Meetup.com is just BEGGING to be replaced. The UI looks like Classmates.com had a baby with a Windows 95 dialog box. The interstitial ads are as annoying and useless as fake recruiter texts. Organizer pricing has skyrocketed like eggs in 2024, and now they're paywalling BASIC features for attendees (like seeing who's actually coming). Classic PE "we hate our customers" BS.
Cactoide looks great for one-off events - nice work! But it doesn't replace Meetup for recurring groups that need subscriptions, notifications, member management, etc.
The best alternative I've found so far is https://guild.host. Just launched Svelte Chicago on it (shameless plug - come join us!) and our first event yesterday went smoothly. Guild has some rough edges but a smart founder with the right priorities.
What's still missing, as TheAdamist mentioned, is discoverability. I think we need to separate meetup discovery from event management - an event-platform-agnostic registry/search that works across Guild, Eventbrite, Facebook Events, whatever. Hmm... might have just found our next Svelte meetup hackathon project.
I've been using Svelte / SvelteKit for 1.5 years now – it is without comparison the most enjoyable and productive web f̵r̵a̵m̵e̵w̵o̵r̵k̵ language I've ever used.
I'm lucky enough to work with Svelte / SvelteKit full-time. I'm gratified that the site I help build and maintain is included in the SvelteKit showcase: https://kit.svelte.dev
Cactoide looks great for one-off events - nice work! But it doesn't replace Meetup for recurring groups that need subscriptions, notifications, member management, etc.
The best alternative I've found so far is https://guild.host. Just launched Svelte Chicago on it (shameless plug - come join us!) and our first event yesterday went smoothly. Guild has some rough edges but a smart founder with the right priorities.
What's still missing, as TheAdamist mentioned, is discoverability. I think we need to separate meetup discovery from event management - an event-platform-agnostic registry/search that works across Guild, Eventbrite, Facebook Events, whatever. Hmm... might have just found our next Svelte meetup hackathon project.