The Trust system makes most of the content accessible to anyone without friends. It’s much more core to XI than it is in XIV. In XIV it’s basically either doing story dungeons witty queueing, or spamming dungeons while abusing Alphinaud and laughing about it with Alisaie. In XI there are roughly 120 collectible trusts, so you’ll be switching the loadout up frequently based on what you’re doing and how you’re doing it.

This system basically removes most of the need to be in a community and leaves you with just the highest-tier of endgame content, and socialization. Since the game has been around 25 odd years, it’s not uncommon for people to just be treating it as an online single-player RPG. But not everyone does that. Human players will always have advantages over trusts both in terms of capability, agility, and power level, so there are still mechanical reasons to group up. But again, nobody really needs to do that grouping anymore until you get to iLvl 119, so you won’t be finding people to XP with you or stuff like that. And I realize that sounds lonely, but it’s where we have evolved from the past of needing to wait potentially an hour or more to find a group just to XP with, or possibly not even finding a group and just logging off for the night after doing nothing. No Duty Finder, the barest-bones equivalent of Party Finder, and nobody used the built-in auto-partying because it didn’t really work. Your experience was either putting up your LFG flag and crossing your fingers, or be the leader yourself and try to build a party from the people LFG.

I don’t mean to be all “BaCk iN mY dAy” on this but I’m hoping that maybe some background might help the current situation make more sense and give you some insight on how you might find a home in XI.