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Comment by joecot | Hacker News Reader

Here's the Github project: https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/chapter

The description is "A self-hosted event management tool for nonprofits"

Maybe they're just being coy currently, and planning to make it a network after all, but the thing that made Meetup work was the network. You setup a meetup.com group, and random people find you by stumbling upon it on meetup.com . We run Larp games in Philly, and every couple months random players find us on meetup, show up to try it, and stay, and that was worth the meetup.com cost for us. If there's going to be a replacement for meetup, it has to also replace the network part of it, since that was much of the point for most groups. If I just wanted a self-hosted platform to track events, I have a wordpress plugin for that already.

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I believe a large percentage of the network effect of meetup was showing up in google, bing, etc... as much as I told many people to simply go to meetup.com and start looking for random things to go check out, I sadly know it's likely any of them who actually went looking, ended up doing a google search for 'meetup.com <city name>" -

small data point from here, when I stumbled upong meetup, I was doing search engine lookups for things like '<activity group> <mycity>' - and found meetup to have what I was looking for and more - I enjoyed browsing it, using it, and appreciate the email reminders.

I think a wordpress plugin would be fine for getting much of the network effect if it had title tags (with city perhaps) and everything SEO right so events showed up in search results fine - a bonus if it could include a 'link wheel' I think it used to be called(?) in the footer showing other meets in same city - perhaps pulled from an API with this thing coming from freecodecamp - or some other apps that could do a same scheme or something.

I noticed buddypress (plugin for WP that adds groups and such) is now API friendly - so I would think these things could be mashed up pretty easy and quickly these days.

I really appreciate(d) what meetup has done for me in the past and I'd like to see that kind of thing continue to be an option for future humans and not have the burden for fees so it's only pay for play.

Everyone's traffic is different. Meetup shows up on google for us, sure, but so does our website (above meetup), and our website sells it far better than meetup does.

When we get new people from meetup, it's because they were on meetup surfing through events near them. I usually see they've joined a dozen other meetup groups in the area. We pay the organizer fee because of the network.

When I mentioned "bonus if it could include a 'link wheel' I think it used to be called(?)" above, what I was actually trying to recall is the days many web sites had a "web ring" type thing in the bottom footer... ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring )

I'd actually like to see the return of these, maybe some plugins where people can select the top ones to show first, or randomize as others have voted to put other sites within certain rings..

give me that, and an open source thing that does what google calendar does with the ability to suck in info from fbook, google cal, and apple cal - then we would have a couple of plugins that groups and small shops could add to their web sites that would actually help others in similar industries and get updated when one or more of their in-house people don't know who to update html can depend on calendar edits.

now I'm wondering if a list of sites can be stashed via git so it's easy to clone - and can an api be used to pull from those to display the needed web ring things and such.

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