Does anyone have any meetup alternatives?

I thought about Forem as well as you did the announcement. There's a "but" though. Some context:

I work in developer relations where facilitating or doing tech meetups is common. Also I run a bi-weekly devrel meetup (used to be IRL, now online).

• Eventbrite solves most things except for community and discovery.
• Despite what I personally think of Facebook, there's a single button click to import an event there from Eventbrite (the ticketing is sort of connected). It almost solves the community/discovery part.
• Good folks at Grafana have sponsored a meetup.com acc for the deverel meetups. But now that everything is online the "local" has less of importance, I don't see it generating much value or activity overall.

Finally, we're in "no IRL meetups" mode for a while, so to pivot online I did many things including several format pivots and a landing on github pages to host the meetup: devrel.events/live/

Eventually the Forem part.

The reason people still use (or have been using until very recently) meetup.com despite all the bad deeds is that the community is there. There's ton of tools that are better than the meetup, but if it cannot help with event discovery, well, one gets back to meetup and pays 15USD/mo for the privilege of organising free community meetups.

Also, let's take a small step back and look at our twitters feeds - everyone is doing online conferences now, everyone is streaming. And I, you, we can attend any of these events. So there's 1 - competition, 2 - events anxiety. When one has too much of something, that something looses value.

TL;DR about Forem:

If Forem could help event orgs solve the event discovery problem, then meetup.com would have nothing to offer.

I can elaborate on any parts, share more experience if there's interest.

That's a mega interesting prospect. I was part way through writing an application for the Beta with this in mind, but then got cold feet at the last minute. I'll put my application back in tomorrow :)