I found this article on meetup alternatives interesting. I'm an organiser for Cardiff R Usergroup, and regularly attend quite a few other events in the city.
Is meetup common for tech groups where you are? Do you or events you go to use anything different?
Top comments (3)
We'd be pretty interested in exploring Forem as a possible replacement for Meetup
For Empowering Community
Ben Halpern γ» May 28 γ» 6 min read
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).
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 :)