Do you know of any alternative we can do to escape the meetup ecosystem? I would have hoped by now we got at least a federated alternative like mastodon.
Meetup is awful in that they hold your group hostage and you have no way of moving your members, so if you decide no longer to run the Meetup one day, they will let you walk away, but anyone else can just step up and take over the group and do whatever they want. Even worse than Facebook groups.
I consider few things as annoying as a single person deciding that a community is done for good.
One of the major values of Meetup.com was always "I'm new here and have no friends, what's there to do?", "I'm bored, what's there to do?" and things like that. Random Discord channels or some Tweets don't solve that.
Meetup was never super-brilliant, but this is really not a tech problem.