Comment by kenkunz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kenkunz | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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