loading . . . Another day, another batch of events I’ve been on the list for, either announcing they are moving away from Meetup.com, or, another batch of emails telling me that the organiser has abandoned the group, and would I like to be the one to save it and keep it going?
Why is this happening? Well, Meetup has had a storied history (it was at one point owned by WeWork, at the height of the bubble around that organisation’s intent to reinvent the way we all live, work and socialise) – culminating most recently in it being acquired by Bending Spoons.
Bending Spoons may not be super well-known outside of late-stage venture capitalist asset stripping piranha circles, but my observation is that it has been a kiss of death for products that they acquired. It is an organisation that has gone around gobbling up once-cool startups and apps, and then hiking prices and reducing quality to squeeze the value out of their customers and users. Wonder why Evernote lost its shine, and everyone moved to Notion, Bear, Obsidian, Joplin (in my case), or anything-other-than-Evernote? Aside from getting tired as a product, that would be the ridiculous pricing and limitations Bending Spoons imposed, after a similar acquisition…
So, the very basic story here is that Meetup tripled prices for Meetup Pro (the bit that let you do the event organising) with less than 30 days notice, and a lot of event organisers suddenly found themselves paying way more for their communities than they wanted to.
In case you’re not familiar with this pattern, Cory Doctorow has coined a word for it: _enshittification_. You should read his excellent book about it.
### What, or where, next?
It’s a choice, and not a great one.
Meetup was particularly great, at a point in time, for location-based and interest-based discovery of physical communities – at least, that was my experience. I was able to look for topics like “internet of things” and locations such as “london” and find myself an excellent group to get involved with.
What I’ve been seeing recently is that groups are either shutting down completely, moving to use something like Discord (!) for arranging meetups, or in some cases, moving to a platform like Lu.ma which also has a decent set of location-based collections of events, at least for some of the large cities. I’m not sure what I think of Lu.ma overall yet, and I haven’t used it to directly arrange events myself, but I’ve certainly been to quite a few where organisers have moved over, and it seems to provide what I need as an attendee.
I haven’t yet found an excellent Fediverse / ActivityPub-based alternative, although there are some promising options – Gath.io is one that I’ve tried and that has worked quite well, for example. One issue is that as email has become (arguably) less-used and more difficult to access from a “send to list” perspective – thanks, spammers – it can be difficult to stay connected to a group of interested parties on an ongoing basis.
This feels like an area that is ripe for a new round of invention and disruption! Let me know if you have any suggestions either for good places to find interesting in-person meetup communities, or alternate platforms I might now know about yet…
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https://andypiper.co.uk/2024/10/18/meetup-com-is-so-over/
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