want and I consider TikTok to be so addictive that I’ve avoided using it, but it’s definitely a successful idea.
The controversy was that they were being actively suppressed as a moderation decision.
https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...
My personal preference would be to have no thumbs on the scales.
Additionally I hate TikTok for the intentional addictive mechanism that requires an attention 'ante' to find out if a video is interesting by preventing jumping to a later point in the video to see where it is going. Basically gambling but with attention instead of currency, the algorithm optimized to give the user just enough to keep them coming back but not too much to satiate their desires.
Search Science is one of those research domains where it appears things are going backwards, google barely works anymore, facebook videos was terrible from the start and AFAIK stayed that way, YouTube only works for me because I have a subscribe list to people I support on Patreon. Amazon is being flooded with duplicate listings which should be trivial to de-dupe and clean up but I guess they suck at search science as well. If Amazon doesn't fix their search and fake good problem people might as well buy from Temu. Almost forgot, Twitter can't find bots that are so easy to find that they become 'X in bio' memes.
how? no idea what you’re referring to.
On other apps like FB, it does show location-based content, but nothing I’m ever interested in (it doesn’t seem to understand interests+location, only interests or location). So like sure, it has posts from my neighbor, but it will be about lawn care or something else I’m not interested in.
I want people to get together more, it’s absolutely good for them, but I think there’s certain groups that should absolutely be discouraged. Like sorry if the only thing that gets you going is fantasizing about obliterating ethnic groups but you might have to take one for the team and stay depressed. Or take up something better like model railroading.
There have been instances where people meeting IRL pushed one another further to one side (Marxists, Nazis) but in every other case IRL interactions help people have a more rounded view of the world.
In a social media world, you only get to see one facet of an opinion at a time, and it's always the simplest and most inflammatory view that makes the rounds.
Shut down and disperse groups of white supremacists. Amend the right to free assembly to exclude hate groups, because we don't need to tolerate that if we don't want to.
And before you say "well who decides what's a ha-" there is a well articulated subjective process for determining that already, and most of the groups that meet the definition are indeed supremacist/nationalist groups of any sort. It is not perfect, because no human made system is, but I fail to understand why that then means we must tolerate all of these with zero effort put to police them. We know what's a hate group, just like we know what's a hate crime. The fact that idiots in the media and on the internet misuse or over-generalize the term doesn't change anything.
> Tbh getting out more is probably more necessary for such people than anyone else.
I would agree, just not for hateful reasons. Come up with something else.
France and Russia are at war now?
Wagner mercenaries moved into Mali after French troops withdrew from it. That's hardly the same thing as French soldiers 'fighting' Russian soldiers.
France actually does take their control over their former colonies rather seriously.
Perhaps my previous statement was a bit too bold. Let’s just say I would be very surprised if this wasn’t a factor in their decision to now prosecute the owner of Telegram.
Source for this? Skirmishes between French soldiers and Wagner mercenaries?
There was a dating website now-owned by Match Group that did a study years ago (pre-acquisition) that showed that college-educated women preferred guys with runners' physiques by a lot over guys with weight-lifters' physiques, and women without college degrees preferred muscular men by a lot over skinnier guys. In both cases, it wasn't even close. Unfortunately this study was taken down after they got acquired or I would link to it.
others (I.e running) are the equivalent of what food does to get away from predators
Running is how predators in nature catch most of their prey. Strength is not relevant until after they've caught their prey.
In practice, you are right that there is an attention ante; most videos are short enough to sit through them to see the payoff without making the effort to scrub.
Discord especially is such a sausage fest. Sad to see it kill web forums (which I suppose were all sausage fests)
At that time anonymous online chats seemed to have little issue attracting young women.
Maybe this is just a reflection of what you consider "fun".
> Discord especially is such a sausage fest.
Discord isn't a single integrated community; there are plenty of servers that aren't sausage fests, maybe you just haven't been interested in, or invited to, them?
> Sad to see it kill web forums (which I suppose were all sausage fests)
Some were (and are), some weren't (and aren't).
This is what I'd suspect. I'm a lesbian and hang out pretty equally in very male dominated and very female dominated places online. I find it really interesting that most hobby/fandom spaces online do unofficially segregate by gender to the point where it's common in both to just assume everybody there is male/female (and straight, of course, because this all kind of relies on straight gender roles).
> Discord isn't a single integrated community; there are plenty of servers that aren't sausage fests, maybe you just haven't been interested in, or invited to, them?
Yeah, I'm in several female dominated servers and have been in the past. I will say that more of the female dominated servers are private/not advertised, specifically to keep them from being overrun and keeping them a manageable size.
In general, the women care more about curating the social space for ease of connection and are more conscientious when it comes to things like considering how big a server can be before it's a pain to mod, what the impacts of creating another channel would be, what the impacts would be of creating restricted channels would be, etc. Guys wing it more.
. . . => …
Im glad you are not in charge
Edit: as does the Art of War, the Quran, the 1981 fall almanac, etc. education is almost a farce in 2024
Most women like strong looking men and not flyweights.
It’s well documented that France is fighting with Wagner in their former colonies, as well as Russia undermining their influence there.
It’s also well documented that Wagner and Russian troops mainly use Telegram for communication, same as in Ukraine. Again, well documented.
And these messages are stored on Russian Telegram services.
Telegram was completely fine to use in France, until Wagner started causing issues in Africa and then it suddenly became a problem.
But we’ll see what happens with the court case.
you'd have a point if half these run clubs weren't full of weightlifters trying to get women by talking to them on a 2-miler
The point is that you need to be lifting weights if you're a man and wanting to attract most women.
It's not rocket science. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWC8_vp-bWI
This statement is demonstrably untrue.
That the conflicts are well-known and have been happening for a while is quite true of course.
But this bizarre framing of these conflicts as "between Russia and colonialist powers" (as if Russia was not also a colonial power, or its influence games in Africa were any different from those of the Western powers) is just propaganda, and rather trite propaganda at that.
But indeed it was, and this is an extremely basic fact of its history. It wasn't run on exactly the same model as the overseas empires of the Western European states, but its modus operandi absolutely fits the definition of a "colonial empire" per the definition in Wikipedia:
A colonial empire is a collective of territories (often called colonies), either contiguous with the imperial center or located overseas, settled by the population of a certain state and governed by that state.
This idea that conquest can't be called a "colony" (or that territorial contiguity has anything to do with the definition of the term) is just silly. As if the American States didn't promptly set out to settle and colonize the West after 1789 (because these places were contiguous to it), or Germany didn't very explicitly set out to colonize Poland in 1939, and so on.
Russia is also providing economic and political support to many African governments, especially those who have turned away from the west and are afraid of regime-change operations.