We have a handful of concepts within the DEV universe that are not entirely fleshed out, but we've long wanted to provide meetup-type solutions for a variety of reasons.
We felt that as a community-oriented open source company, there was ample opportunity to provide a better alternative to meetup, but we never leaned very hard into these projects due to it being a focus creep we could do without.
However, I sort of regret that we hadn't leaned further here, because if we had we'd be better organized to absorb dissatisfied Meetup users today. That is not the case, we'd have much work to do.
Our event-oriented features which need to be built out and unified.
Event listings (a place to publicize events at a high level)...
These are all existing in limbo and it would be interesting if we could collaborate with the community to really provide a free-forever, community-first genuine alternative to Meetup. It's our hypothesis that open source technology can improve more rapidly, serve more use cases more effectively, and generally win out compared to inefficient, value-consuming alternatives.
As Meetup also serves broader needs than just software developers, our longterm open source plans (to offer our technology for broader groups) could allow folks to spin up and self host (or use a hosted version) of our eventual technology to ensure that they are not at the whims of a major power imbalance.
Anyway, I've been meaning to make a post about this myself but hadn't gotten around to it. So thank you for an outlet to comment on the topic.
(I'll still possibly make a post tomorrow with some more info about how we could make some of this happen as part of our open source initiative, for anyone interested.)
I think if Dev.to were to provide a meetup solution it needs to be its own codebase so there is rapid agility. Also, I would very much like to see DEV.to as an umbrella of open-source projects instead of one beastly monolith.
I was just talking about this with one of my business partners. We run a pretty big meetup (~4500), and although I've had no real reason to disagree with them in the past, the recent changes haven't been well received.
I've been following the FCC efforts. There are a few projects in a similar vein, some more advanced than others. The "vein" being siloed and self-hosted. Personally, I'd much rather have something on a hosted platform with discovery. Essentially meetup, with some more control over what happens. Seems like you'd be a natural option for the tech world, but the other issue with FCC and others is that replicating "meetup" is certainly not trivial. There's a lot of work to make something functional enough.
I know a lot of good people at meetup, so I also hope they get the message and reset, but we'll see how it goes.
I think DEV is in a really unique position to do something here for sure.
Freecodecamp is doing something as well: twitter.com/ossia/status/118384505... - but I'm not sure it'll exactly be a drop in replacement for meetup (unclear so far)
I'm excited to see where this all goes - I do think fragmentation is not great (from a network effect perspective) - but it's clear (to me) that meetup has a unique hold on the market that should be broken.
Ah, nice. It's great to have multiple open source driven orgs getting into the mix. FCC is also non-profit, which is great.
If we get involved in building out our Meetup-esque suite of features, I'd hope we can achieve cohesion and compatibility with other projects and companies.
We don't need to provide some of this tooling to be useful and "successful" so I'd just as soon see FCC succeed as with us, however I do think we have a different style of building open source software and different approaches (and tech preferences) so I would say that I wouldn't necessarily reach to try and collaborate with them on this.
New-ish Jr. Web Developer out of the Phoenix, AZ area, working primarily JAMstack web development. Previous careers include IT Project Management and Voice Engineering for about a decade each.
Location
Phoenix, AZ
Education
University of Illinois, BFA; Grand Canyon University, Java Programming Certificate
Whoops. I wrote Medium because I meant to reference it in a following sentence in terms of where we already took a similar approach with Medium. I got all mixed up. 🙃
That's the kind of mixup that might indicate that something is a focus creep in the first place... However I genuinely think that a lot of focus creep issues plague closed source software a bit worse than open source.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
We have a handful of concepts within the DEV universe that are not entirely fleshed out, but we've long wanted to provide meetup-type solutions for a variety of reasons.
We felt that as a community-oriented open source company, there was ample opportunity to provide a better alternative to meetup, but we never leaned very hard into these projects due to it being a focus creep we could do without.
However, I sort of regret that we hadn't leaned further here, because if we had we'd be better organized to absorb dissatisfied Meetup users today. That is not the case, we'd have much work to do.
Our event-oriented features which need to be built out and unified.
Event listings (a place to publicize events at a high level)...
dev.to/listings/events
Events calendar (more info on events, add to calendar, etc.)
dev.to/events
IRL.DEV (a dedicated portal for event discovery with a neat vanity URL for easier IRL link sharing)
irl.dev
Additionally in beta are group Connect channels
dev.to/connect
These are all existing in limbo and it would be interesting if we could collaborate with the community to really provide a free-forever, community-first genuine alternative to Meetup. It's our hypothesis that open source technology can improve more rapidly, serve more use cases more effectively, and generally win out compared to inefficient, value-consuming alternatives.
As Meetup also serves broader needs than just software developers, our longterm open source plans (to offer our technology for broader groups) could allow folks to spin up and self host (or use a hosted version) of our eventual technology to ensure that they are not at the whims of a major power imbalance.
Anyway, I've been meaning to make a post about this myself but hadn't gotten around to it. So thank you for an outlet to comment on the topic.
(I'll still possibly make a post tomorrow with some more info about how we could make some of this happen as part of our open source initiative, for anyone interested.)
I think if Dev.to were to provide a meetup solution it needs to be its own codebase so there is rapid agility. Also, I would very much like to see DEV.to as an umbrella of open-source projects instead of one beastly monolith.
I was just talking about this with one of my business partners. We run a pretty big meetup (~4500), and although I've had no real reason to disagree with them in the past, the recent changes haven't been well received.
I've been following the FCC efforts. There are a few projects in a similar vein, some more advanced than others. The "vein" being siloed and self-hosted. Personally, I'd much rather have something on a hosted platform with discovery. Essentially meetup, with some more control over what happens. Seems like you'd be a natural option for the tech world, but the other issue with FCC and others is that replicating "meetup" is certainly not trivial. There's a lot of work to make something functional enough.
I know a lot of good people at meetup, so I also hope they get the message and reset, but we'll see how it goes.
I think DEV is in a really unique position to do something here for sure.
Freecodecamp is doing something as well: twitter.com/ossia/status/118384505... - but I'm not sure it'll exactly be a drop in replacement for meetup (unclear so far)
I'm excited to see where this all goes - I do think fragmentation is not great (from a network effect perspective) - but it's clear (to me) that meetup has a unique hold on the market that should be broken.
Ah, nice. It's great to have multiple open source driven orgs getting into the mix. FCC is also non-profit, which is great.
If we get involved in building out our Meetup-esque suite of features, I'd hope we can achieve cohesion and compatibility with other projects and companies.
We don't need to provide some of this tooling to be useful and "successful" so I'd just as soon see FCC succeed as with us, however I do think we have a different style of building open source software and different approaches (and tech preferences) so I would say that I wouldn't necessarily reach to try and collaborate with them on this.
Anyway, it's all pretty neat!
Yeah, I think having multiple options is a good thing; it will be interesting to see what they (and you!) come up with
I definitely think direct collaboration could be in the cards, and wouldn't dismiss that.
Maybe a collaboration on a protocol of sorts (or agreeing to work together with an existing one) could be the right solution.
Agreed, thinking a lot along these lines.
This also prevents any group from holding too much power. And a repeat of this happening.
Not too sure if it has to be a new setup.
Or something built on existing ones (iCal, RSS, etc)
Ben, did you actually mean to use Medium in this sentence? "...a free-forever, community-first genuine alternative to Medium."
I feel like that should be "...alternative to Meetup."
Cause isn't Dev.to already an alternative to Medium? 🤔
Whoops. I wrote Medium because I meant to reference it in a following sentence in terms of where we already took a similar approach with Medium. I got all mixed up. 🙃
That's the kind of mixup that might indicate that something is a focus creep in the first place... However I genuinely think that a lot of focus creep issues plague closed source software a bit worse than open source.