Meetup was great until it became so expensive to run a glorified calendar+ email list. $180+ a year is silly for small groups.

But meetup was awesome for discoverability of small local niche groups.

Manual link sharing doesn't help with local groups.

The alternative was Facebook groups for free, but has awful discoverability and awful event calendars. But most people have Facebook, so thats the default now.

How does this benefit me as an organizer? How can local people find my event without me having to spam it on services(Facebook, etc) that they already have accounts on?

The reason Meetup worked was years of collecting contact info of people interested in specific topics and then blasting all of them when a new group started in a location. If 1% of people responded, that was still a decent turnout.

This is the big barrier to entry for anyone trying to replicate Meetup. It was never about the event organizing software (which really wasn’t that great) it was about connecting your group or event to enough interested, local people that you had a chance at actually getting off the ground.

My experience was that Facebook was the default for events, which slowly moved to meetup.com and with the price hikes organizers moved to WhatsApp, which is the worst in every aspect for _me_ as a user.

But people seem to like it.

Facebook events were amazing, you would get suggestions of friends going to some event or just suggestions to similar events that you liked.

But nowadays nobody is on Facebook anymore and there is just no replacement for that.

How do you find new groups on WhatsApp?

Word of mouth. Ironically enough, I just sent this to a friend around the same time you commented this

"I’m curious where event discovery is for___, are there TG / WA groups?"

Every year I pay $39.99 for a one-month subscription for Punchbowl, which allows me to easily manage RSVP's for my son's birthday party.

For that price, you get the normal stuff you'd expect and also:

- no ads

- ability to set each invitee as an adult, a child or an infant (useful when planning food and activities)

- ability to group invitees into families, so that any adult in the family can edit the RSVP for any/all family members

- single place to manage all messages with attendees

- easy to start this year's invitation as a copy of last year's

- app that displays the total 'yes' folks, split by adult, child, infant

It's totally worth the money for the time it saves and the ease of use for guests.

But I'm surprised that AFAIK there's no open source thing that's as easy to use, and that includes all the features I listed.

Every event I've hosted or been invited to was just a group chat on Telegram. Add everyone who is invited, create a pinned message with the details and a poll with yes/no/maybe.

That would require at least one adult from each family to have Telegram, which isn't the case.

And a poll wouldn't allow me to know which kid(s) and adult(s) from each family are coming.

You should try out Lu.ma - it does all those things for free. I use it extensively for managing rsvps to both private and public events.

I just signed up to try it out, but I don't see either of these features:

  - ability to set each invitee as an adult, a child or an infant
  - ability to group invitees into families, so that any adult in the family can edit the RSVP for any/all family members

What would be the use case for that? Do people really (want to) manage their RSVP in that much detail?

Invitee age group: - kids need less food than adults

- adults don't need nerf guns

- kids and adults have different drink preferences.

Ability to group invitees into families:

- whichever parent is 'in charge' of plans for that weekend can respond

- whichever parent realises there's a change of plans can edit one or more of the RSVPs

- often a family will accept/decline differently for different members, e.g. older sibling isn't interested, or one parent will run errands whilst the other is at the party

Otherwise, you have to choose: either you invite one adult from the household, but then the other may be unaware of the event details, or you invite both, but then you must rely on them to discover it to avoid a scenario where they both RSVP for themselves and a partner and a kid, and you end up double counting.

How does it work with various modes of communicating? Pretty much each person I know has their own messenger service, or sometimes just the phone or seeing them in person.

Each invited family must have at least one person with an email address OR cellphone number.

Looks really nice for it's niche.

I very recently started considering the options around and really wanna give a shot to the federated version called Mobilizon. It seems to be gaining quite some popularity according to the stats but it's mostly in Europe.

There is a US instance though with some decent amount of activity.

https://mobilizon.us

It's still a little rough around the edges but the devs (french nonprofit that made peertube) just got money to fix that up so I really hope they make good headway. I'm gonna start a group on there soon and hopefully that'll lead to some useful bug reports and feedback.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobilizon

I switched all my events to Mobilizon and wont look back. It works really well. A few features are missing like recurring events but since it is FOSS, anyone can add it. Feel free to give it a shot.

Semi related, but has anyone else noticed a massive surge in Meetup comment spam in the last few months? All my local groups are pumping out spam, mostly offering work from home employment opportunities. I keep wondering what has changed.

Meetup was bought by Bending Spoons (after a winding path getting passed around after it being sold to WeWork). They’re basically just running it until the wheels fall off.

Bending Spoons are the same people who bought and then systematically abused and violated poor Evernote.

Bending Spoons is a weird beast. Nobody likes them and nobody likes working for them, but they are loved by capital markets - they seem to have an endless stream of money coming in to finance acquisitions. They will buy anything, strip it down to bare essentials, jack up prices, and leave it running to generate cash for as long as it can, until it dies of natural death. There is little or no pretension of innovation, just value-extraction distilled into purest form.

Oracle should buy them, they'd fit together perfectly.

Yeah, every time I'm on Meetup I see those ads at the end of the sign up. The same thing happened with Poshmark now too. After I purchase something on Poshmark I get spammed with three ads. Like the same ad provider I mean, same deal.

Yep I have been in one group for years then in the last month I start getting spam emails from comments on the group

This looks promising! I help run local meetups for systems programmers [0] in cities across the world. We've been looking for a self-hosted RSVP system for ages (and haven't had the time to build one.)

We'll take Cactoide out for a spin for our September meetups! I'll open up some GitHub issues if any blockers show up.

[0] https://handmadecities.com/meetups

Coool! If you have any trouble with the spinup just contact me.

No Hassle, No Sign-Ups - Skip registrations and endless forms = spam.

There's https://smokesignal.events/ for event stuff on Bluesky / At Protocol too. IMO really sweet how your Personal Data Store can handle all different manners of data.

There's still no standards for Private Data though, so, pretty limited use at the moment.

Reminds me of my site Partey.io but with a bit of a different vibe. Congrats on launching!

https://partey.io/

Something similar, yes. Just cactoide is open-source and self hostable.

This seems useful, but I don’t think this could replace most use cases for Meetup or Eventbrite.

This actually sounds more similar to Partiful, which I like for one-off events. I would describe this as an open source Partiful, but not specifically geared towards parties.

So they did mean Eventbrite?

I was wondering if Eventribe was actually a thing and was guessing that it really could be. (It seems that it is a thing, but small. Not even leaning into the “tribe” aspect of the name)

You 're right something similar, I don't know about Partiful, but something similar, yes just with less noise, it really only focuses on the event

The only reason for me to be on meetup.com was the reach to get more people to my events (e.g. eBay Tech Talk Germany). I didn't care about the event management etc.

...and re u paying for the service nowdays? Don't you wanna a selfhost your own events?

I'm no longer employed and have no more need for this.

Is this hosted as a free service anywhere? The thing all my friends in NYC are using is Partiful. It’s free and I don’t have to host.

Yea, you could try now at cactoide.dalev.hu but I'm gonna reset the database in every week, so you should selfhost or just contact me and I'm gonna setup an instance for you.

Great start!

My first action after creating the event was to try to edit it and I realized I couldn't do that cuz I don't have an account or authorization to edit it.

Is editing in the works?

I'm thinking of new features so ofc, if someone needs this I'm gonna implement it. Right now my focus was only on the event creation and pure rsvp.

https://www.eventbrite.com ?

Probably what they meant but -- Eventribe sounds like an awesome name =)

lol, yessss

Great idea, congrats.

Upon seeing this mastodon popped in my head. If a service like this was federated it could let everyone run their own and depending on how it was managed, still be tied together?

Seen https://mobilizon.org/ ?

Wow, not a bad idea, but I don't know how can it works. How I can federate it what is the usecase for it?

This is great, and really needed!

Whenever someone sends me a luma or partiful link that asks me for personal info which will undoubtedly be bundled into some data broker when the VCs start putting pressure on the founders to cash out, I balk.

I would much, much rather see people just link me to a little no-signup widget without a platform attached <3

Thanks, happy to hear feedbacks if you have about the ux or the service.

I think there is room for an open source version of Luma, but this ain’t it.

Trying to do better than Meetup or Eventbrite is setting the bar so low you can hold a limbo contest. If you’re going to vibe code a competitor, I would at least aim to replicate the gold standard.

Gold standard is Luma for you?

Correct

I’m building PartyGem AI intended to tackle virtually all the issues I’ve read here and more.

I’ve been working in silence but progress has been made and my work will surface soon.

No nonsense ads, vaporware, data brokers, nor VCs own me. I’m going to make something that threatens all those apps which started great and sold out.

Good to hear it, its gonna be open source?

Meetup.com is just BEGGING to be replaced. The UI looks like Classmates.com had a baby with a Windows 95 dialog box. The interstitial ads are as annoying and useless as fake recruiter texts. Organizer pricing has skyrocketed like eggs in 2024, and now they're paywalling BASIC features for attendees (like seeing who's actually coming). Classic PE "we hate our customers" BS.

Cactoide looks great for one-off events - nice work! But it doesn't replace Meetup for recurring groups that need subscriptions, notifications, member management, etc.

The best alternative I've found so far is https://guild.host. Just launched Svelte Chicago on it (shameless plug - come join us!) and our first event yesterday went smoothly. Guild has some rough edges but a smart founder with the right priorities.

What's still missing, as TheAdamist mentioned, is discoverability. I think we need to separate meetup discovery from event management - an event-platform-agnostic registry/search that works across Guild, Eventbrite, Facebook Events, whatever. Hmm... might have just found our next Svelte meetup hackathon project.

Couldn’t agree more! Event guy here, for our country 2 weeks ago we launched https://belgiumtech.events

Little niche we conquered with duck tape data inputting and a nice UI Very open to feedback!

For guilds / groups / clubs / companies.. I was even thinking a decentralised SOLID database (cf Berners Lee) for futureproof(?) data ownership and interoperability

> I think we need to separate meetup discovery from event management - an event-platform-agnostic registry/search that works across Guild, Eventbrite, Facebook Events, whatever. Hmm... might have just found our next Svelte meetup hackathon project.

Welcome, I've seen a lot of projects in this space (and done a few)!

If I can make a suggestion, the first thing to look at is public API's and existing formats like iCal (for the listings information that can be public - obviously some information like attendee details should be private).

Making sure whatever platform you use to host your events has open data feeds is a great first step, and preferably in iCal. Before you even start working on a search site, your regular atendees can import your feed straight into their personal calendars (and I know from previous projects some people will).

ps. Hey OP, please add open data feeds to your project!

For our small country we launched https://belgiumtech.events couple weeks ago. I am not a stellar dev (events guy here) and I couldn’t agree more! Meetup and Facebook events want to be replaced!!

Please provide feedback, and let’s see what we can do.

Got some more ideas and devs interested if we spin this for real

Ofc, I want to use a vanilla rsvp platform, you mentioned tools which are more than that. That's not a problem just I don't need those stuffs... and I want to selfhost my services.