"Long time listener, first time caller"

I'm old skool. Been there since the NES days of FF1, and living in Okinawa back in those days I even had the luxury of playing FF2 and 3 in their old skool glory with the help of a Japanese friend.
I was faithful to the old SNES games and even migrated over to the PS.
Somewhere down the line I fell off of the FF bandwagon and recently got back on.
After finally playing catch up (FF8-9) I'm about 1 day away from finishing X-2.
So I'm ready to join the online community.
My question, what is the best way to meet up with people and make some friends?
My experience in MMORPGs tells me that unless you have RL friends that play, it's pretty hard to get your foot in the door and break into all the little clicks.
Any tips? Good servers, etc?

It is a lot more fun to play MMORPGs if you have people to play with going into it. Luckily I had a few people from this forum already on the server I started on, and they provided me with a linkshell and helpful tips and advice. None of these people were "RL" friends.

In any case, even if you don't have friends established on a server, as long as you are a good player, people will notice and offer you pearls into a variety of linkshells. So I wouldn't worry too much.

be prepared to give up most of your life if your playing on playing.

you will be grinding for awhile until you get a scratch of storyline.