I think it can be very difficult to try and make friends by striking up conversations, especially if you are worrying if they'll ignore you or find you annoying or tell you off or ridicule you or the many other worries and what-ifs that spring to mind.

I was very lucky when I started the game, and I was playing a lala I managed to get spotted by a lala fanatic who tried to /tell me and I kept responding in the wrong channel because I couldn't work it out. They were very kind to me and I ended up joining their FC. People in the FC were not always very chatty and I worried that I was the outsider to a little clique, or that maybe FC social chatting just wasn't the done thing and that I'd annoy people. I mean, I'm not very chatty anyway and in fact I hate it when you log in and you get bombarded with a ton of questions for the sake of conversation, but I digress.
I made a point of saying 'Hello C:' and if anyone responded I would say 'How are you?' and leave it at that, unless someone then started a conversation off of it. And I would tell myself, if no-one replied then that was ok too but at least I did my part. I often felt a bit robotic and maybe I even came across that way. However, it did the trick and I now have a few people who want to do content with me sometimes, and through them I got used to doing emotes at people and managed to strike up conversations with strangers (usually about their house and their decorating).

Saying that, I too have characters on Omega now and I have not actually made any friends on that server. The sever just feels too unsettled currently.