I’ve been the lead organizer of a largish group with a couple hundred very active members. But getting to that point was quite a challenge that was made harder by Meetup. The group still ended up falling apart.

The Meetup platform is pretty terrible. It’s designed to get people to join many groups, most of which they never engage with and just get a lot of spam from. I’m sure >99.99% of pre-pandemic “social” Meetup groups were totally inactive. Most of the rest would have semi-regular events that <4 people would sign up for.

That said, I think there’s a lot room to build a better version of Meetup.com. The main problem with it is that the managers just don’t know what they’re doing, or are in too deep with tech debt and legacy code. If someone here actually wants to build a better version of Meetup, let me know.