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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. My plan

by chrisa 7y 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. My plan is to charge organizers (like meetup does today) to cover costs - but never to charge members to attend free events. I've been looking for a solid project to spend time on, and this just became it. I put up a landing page this morning, and I've already started coding: https://meetingplace.io/ https://meetingplace.io/

starpilot 7y ago
There are many other Meetup alternatives being started or in use, included some not listed in OP article. This is not good. There's too much fragmentation in this space and it'll be hard to have the self-sustaining critical mass, and cross-pollination across communities that made Meetup.com effective. I'm in tech, sports, and social Meetup groups. I don't want to join 3 new sites to replace this one.
- chrisa 7y ago
  Yes, I worry about that too - any ideas about how to fix it? One of the things I liked about meetup was that many (most?) groups were hosted on it, but I think what this has shown is that meetup had a kind of monopoly in that way (which wasn't good!)
  - ativzzz 7y ago
    > Yes, I worry about that too - any ideas about how to fix it? Create an API that allows any site to be a front-end for meetups, you just store the data. Not sure how willing other sites would be to use this though.
  - iso-8859-1 7y ago
    > any ideas about how to fix it? Mobilizon supports federation. https://joinmobilizon.org/en/ https://joinmobilizon.org/en/
  - starpilot 7y ago
    My idea would be to clone Meetup.com as much as possible and aggressively pitch it as a "Meetup alternative." Use similar color scheme and branding, and have a Meetup.com migration tool to import existing groups and user accounts. The changeover has to be as smooth as possible, there are many non-technical Meetup organizers. It needs to stand out from the other Meetup clones. People don't know where to go. Really though I don't think Meetup is going to die. WeWork is selling it, there's no way the market would just let this huge captive audience of active users implode. Maybe FB wil buy it.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway8291 7y ago
  > There's too much fragmentation in this space and it'll be hard to have the self-sustaining critical mass. You do not need to have a single platform, though. All you would need is a single, in the best case open, index of meetup sites and descriptions. For that to work, you would need a simple protocol, e.g. myownmeetup.com/meetup.json, which the aggregators can crawl.
Santoshpanda 7y ago
Have a look at https://info.explara.com/switch-from-meetup-to-explara https://info.explara.com/switch-from-meetup-to-explara You will love it. Map your domain, bring multiple groups under one network and just grow like https://hub.tie.org https://hub.tie.org in 60+ cities powered by Explara Community.

by chrisa 7y ago

starpilot 7y ago

There are many other Meetup alternatives being started or in use, included some not listed in OP article. This is not good. There's too much fragmentation in this space and it'll be hard to have the self-sustaining critical mass, and cross-pollination across communities that made Meetup.com effective. I'm in tech, sports, and social Meetup groups. I don't want to join 3 new sites to replace this one.

chrisa 7y ago
Yes, I worry about that too - any ideas about how to fix it? One of the things I liked about meetup was that many (most?) groups were hosted on it, but I think what this has shown is that meetup had a kind of monopoly in that way (which wasn't good!)
- ativzzz 7y ago
  > Yes, I worry about that too - any ideas about how to fix it? Create an API that allows any site to be a front-end for meetups, you just store the data. Not sure how willing other sites would be to use this though.
- iso-8859-1 7y ago
  > any ideas about how to fix it? Mobilizon supports federation. https://joinmobilizon.org/en/ https://joinmobilizon.org/en/
- starpilot 7y ago
  My idea would be to clone Meetup.com as much as possible and aggressively pitch it as a "Meetup alternative." Use similar color scheme and branding, and have a Meetup.com migration tool to import existing groups and user accounts. The changeover has to be as smooth as possible, there are many non-technical Meetup organizers. It needs to stand out from the other Meetup clones. People don't know where to go. Really though I don't think Meetup is going to die. WeWork is selling it, there's no way the market would just let this huge captive audience of active users implode. Maybe FB wil buy it.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
throwaway8291 7y ago
> There's too much fragmentation in this space and it'll be hard to have the self-sustaining critical mass. You do not need to have a single platform, though. All you would need is a single, in the best case open, index of meetup sites and descriptions. For that to work, you would need a simple protocol, e.g. myownmeetup.com/meetup.json, which the aggregators can crawl.

Santoshpanda 7y ago

Have a look at https://info.explara.com/switch-from-meetup-to-explara https://info.explara.com/switch-from-meetup-to-explara You will love it. Map your domain, bring multiple groups under one network and just grow like https://hub.tie.org https://hub.tie.org in 60+ cities powered by Explara Community.