Absolutely. They were quite widespread among diaspora communities. There are documented accounts from the mid-19th century throughout Chinese population centres in SE Asia, including Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Society houses (along with Native Place Associations 同鄉會) are still to be found in many of these places. They were also to be found in places like San Francisco, Honolulu, Vancouver and elsewhere in the western hemisphere.

Anywhere you'd encounter native-place associations you'd also find Hongmen/Tiandihui or similar organisations. In many cases it was the secret societies and the various native-place associations that formed the backbone not only of trade but also intelligence networks throughout Southeast Asia at the time, but also well into the US and Canada. The various non-secret-society association, in particular in the US the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, functioned as basically embassies in lieu of a direct Qing presence, just to give an idea of the importance of societies in general. The "secret societies" often were ultimately just variants on a theme, and much of the secrecy was theatre anyway. But they were not easily separable from the non-"secret" societies that were incredibly important to nearly anyone who was part of the various diaspora communities.