11–20 of 54 posts
Although I haven't updated my perspective about meetup since COVID started, so while I thought it was very useful before, and believe it still is, I'm not sure it's traction survived (or resources if it faded)
I have contacted them to ask for help, and I follow up every month to remind them that it still needs to be fixed. But no luck so far.
Any suggestions a) how to get this specific issue resolved and b) general advice for getting menial (but "important to me") things like this fixed?
I just haven't met many interesting people on meetup. The good independent events just use word-of-mouth and get more than enough people. It's best for sports, the park I live next to is really just a huge playing field, through meetup I can play football, touch rugby, or do some circuits there.
I still think it's the main place to advertise/host technical meetups though. I can't think of anywhere else. You have to put yourself in the shoes of someone who might come to your event - how will they find you? Are they going to be actively looking for your event, or will you need to reach out?
I'm no huge fan of discord for IRL communities because I like to separate my 'gamer tag' from my real identity, as do most people. I've had this problem lately, I love the discord app but I wish we could make IRL servers with real (or abbreviated, like 'John S.') names. It would be so much easier to manage and mod sports clubs if we could keep comms on it, rather than the email/sms/whatsapp mess we have right now.
There's non-profit and free groups I would definitely run. I was offered one such IoT meetup. Again cause of the $15/mo (which I couldn't at the time afford) that group died.
These days, I just ignore Meetup. Let something better come in instead.
I've been playing around with an idea in this space for a long time but made no progress on it. Meetup.com is now rubbish (mostly singles events, walking tours, scam investment talks etc) and Discord is too geographically distributed to be the right answer. I've seen a handful of apps that claim to work but none have achieved network. Been thinking about launching a no code app that basically sets up whatsapp distrib…
I one of the organizers of a meetup called Coffee and Code in Toronto, Canada. We used to be a bi-weekly meetup in cafes pre-pandemic. After the pandemic started we moved online to a weekly Discord. We still posted the meetups on Meetup and now attract an international audience. 2 years later we are still going. Now that restrictions are lifted in Ontario we will be going back to in-person meetups and probably by the…
Comparing this to some of the other comments, I'm jumping to a conclusion here, and doing so to see if you agree with this thinking - It sounds like your success can be attributed to, at least in significant part, having a strong/sticky "base" BEFORE the pandemic started. Would you agree/disagree that? More applicably to guiding the OP here, would you say that if you guys DIDN'T have that sticky base of attendees tha…
We do have a fairly regular group of core users that are usually there. Of course this core group will change with time given life commitments and other things that come up. Not uncommon for regulars to disappear for a while and show up later when life permits.
Something we have discussed about our longevity is early on we decided against using webcam meetups. All our meetups are voice only. I had a lot of feedback from people early on they preferred the voice only meetup. Now almost 2 years later, we question if this decision allowed us to avoid the webcam fatigue that most other groups seemed to suffer. It probably doesn't hurt we are in Canada's biggest and hottest tech hub.