TLDR - Stop worrying about finding the perfect place and try to get the best out of what is around you. Find a local volunteer opportunity that will force you to interact with random people and other volunteers (volunteermatch.org is not a bad choice). Just pick something and do it immediately, you may find better/different connections than you would with friends (I have at least).
Long version:
I have a couple recommendations that could help you to connect with people better if you can take a couple minutes to read this, its a little longer than I would like but I really think that you can turn things around. I am by no means an expert and I have struggled with isolation myself at other times in my life, but I do feel like I have made some small improvements so my guess is you could to.
First off, while I think a location can be either conducive or adverse to the type of lifestyle you would like, I think a big part of how well or poorly you fit into a place is on you - you get out of it what you put into it (or something like that). That sucks to hear and you probably already know it and I think it is the truth. The only reason I say that is to caution you to not overlook what might be around you already. That being said, I have a buddy who I feel like was in a similar situation until he picked up and move to Portland kind of on a whim (after doing similar things with other places) and this time it worked out for him (so far), but he probably had to be ready and open to good things happening or else it would have been like it had been before in other places.
More importantly, I think it is way easier to connect with people outside of what we typically think of as "social" situations. I've never liked going to bars to meet people or any kind of mixer situation although these days I'm much better at it. What really did it for me was to go way out of my comfort zone and do volunteer activities that forced me to do things I really didn't feel like doing but I kind of put myself in a situation that made it hard to give into my desire to bail. The main one for me was political volunteering, starting during the primaries of this year and going into the general election. The outcome was devastating but the process and the changes I felt were pretty amazing. The actual work required connecting with total strangers in situations where I otherwise never would have: registering people to vote (talking to people on the street, going to large festivals and walking around and talking to strangers), going door to door to talk to people (mostly giving information but also trying to convince people to vote and giving them my personal opinions), and phone banking (talking to random strangers who were mostly in my city but who I would never likely meet). All these things were really uncomfortable at first but once I met the organizers involved and got excited by their excitement and passion I would sign up for something and then it was like "well, guess I gotta do it". Lock yourself into something that can't really hurt you but that pushes you outside your comfort zone.
After doing all of that, at 30 years old I felt like I had kind of finally figured out how to be a part of my own environment (as opposed to a mindless drone only focused on going from A->B). I haven't found my "next thing" yet, but since then I've found many social situations to be easier than they used to be, even something as stupid as buying a car was 10x less stressful than it used to be for me (and I got a couple grand better of a deal than I usually would have). Once you get over knocking on the door of a strangers house and realizing that a) most people are actually pretty cool and b) the vast majority of the time you are going to be totally fine no matter what, a lot of other things feel like a cakewalk. I met more new people in 6 months than in the prior 6 years and since we were all going to a similar stressful time, connecting was easy for once (even though aside from politics personality wise nobody was that similar to me).
All that to say this: forget (or at least, demphasize) the typical social stuff and find a cause that you can get on board with, just pull the trigger and show up and say "what can I do?". Don't spend ages shopping around for something to do (I've done that, I had no less than 60 bookmarks from a volunteermatch.org at one point before this, never did a single one of them), look around in your area (volunteermatch.org is not bad if you don't abuse it like I did), find anything that will involve working with other people you don't know (both other volunteers and strangers ideally, which is a lot of things) and just sign yourself up and do it. In my experience once you are actually there, nature kind of takes its course. I may be lucky in that but my problem has largely been hesitation. If you are male you will find in a lot of volunteer situations that you will be one of the few men and your contributions will be appreciated if you don't hold back and give it your best shot. You won't have to deal with the weirdness of finding a like-minded social group to fit into and honestly, I enjoyed the interactions I had more than I usually would have in a purely social environment (sometimes working towards a common goal that isn't job is more fun than just hanging out).
I know this was long as hell but your comment got the juices flowing, sorry if it was a slog but I've had my perception change quite a lot over the last year (in some ways at least) and I would like to think that other people can have a similar experience.