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Meetup.com alternatives

722 pointsby phacksover 5 years ago

80 comments

jborichevskiyover 5 years ago
Somewhat related note: as someone living in a major city I find it increasingly hard to discover relevant events happening soon&#x2F;around me.<p>Events I&#x27;m looking for span a range of interests, artists, bands, topics, hobbies, and causes - hence no one central location has a list of everything relevant to me. So I&#x27;m forced to regularly dig through Meetup, Eventbrite, Facebook, Google Events Search, individual sites, individual web pages, AXS, Spotify Concerts, email newsletters, etc.<p>Building another event organization platform isn&#x27;t the solution - getting people, venues, and organizers onto it would be an expensive uphill battle, and would further fracture discovery. But a thought of a decentralized open-source aggregation of a bunch of feeds has been popping up in my mind lately. These could be sourced from all of the above mentioned sources and somewhat standardized into a format with name, description, price, location, time. From there, it should be a simple matter to add filtering, subscriptions, and even a recommendations engine.<p>Has anything like this been attempted? Might it work? I haven&#x27;t found anything yet.
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olegpover 5 years ago
Another alternative aimed at technical meetups is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meetabit.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meetabit.com</a> which we built at Toughbyte.<p>I organize a number of technical meetups, such as HelsinkiJS which is the biggest developer meetup in Finland, and have found Meetup.com lacking. To scratch our own itch, we built Meetabit which includes some additional features such as the ability to accept talk proposals and sponsorship offers, have speaker profiles, archive of talks and related materials, export data etc.<p>It does what we need and we haven&#x27;t been actively developing or promoting it recently, but it has still grown organically to around 10K users and multiple meetups organized each month. We are likely to put more resources into it given the recent changes at Meetup.com. Worth adding that the service is free both to organizers and attendees; our long term plan is to have the same business model as Stack Overflow by promoting relevant jobs to members.<p>I&#x27;ll draft a blog post explaining things in more detail, but in the meantime feel free to ask questions in the comments below. Also, if you&#x27;d like to take the service for a spin and your city isn&#x27;t listed, shoot me an email at oleg@toughbyte.com and I&#x27;ll add it.<p>PS. Nicolas has added us to the linked post since I made this comment, many thanks for super quick responses!
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degenerateover 5 years ago
The list:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;emamo.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;emamo.com</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kommunity.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kommunity.com</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;joinmobilizon.org&#x2F;en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;joinmobilizon.org&#x2F;en</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cete.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cete.io</a> (not yet launched?)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eventy.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eventy.io</a> (not yet launched)<p>And the <i>not-yet-build one</i> by FreeCodeCamp: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ossia&#x2F;status&#x2F;1183845054449930241" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ossia&#x2F;status&#x2F;1183845054449930241</a><p>I&#x27;ve never heard of any of them. Opinions?
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emptybitsover 5 years ago
I fear this $2&#x2F;attendee grab by Meetup will drive more people to Facebook for finding and planning and advertising events. Sadface.<p>The understandable reason: Facebook is &quot;free&quot; and most of these better alternatives will be fragmented and mainstream unknown for a long time.<p>Maybe one overarching event-search service could help the fragmentation problem, if it doesn&#x27;t already exist.
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adrianmonkover 5 years ago
People skipping the RSVP and just showing up &quot;unofficially&quot; is already a problem with Meetup. This is going to create the <i>exact wrong</i> incentive for that.<p>Next up: movie theaters that charge $2 to anyone who doesn&#x27;t talk during a movie, gyms that charge $2 if you put dumbbells back on the rack instead leaving them strewn around the floor, traffic cops giving tickets for properly using your turn signal, ...
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nickjjover 5 years ago
This is a good reminder of why I stopped going to most local tech meetups ran by meetup.com.<p>Not because of the upcoming $2 fee, but because most of the time it&#x27;s a 2 hour tech meetup where you spend 15 minutes mingling at the start, then 1 hour and 30 minutes listening to advertisements disguised as talks where you sit down and remain silent and then another 15 minutes mingling at the end.<p>It feels so corporate and non-human. You get lured into a business&#x27; office with free food and drinks or stickers but then you have sign up forms, recruitment pitches and vendors giving talks about some technology but it&#x27;s all focused on using their service around that tech.<p>I miss the good old days of 2600 meetups in the late 1990s. Everyone meets in a public place. There&#x27;s no set schedule other than where to go and when it starts. Then you actually meet up with people and talk about things that you have in common. You can leave in 30 seconds or stay all night. There&#x27;s no commitment, agenda or sales pitches.
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Geeflowover 5 years ago
I am wondering which of these alternatives has a similar audience like meetup.com. The audience is the real killer feature of meetup.com.<p>I know of no other place where it is so easy to gather people. Just post a new event and people will notice and sign up.<p>If you switch to a self-hosted solution you will have to find an audience through other channels. Which, for many Meetups, is quite the challenge. Remember &quot;build it and they will come&quot;? Same applies to events. &quot;Set a date and they will come&quot; - doesn&#x27;t work that way unless you have an existing audience.<p>Personally I don&#x27;t mind paying 2$ to attend a meetup. The old&#x2F;existing pricing model seemed much smarter for everyone involved though. Organizers pay to get access to the audience. The audience pays nothing so that the audience, the real value, can be maximized. I hope that they won&#x27;t destroy their value with this move...
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brianbreslinover 5 years ago
There is some irony that everyone is rushing to build their own competitors because Meetup decided to charge $2. Let that sink in. You&#x27;re effectively limiting yourself to a LTV of a customer of less than $2 per attendee of their events now. You&#x27;ll end up in the same vicious cycle of needing to charge for something if you want your platform to survive.<p>Meetup was making money before they took VC funds and eventually sold to Wework. Their old model of charging $15+ to organizers seemed to work. I paid it for years because of the extra traffic and not wanting my events to be hijacked. They never let you own your own audience though.
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sabootover 5 years ago
They are what?? $2 to just to say I&#x27;m attending an event? What a blatant shakedown. I should also become a corporate executive and steal a bunch of money if this is the level of thought the job requires.
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koolbaover 5 years ago
I think it&#x27;s insane that Meetup thinks they can get attendees to pay $2 <i>per event</i> when a lot of those same people only show up at events to grab a free slice of pizza.<p>I suppose it&#x27;s still economical if you plan on eating more than two slices but I doubt it&#x27;ll work out for them.
ziftfaceover 5 years ago
&gt; I’m considering alternatives to Meetup.com for our meetup (should it still be called like that?)<p>It should be. It&#x27;s just an English word that predates the app, and is also used in the same setting&#x2F;context as the use of the word within the meetup.com app, so I really hope there wouldn&#x27;t be any trademark issues.<p>Kind of a clever name, since it causes this confusion. I&#x27;m not sure if that was intentional, but the effect is interesting nonetheless.
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hamslamwichover 5 years ago
Great list! (tweeted at you too!)<p>We&#x27;ve been cranking away at a better group event&#x2F;planning platform on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;guestboard.co" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;guestboard.co</a> for a while now (basically Slack meets Evite), but with this news, we&#x27;re switching up our product roadmap to include recurring events much sooner. Would love the input from any&#x2F;all. Possibly considering an interim solution of simply cloning an existing event and carrying over the guest list from previous?<p>We&#x27;ll also be prioritizing a &quot;discovery&quot; search tool to be able to find public events without needing to encounter an invite link from an organizer.<p>And before you jump down my throat(!) a common feedback point has been improving the RSVP function to allow attendees to join without a full registration, and this new invite&#x2F;onboarding flow will be releasing in a week or so :)
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whsheetover 5 years ago
OT: Am I the only one who thinks that most meetups are crap? The idea of meeting like-minded people is tempting but the reality is always different: Crowded places, stuffy air, weak talks, lame sponsors, 1-to-n presentations, no real interaction, stale drinks out of thin plastic cups, odd devs
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bdrover 5 years ago
I&#x27;m building Mixily.com as a general event-organizing tool. Like an alternative to FB events, but with better styling, features, and privacy policy. It launched in July and works great for one-off events.<p>For recurring events, we have some features in private beta, like pre-set guest lists and a forum. Email me at andrew@mixily.com if you want to try it out!
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schlagetownover 5 years ago
Very interested to see all these Meetup competitors developing! Seems there are kind of two main buckets here: simple tools focused on organize events, and platforms that are more a two-sided market where event discovery &#x2F; matching interests and attendees is a factor as well.<p>For hosting small dinners and learning events, I&#x27;m looking mostly for the former, and one tool that&#x27;s quite new but looks very promising is Mixily: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mixily.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mixily.com</a><p>It&#x27;s a nice streamlined tool, prioritizes privacy, and has a number of solid features like messaging and event reminders, date polling (like doodle), comments wall, variety of privacy settings. Also some other very cool things in beta, like contact lists, and ticketed &#x2F; donation-based events.
muriculaover 5 years ago
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;calagator.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;calagator.org&#x2F;</a> is a calendar for tech meetups and events happening in Portland, OR. I&#x27;m still curious if there&#x27;s something similar for Seattle.
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intrasightover 5 years ago
So many posts say &quot;Meetup.com sucks but they have &#x27;the community&#x27;&quot; I don&#x27;t understand this sentiment. Your town or city is the community - not some random web site. And your town, if it&#x27;s like mine, has one ore more newspapers that maintain community events calendars.<p>And Google manages events now with Google search. I google &quot;beer event pittsburgh&quot; and Google shows me the results.<p>What exactly is the value-add of meetup.com? An honest question. I attend all kinds of events and I almost never come across meetup.com.
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peterwwillisover 5 years ago
I was thinking of an alternative that would allow anyone to publish a meeting with a standard data format (similar to recipes) and get picked up by a massive meeting indexer. But then I realized that event coordinators want a lot of control over RSVPs, sending messages to attendees, and the ability to collect money ahead of time to pre-pay for event supplies, etc. It really is annoying that you need a platform to handle this, but anything else might end up being too complicated.
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iso-8859-1over 5 years ago
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;coderbyheart&#x2F;open-source-meetup-alternatives" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;coderbyheart&#x2F;open-source-meetup-alternati...</a>
sitkackover 5 years ago
I hate meetup so. damn. much! They have now become the shty equivalent of the yellow pages, needed but detested at the same time. The rents they seek with the desert of functionality conspires to boil my blood. I will dance in the street when they are replaced by anything, anything at all.<p>We need a community run service, not a for profit company.
opensportsover 5 years ago
If you&#x27;re a recreational sports Meetup group you could try us at OpenSports (www.opensports.net). We only charge for paid events and don&#x27;t have monthly fees. We&#x27;ve moved over hundreds of sports Meetup groups such as <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opensports.net&#x2F;@cfrs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opensports.net&#x2F;@cfrs</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opensports.net&#x2F;@sonsofpitchesfc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opensports.net&#x2F;@sonsofpitchesfc</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opensports.net&#x2F;@philadelphiavolleyball&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opensports.net&#x2F;@philadelphiavolleyball&#x2F;</a>. We offer the full gamut of Meetup features along with many others such as support for waivers, discounts, waitlists for paid events, etc. Transaction fees of $5% + $0.30 including Stripe credit card fees.
rexreedover 5 years ago
Meetup.com is a truly horrible site and corporation. They hold your meetup group hostage if you&#x27;re an organizer. What do I mean by that? Since you have no contact information for any of your attendees, you can&#x27;t reach out to them to move them to another platform. You can&#x27;t shut down your Meetup either. Instead, you can simply resign as an organizer. This allows someone else to step in and take over. Taking all the hard work you did to create the meetup and giving it to someone else. It would be nice if Meetup could give you the contact information of all your members and also allow you to close a group without allowing anyone else to step in. In this way, they hold your group hostage, not allowing you to leave, and thus committing you forever for their fees, even if you never run another event again.
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akimaruover 5 years ago
I&#x27;m a meetup organizer as well (over 3.5K members and over 500 attendees to our mostly free events) so this is hitting us hard.<p>My team is working on a virtual event spaces app called Morphus, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.morphus.ai" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.morphus.ai</a>. We aim to create a 2.0 Meetup that helps anyone to spin up a virtual space and allow mobile, desktop, and VR users to join events.<p>As an organizer myself I&#x27;ll be focusing on helping communities better manage their members and also create a more interactive and fun environment for everyone.<p>Any feedback appreciated :)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.morphus.ai" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.morphus.ai</a>
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bdukicover 5 years ago
I remember thinking that things like these will happen with Meetup.com more and more ever since they got acquired by WeWork -- and I&#x27;ve personally heard many organizers around me say that Meetup.com is getting worse and worse, but there&#x27;s really not much to be done with the discovery dimension as they have the grand majority of the users.<p>I&#x27;ve since been working on an alternative: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blinkmeet.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blinkmeet.com</a>, but that didn&#x27;t really account for much for various reasons.<p>I really do think that it&#x27;s only a matter of time before Meetup.com goes down, this way or another.
Endyover 5 years ago
Thank you for sharing this article. I was not aware of WeWork killing Meetup until now. I&#x27;ve already told three groups I&#x27;m in that I will be deleting my account by 10&#x2F;30.
willart4foodover 5 years ago
WOW! This is interesting.<p>I belong to 2 large-ish meetups that in the past few months have been migrating to a Facebook page.<p>I have run meetups of all kinds, from tech to social; and I am now running 3 meetups and IMO this is not only a disaster for meetup.com but offers an incredible opportunity to take the cherry for:<p>* Facebook * EventBrite * a new startup taking over this space<p>Unless meetup.com rever its course, this is going to go down as the worst decision ever. I am sorry if We spend a lot of money on it, stil.... 2 wrong don&#x27;t make one right.
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sytelusover 5 years ago
It is surprising they couldn’t think of any business model where they don’t need to kill the chicken laying eggs. People participating there already gave away their contacts, location, interest. How about just ads with sponsors with matching interests? How about rev share where organizers support sponsors? How about recommending interesting audience to sponsored events? May be users can opt out of ad supported model if they pay subscription?
sersheover 5 years ago
So I am a member of a number of boardgame groups with meetups that each happen at the same place either regularly or on a different date each month. When they do happen, I just go there, and never RSVP anymore because nobody cares. In fact, one of the weekly meetups would regularly have 2-5 people RSVP but 15-25 show up. What prevents everyone without a headcount limit from doing more of that? :)
derkoeover 5 years ago
I guess this will be the end of meetup.com. Nobody will be willing to pay the $2 reservation fee and organizers will move their events somewhere else.
zaisteover 5 years ago
Yet another alternative, focused on technical events is Eventil [1]. It&#x27;s born out of my experiences as a organizer of PolyConf [2] and RuPy [3] conferences. It&#x27;s a side-project built to scratch my own itch. There is still plenty to be improved with bugs here and there. Several large conferences use this tool successfully to improve their workflow.<p>There is group management, ticketing without fees, call for proposals management, mailings, invoicing, sponsorship management et more. We charge 49&#x2F;199 USD on <i>per-event</i> basis (no monthly fee, no % off ticket sales) depending on the event size. Free events are free and non-profit are 50% off.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eventil.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eventil.com&#x2F;</a> [2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;polyconf.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;polyconf.com&#x2F;</a> [3]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;13.rupy.eu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;13.rupy.eu&#x2F;</a>
greggman2over 5 years ago
Meetup has a spam issue for lack of a better way to describe it.<p>One problem is there are people that post the same event multiple times. I documented one where they posted the same event 22 times. I&#x27;m not sure how they even do that. One way they do it is just to post the same event 5 minutes apart so looking at the list of things to do the same event appears over and over. All of these are the same event: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;o4fAxjA.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;o4fAxjA.png</a> and there are plenty more of the same event further down the page. But it&#x27;s not just different times. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;C1gMleC" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;C1gMleC</a><p>I&#x27;ve seen one event which is clearly fake. It&#x27;s always full at 101 attendees from the moment it is posted. I&#x27;m not even sure what the point is except maybe to harvest names from a waiting list? Like maybe the idea was if the meetup looks popular people will try to join? The event is clearly a marketing event (not about marketing itself, but an event designed to sell attendees on a service)<p>Another issue is just bars effectively listing that they&#x27;re open. I don&#x27;t know how to solve that. It&#x27;s one thing if it&#x27;s really a &quot;meetup&quot; like &quot;model rocket talk at Bar ABC&quot; but some listings just come across as &quot;we&#x27;re open&quot;<p>The other big issue with Meetup.com is email spam. They have like 40 different things they can send you email for PER meetup and attending any meetup signs you up for all 40 things. I get that I might want to know about meetups I&#x27;ve been to before so maybe that&#x27;s okay? But... They also end up signing you up to categories of similar meetups and so if you ever attended a new meetup you&#x27;ll get added back to the category. Which I also get. And it might be fine except at literally 65% of the email I get daily is from meetup.com at this point. So it feels like something is clearly not working.<p>The finally issue I&#x27;ve seen is fraud? I&#x27;ve seen a meetup where the user kept posting things like 250 people have signed up! Hurry now! And then the next day 350 people have signed up for our party!!! The final count they claimed was 600 people but the venue only legally allowed 200 people. I brought it up the venue only held 200 people (listed on their website) and the guy just asked if I was attending his awesome event with 600 people.
jarofgreenover 5 years ago
A plea to anyone working on a meetup.com alternative - make sure good Open Data Feeds are baked into to whatever you do.<p>There is already a industry standard in ical&#x2F;ics - this should be your first feed. Another reason to add this one - regular attendees of a group who are keen can import this straight into their personal calendars and get details of all upcoming events.<p>After that, I&#x27;m less opinionated on what format you should use. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;schema.org&#x2F;Event" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;schema.org&#x2F;Event</a> will help your SEO so that&#x27;s a plus.<p>Do others have comments on what open data format to use?<p>As someone who has worked on an event aggregator for years, getting good information out of event organisers is very difficult. If they are taking the time to update your site with info, making it so it can be passed on is really helpful. (If they want of course, privacy controls, but in my experience almost all events want more publicity)
arcalineaover 5 years ago
Adding another alternative to the list - have been working on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;happening.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;happening.net</a>, a site to make event hosting easier.<p>It will be gradually getting more features to support Meetup-like functionality.
merqurioover 5 years ago
I would happily work on implementing a Meetup.com alternative based on ActivityPub and push for a federation of instances, much like Mastodon.<p>Each community has very different needs, but a federated network would help making the multi-community reality we experience much easier.
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starpilotover 5 years ago
&gt; The pricing change is currently only a limited test for select groups in a small number of locations. We will not be making any significant pricing changes in the near term. We are committed to providing advance notice before any changes go into effect.
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k_bxover 5 years ago
I&#x27;ve developed myself a minimal alternative at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meetup.events" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meetup.events</a> when I was not allowed to run my Elm Study Group at meetup.com. It doesn&#x27;t even have means to create events yet, but if you&#x27;re interested in developing it further (Haskell + Elm), or contribute a design, or you are a potential user and need something – please contact me (via creating an issue on GitLab) and I&#x27;m happy to actually feature-complete the thing as needed by actual users.<p>UPDATE: actually, let me add the means to add&#x2F;edit events there today...
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timotitasover 5 years ago
This is disappointing. I&#x27;ve been using meetup to join mountain bike group rides in my area, they are scarce and not many people show up, but it&#x27;s been a good experience. Adding a 2$ fee just to confirm assistance will completely make them go extinct. Any good alternatives for non tech activities (sports&#x2F;social)? I&#x27;m already in some facebook&#x2F;whatsapp groups but there&#x27;s not much going on. The alternatives listed on the post seem to have either no user base or catered towards tech&#x2F;corp events
kabachaover 5 years ago
$2 per atendee - what a brilliant way to kill the platform. No one is going to pay the fee and just migrate to facebook events and a million of other alternatives. This is hilarious.
navsover 5 years ago
A lot of the alternatives posted look like they&#x27;d be a good fit for my group. However, I feel the discoverability isn&#x27;t there. The local UX meetup will likely choose one platform. The local frontend developers meetup will choose another.<p>Reliable, consistent members will follow the group regardless of the platform but I&#x27;ve always liked how easy it is for a local developer to just stumble across my group.<p>The best part about running these meetups are the random devs that decide to come to one event and stick around.
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chrisaover 5 years ago
I co-organize a React meetup, and seeing the price change update last night made me so... upset and confused - that I decided to build an alternative.<p>My plan is to charge organizers (like meetup does today) to cover costs - but never to charge members to attend free events.<p>I&#x27;ve been looking for a solid project to spend time on, and this just became it.<p>I put up a landing page this morning, and I&#x27;ve already started coding:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meetingplace.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meetingplace.io&#x2F;</a>
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JoshMnemover 5 years ago
I&#x27;ve organized about 500 events through that site. Charging attendees is a terrible idea that will kill Meetup.com and damage communities around the world in the process.
zeristorover 5 years ago
Isn’t the network effect the main problem in trying to replace Meet-up?<p>Perhaps Meet-ups for various niche interests is an option. But it’d be great to have some sites with better usability.
paul7986over 5 years ago
Hiking groups used to plentiful in the mid-Atlantic region on meeetup. Though it&#x27;s been pretty dead in that regard for a year or two. Also similarly with tech meetups. Like the New York Tech meetup was or used to be a huge event that helped launch a good amount of well known startups. Where did that community go to (had the pleasure demoing there once with other fellow unknown startups at the time like Tumblr &amp; Vimeo)?
notelonmuskover 5 years ago
Recent AskHN: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21253620" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21253620</a>
hojung1996over 5 years ago
Oh man... I actually saw Scott Heiferman speak at a Community 2.0 event yesterday and he seemed heartbroken about everything that&#x27;s happening.<p>We made a pretty simple mobile app for social events called gathr (App Store and Play Store). Feel free to try it and see if it&#x27;s what you&#x27;re looking for. Ping me here: hojung@gathraround.com or request a Circle in app if you think it&#x27;ll be useful.<p>www gathraround.com
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jameszolover 5 years ago
I used to run a local web marketing meetup in East Idaho. It grew to about 260 people! We used meetup.com and I loved that...<p>Then I discovered that Facebook Groups and setting up events there worked just as well for us. RSVPs, reminders, notifications, etc all built in.<p>I since retired that meetup due to moving out of the State for a short time, but if I were to start again I would probably still use Facebook.
gherkin1over 5 years ago
Linkedin grabs the chance and debuts their alternative, currently free <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;10&#x2F;15&#x2F;linkedin-gets-physical-debuts-new-events-hub-for-people-to-plan-in-person-networking-events&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;10&#x2F;15&#x2F;linkedin-gets-physical-deb...</a>
davidjnelsonover 5 years ago
These are interesting. Premise is a bit perplexing. Don’t have $2? Really? Even meetups for spiritual teachers who operate as a non profit suggest a $20 donation per event for instance.<p>Anyone know of a meetup for people interested in physics, meditation, and software entrepreneurship in the Bay Area? You’d think that would be easy to find given the areas demographics...
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3dprintscannerover 5 years ago
As a small side project I&#x27;ve been working on a tool to find interesting events in London that also have some food or drink provided, I found that there was sometimes too much choice and not an easy way to pick the best upcoming events. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;onlythebestevents.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;onlythebestevents.com</a>
rShergoldover 5 years ago
Our meet up has been running for a decade. This has only been possible by making attendees aware that they own the event. Over the years people have moved on and others have stepped in to keep the thing alive.<p>By effectively charging at the door our meet up becomes a product people buy not a community they take part in.<p>If we allow that to happen it won&#x27;t survive another decade.
mikeceover 5 years ago
There are already several alternatives to meetup.com; what we need is a standard like ActivityPub could be leveraged to allow for federation, discovery, and searching for user groups by interest, topic, location, and affinity (people in my user groups are also members of these groups...)?
jl2718over 5 years ago
This feels like a trend: investors forcing startups to find a real business model. Expect more of this.
iskanderover 5 years ago
I&#x27;ve been using Mixily (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mixily.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mixily.com</a>) for events with friends and would happily use it to schedule individual meetup events. It&#x27;s missing a main community landing page though.
robbiemitchellover 5 years ago
If a meetup is not even worth $2 to attend, is it really worth an hour+ of your personal time?
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aabbcc1241over 5 years ago
There are more than enough alternatives. One could just organize meet up in Facebook group or telegram group as well. You just need a place that many people sharing the similar interests gather to spread the meet up time and location.
taudeover 5 years ago
So, since there could be a fee now, will we not officially be the product for whatever behind-the-scenes data mining they&#x27;re doing with our PII? I&#x27;d probably actually be OK paying a couple bucks&#x2F;meetup for this.
peraover 5 years ago
Here in Seattle the local Haskell meetup has just &quot;migrated&quot; to a mix of GitHub, Slack, and Google Groups. The reason was the price of Meetup.com ($20&#x2F;month IIRC).<p>I guess with this announcement many other groups will follow.
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psteinweberover 5 years ago
The mentioned $2 fee was just a test. Check out the offical statement from meetup.com (linked in the posted article): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.meetup.com&#x2F;lp&#x2F;paymentchanges" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.meetup.com&#x2F;lp&#x2F;paymentchanges</a><p>&gt;We are not, I repeat not, in the process of making a massive payment change for our existing customers. The confusion was triggered by a limited test to a few hundred groups in two U.S. states. The payment options shared on social media will only apply to organizers who are part of this test. We apologize that the language on the page caused alarm and confusion. We would never make such a change without giving our customers advance notice.
arielmover 5 years ago
The technical aspect of creating an event list an way to manage RSVPs isn’t hard to compete with but it’s meetup’s community that made it a destination for new organizers. That, is hard to compete with.
diminotenover 5 years ago
What I&#x27;m missing in a service like meetup is the <i>creation</i> of events. Got 50 people in an area who are all fans of something? See if they&#x27;re interested in getting together.
sjdb77over 5 years ago
I feel like every YC batch must get 100 applications for a Meetup alternative. I wonder why nothing has sticked or worked. I find every aspect of Meetup to be very 2010 and hard to use.
poof_he_is_goneover 5 years ago
As someone who organizes several Meetup groups, I really hate this. I am going to continue to promote on meetup, but move the registration to our wordpress site to get around this.
mrfusionover 5 years ago
A feature I really want is to just show me every possible event in a given radius happening today.<p>I figure a miss a lot just searching for my interests. I’d rather just see everything nearby.
sambalbadjakover 5 years ago
I use the Dutch Erbij app to organize meetups myself - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;erbij.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;erbij.app</a><p>However, for browsing I still use meetup.com
giongto35over 5 years ago
Every business needs money. Why we are so bitter every time a business charging for service fees? the society is so familiar with free stuff and ads.
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timwaaghover 5 years ago
i always thought facebooks greatest strength was their events. i never attended anything through meetup so far. it should at the very least be mentioned as an alternative. not everybody likes sharing data with the Zuck, and that&#x27;s legitimate, but it&#x27;s arguably the market leader. and it&#x27;s free.
gowldover 5 years ago
Interesting timing on the Meetup $2&#x2F;attendee fee, coming right after parent company WeWork collapsed.
edisonjoaoover 5 years ago
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;foxie.cool" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;foxie.cool</a> check us out!!
_hardwaregeekover 5 years ago
Reddit or HN are actually ideal platforms for meetups. All you need is list of links for tech meetups. Either a subreddit like &#x2F;r&#x2F;nyc_meetups or just a weekly &quot;What&#x27;s Going On&quot; post where people can post about events. We&#x27;re already on the network. I don&#x27;t see why we need a separate website just for the physical act of coming together.
ausjkeover 5 years ago
what about just the old way, google groups or email lists?<p>otherwise, I still see certain business model shall work for meetup, how about when meetup charges a fee for its members then it shares some percentage of that fee with meetup? otherwise it will be free.<p>and what about eventbrite.com
kinsover 5 years ago
I was banned from meetup today for posting this link to one of my meetup.com groups.
lovetocodeover 5 years ago
Adios Meetup.com you had a good run but this may be the end of you.
tw1010over 5 years ago
Isn&#x27;t eventbrite the most popular one of these alternatives?
cryptofitsover 5 years ago
tl;dr<p>1. cete - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cete.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cete.io&#x2F;</a> 2. emamo - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;emamo.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;emamo.com</a> 3. kommunity - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kommunity.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kommunity.com</a> 4. eventy - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eventy.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eventy.io&#x2F;</a> 5. &quot;FreeCodeCamp is currently building an Open Source alternative to Meetup.com. They are looking for contributors, head to this Discord channel to get involved!&quot; (In my opinion this article was made to feature this paragraph tbh)<p>Anyhow<p>I&#x27;m using meetup for a while<p>Been extremely useful (especially when i lived abroad. It&#x27;s a great way to meet some new friends with similar hobbies.
jabvigWeover 5 years ago
A free software alternative:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gettogether.community&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gettogether.community&#x2F;</a><p>All the ones on the page look like more proprietary junk.
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bizdevsgover 5 years ago
For those on Asia - Japan, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong, you could consider <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;peatix.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;peatix.com</a>
blackflameover 5 years ago
I was always on the fence about meetup but now they made my mind up for me.
Muuuchemover 5 years ago
Weird, a lot of meetups that I see have fees set up and say that you get into the meetup free if instead you register on Meet More You www.meetmoreyou.com<p>So they are trying to get people on the platform by putting up a paywall on meetup so that nobody that is tech literate would actually sign up on meetup.<p>I am surprised that this site hasn&#x27;t been mentioned once. It seems pretty decent.
Dowwieover 5 years ago
Considering the value I get from Meetup, I think that paying a $2 attendee fee is reasonable. I appreciate the services that meetup provides. This seems like a very fair deal.<p>Cannot relate to the people here who are screaming bloody murder over this. You have to give to get.
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scjodyover 5 years ago
A decentralized approach that doesn&#x27;t depend on one corporate service remaining profitable (or one nonprofit remaining viable) would be great.<p>The Zot protocol <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zotlabs.org&#x2F;page&#x2F;zotlabs&#x2F;home" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zotlabs.org&#x2F;page&#x2F;zotlabs&#x2F;home</a> can do distributed event invitations but the leading implementation Hubzilla has horrendous UX and an unpalatable (PHP + JQuery) tech stack. I&#x27;d love to have time to reimplement it in a more developer and user friendly way - focusing on events only to start with could make this a reasonable task.