In ~2015 when I was living in Chicago and frequently traveling, I could reliably find something interesting to do through Meetup.org. It seems that that are far fewer things being listed now. Are there really fewer things being organized in general or have people gravitated to another site/app?
Oh Meetup. I miss you.<p>I first started using Meetup in the middle to late 2000s in the Bay area. It almost kick started my tech career after meeting a ton of people at a computer music event. I wasn't quite ready yet and made a detour through moving to LA, starting a pirate radio station and then becoming a carpenter in the art world for 5 years.<p>Meetup was there for me when I finally re-engaged with software engineering and computers. I would go to events almost weekly and met tons of interesting people who taught me about all sorts of subjects from 3d printing to category theory. I got to see the inside of many different startups and eat a ton of bad pizza.<p>All the way up to the pandemic i was a regular participant. I don't think I have been to a single event since the pandemic. I still live in the same place and do the same sort of work. I have a really hard time motivating myself to use the site and whenever I do, I find the schedule rather sparse. I have heard the same story from others many times.<p>Perhaps this is post-covid trauma? Or perhaps this is part of the price we pay for shifting so hard to remote work? Or perhaps this is the result of the shitty Meetup UX making it difficult to find groups I relate to? I don't know, but I suspect it is all of the above.<p>I miss the sense of IRL community provided by my local meetup groups.
Meetup didn’t (want to) realize its customers were running events to make money. So they ignored all the calls for features like selling tickets and let Eventbrite eat their lunch in that space.<p>The non-commercial side of things - evergreen interest groups - got eaten by Facebook, who doesn’t need groups to make money, just to engage users.<p>Everyone too young to have anything to do with either Meetup or FB are in some private chat.
We still use Meetup for our functional programming meetup that's been going on for about a decade, but I gotta say as an organizer, it's a very buggy piece of software.<p>Editing an event never goes smoothly, it pretty much always eats half of your edits, etc.<p>It's also not exactly free. But it's risky to try to move a large group onto some new platform, so here we are.
I ran a relatively large Software Development meetup in Las Vegas with 500+ members, and it was really the pandemic that killed it. Tried to bring it back but interest just wasn't there for a while and I kind of lost touch with the other people I organized it with. A lot of the other big local meetups also went to online only and the meetup scene here is a lot worse than it was before in general. It wasn't a move to another platform as far as I know.
In SF Bay area, and a few other cities:
<a href="https://lu.ma/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://lu.ma/</a> and <a href="https://partiful.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://partiful.com/</a> are the most common (for new tech events) right now. Discovery isn't great, but it's what everyone is using.<p>Luma is rolling out more discovery features, and I search twitter for "lu.ma San Francisco" to find other events sometimes.<p>Nothing that covers the feature set of Meetup though, but much better to use.
I'm the organizer of a social meetup in Sydney for LGBTQIA+ scientists, engineers and technologists.[^1]<p>We still mostly find new members through the platform and word-of-mouth (probably about 50-50), but compared to pre-pandemic, the numbers are generally smaller. There is less being organised in general, but I suspect people have competing commitments, or are less enthusiastic about trying it out: I find many people sign up to join the group but only a handful will ever show up at any event. Attendance can be very seasonal too.<p>As a platform I find Meetup quite expensive given how buggy and slow it is. Participants complain about not getting notifications (it frequently fails to send me anything). There is lots of duplicated and flakey functionality, like chat and discussion groups. I'd love to use something else but I don't know if its worth the risk trying to drive people elsewhere.<p>Trying to foster a sense of community with tech platforms alone is also a bit futile - it really boils down to the vibe of the group and other participants, and it's a difficult balancing act as an organiser.<p>[^1] <a href="https://www.meetup.com/turingcircle/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.meetup.com/turingcircle/</a>
I find this question really interesting because to me, the use case appears very clear, and the idea itself should be appealing to a wide variety of audiences, yet there is no popular solution.<p>I'd love to see more activity in this area. Through digitalization, we're missing out on a lot of human interaction. Meeting up with like-minded people through social gatherings is a great way to get it back.
I’ve been interested in trying meetup but I can never really find any groups I like.<p>When I find one that seems remotely interesting, there’s only like 4 people marked as attending. Usually a husband and wife and probably their good friend of 10 years.<p>So I’m hesitant about showing up for board games for example where everybody is extremely close friends except me and they just have this event continuing from when it used to be bigger and have more people.<p>It’d be fine if the hosts were engaging with new people but I don’t trust that to happen. In my experience the hosts usually don’t know they’re supposed to lead the events and introduce guests and spot and resolve awkwardness unless they were in a sorority.<p>I imagine I’d show up to scope out the group meetup, but it ends up being a niche location where anybody there is obviously for the meetup. Or worse, I don’t find out they’re close friends until a 3 hour long game already started so leaving would ruin the game.<p>Or I show up to have beers and hang out and they turn out to be hardcore serious terraform mars players who expect me to know the rules because “why else would you show up to a random board game night?”<p>This sounds like a lot of worrying but these are all actually based on prior events I’ve gone to with acquaintances from work or new friends I don’t know well. Or like flyers in my apartment for something like a hosted Halloween party.<p>I don’t think I’ve ever had a good experience unless I’m the one hosting the event and can introduce guests and such, or a very close friend is hosting something so I can call him out to be a better host… But it’s a lot of work to get people interested in doing anything except sitting at home watching Netflix. That’s even before all the planning for the event and doing the hosting.
For Chicago specifically, there are two solutions I can offer:<p>1. Chicago Engineering Tech Communities and Organizations - <a href="https://github.com/driscoll42/chicago-engineering-and-tech-communities">https://github.com/driscoll42/chicago-engineering-and-tech-c...</a>
2. Chicago Tech Community Events - <a href="https://chitechcommunityevents.softr.app/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://chitechcommunityevents.softr.app/</a><p>The first is a list of all the tech/engineering orgs in Chicago I maintain. Many are still on meetup, but not all. Unfortunately there's not one calendar to find everything. The second <i>is</i> an attempt to make a calendar of Chicago tech events, but it's not perfect. I don't run it but I highly recommend it.<p>I do recommend joining local community slacks/Discords. There's a good one for slacks here (<a href="https://github.com/thisdot/tech-community-slacks">https://github.com/thisdot/tech-community-slacks</a>), e.g. for Chicago there's the Chicago Tech Slack (<a href="https://join.slack.com/t/chicago-tech/shared_invite/zt-1cb3mexrp-Ri0DCePyYaXSuEg8qPUCTA" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://join.slack.com/t/chicago-tech/shared_invite/zt-1cb3m...</a>), but you'll need to explore around.
I used to go to a lot of tech-oriented Meetups pre-pandemic, and even helped organize a few.<p>But then there was COVID, and I moved many states away, and it doesn't feel like that scene bounced back to pre-pandemic levels in either my old or new cities.
One thing of pre-pandemic, is that people were already in the city center after work, so it was easy to go to a bar to talk about python, use some meeting rooms some company had for toasts or whatever. But now, most of the senior devs and engineers that organized these stuff moved to fully remote so there isn't a good easy to go place, so the effort to attend a meetup now is higher.
This spring/summer there were a number of attempts to organize coding meetups here in Chicago.<p><a href="https://www.meetup.com/js-chi/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.meetup.com/js-chi/</a> is still going strong, but some of the other events aren't happening anymore.<p>I've been going to events all summer, but I've heard it's very hard for organizers because of the pressure from participants who are trying to find jobs at these events. I see it as a great opportunity to get a handle on the latest developments in tech and also meet people in the local area who are programmers. But yah, there are lots of people trying to land those high paying tech jobs at neighborhood meetups and it's hard to have that conversation about like just chilling out a little and enjoying the company of fellow developers.
10 years ago, I started a language meetup. Over the years, it grew to as much as 50 people and eventually people moved away, lost interest, etc. I met most of my friends and my wife from this group.<p>Many of my friends even met their spouses from this group (4 weddings, I think). Meetup was the best place to meet people outside of work. It was always difficult for me to make new friends as I got older, but the site made it much easier.<p>It's sad to see what it's become. I don't know anyone using it anymore. covid did kill a lot of meetups though. My friend group still hasn't been the same. We all still haven't met together in the same room/space since Covid started.
Couchsurfing.org may be worth a try. They have a website that I used to find other people to hangout with via their "connect with other travelers" feature. I have used it in San Francisco and Bay Area as well as traveling the world such as in Thailand and it worked great for me at that time. It really did work to find and connect with real people and events in person for a given locale. I see now that they are requesting a donation to even use their website now so YMMV.
Haven't seen any issue with Meetup in the UK that isn't explained by the pandemic, and it seems to be active enough and on an upward trajectory back to pre levels.<p>I'm unaware of a competitor; Facebook and other public fora like Reddit lack privacy and professionalism (the latter I presume encouraged by Meetup fees).<p>Discord and closed fora etc lack professionalism and mainstream ingress.<p>Perhaps the situation in other regions and particular demographics is different, as the OP indicates. But it seems fine here.
> Are there really fewer things being organized in general or have people gravitated to another site/app<p>There was that whole pandemic thing.
First things first: it's Meetup dot com. It's a commercial product owned by a commercial entity. It's not a community service.<p>Second, nothing replaced it, at least not in the Bay Area for tech meetups. It had a few shaky years under erratic WeWork ownership, and then COVID dealt it a killing blow.<p>I really think people used to go to Meetup events to catch up with acquaintances and eat the free pizza. They were like low-pressure parties where you could talk to strangers about something you cared about. Most Meetup groups that went to Zoom had huge drops in attendance, because being on a call with strangers is awkward, puts everyone on the spot, and is generally not fun at all.<p>I think IRL tech meetups can still come back, but I think a lot fewer companies are willing to host. I've spoken to several organizers of small tech enthusiast groups that I care about; they absolutely <i>hate</i> the online format and are desperately searching for IRL options. I go to an IRL AI/ML event that moves around startup offices in SF; they have <i>overwhelming</i> interest and have to turn away 2/3 of the people that sign up, because they just don't have the capacity.<p>What's left on Meetup:<p>- dead groups that stopped scheduling events years ago<p>- groups that are managed by tech companies (in spaces like Web3) that organize events that sound general-interest, but are actually promoting their own services and solutions, and usually fold after 1-2 events<p>- non-sponsored tech enthusiast groups that run events on Zoom and get like 3-4 attendees per event<p>My takeaway is that online-only is absolute poison for organizing events where people can meet each other, and IRL is heavily blocked on companies willing to host events and feed people free pizza. All the IRL stuff I've been to this year has been attended and <i>overattended</i>, but there just aren't as many events compared to 5 years ago.
Is there a way to get unfiltered search? When Im logged in and search for events in my town, I carefully set the filters for 2miles, then onsite events... it doea not show all events. When not logged in, or when accessing those events I can find them. It feels like being stuck in an "algorhitm bubble".
Couchsurfing has a lot of events nowadays. I don't use it, but some friends occasionally invite me to things they find on it.<p>Meetup still runs strong in some areas.<p>For a time, FB groups carried the burden, but that fount's since dried up.
I'm curious about this too. I've been really wanting to find a new group for tabletop RPGs. There's no real game stores nearby where I live, closest would be quite a drive. They also don't seem to be hosting many game nights yet either.<p>So I would like something like Meetup for that, but of course all of the groups on there are defunct.
Locals. Has been Apple app of the day in the iOS App Store a few times.<p><a href="https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/locals-org-meet-network/id1511341755" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/locals-org-meet-network/id1511...</a>
The Toronto CS group(CS Cabal) has started using Guild: <a href="https://guild.host/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://guild.host/</a>. It's free.
Partiful allows event creators to broadcast events to mutuals. Not exactly the same as Meetup, but semi-public invites to IRL social events nonetheless.