I think meetup apps need to be aggressively anti-commercial. Meetup became a crappy stew of for-profit low effort AI flyer events designed to harvest money from people. I used an app called Nomadtable for a while but there too I caught organisers just trying to make money off of travelers. I'm also told women constantly get unwanted sexual messages.

If you want to start in that niche you really need to double down on a specific subset of that niche to get people to use it. Right now you are not offering much over Facebook Events or Meetup and the tech / design in this case doesn't matter when all that matters is that you have people using it for their events.

I'd take a look at how Luma (The only seemingly competitor in that niche these days) is doing it, they are focused on a very small group of large cities and started being mostly for crypto related events. Only these days it feels like there's more variety in the events depending on the city. Doing a generic "I was annoyed with Meetup" strategy won't work.

I would love a meetup alternative so I gave this a look, here's my experience and feedback:

Open up the site, (click away cookie consent banner), only way to see nearby events is to give location permissions for some reason (why? I just need to know what's happening in and around Amsterdam, not within x kms of my current actual location), look for a way to search by city while getting distracted by what seems to be the live event log of random people in different countries.

Go to "browse groups", click map view, now I have a teeny tiny globe on the bottom pretty much entirely covered by symbols. Drag the slider up, zoom in enough to see bits of the map in between symbols (which is pretty hard because it doesn't let me zoom if either of my fingers happened to be on a symbol, which again is most of the screen), finally find the Netherlands, and there's a single cryptic symbol. Tap on it, nothing happens. Tap a couple more times, then think to drag the slider back down to find that it's two "communities" of one person each.

Overall, not a very pleasant first impression. I'd put a nice search bar in the landing page, for searching by location or by group type. I'd also put some categories to filter by in the groups view.

I think the hyper-local discovery thing is pretty neat. Kinda reminds me of Tom Scott's pub flare idea. I'd much rather see that above the relatively pointless activity feed and events.

Also, the website has strong "vibe coded ui" vibes. I have no idea if that's the case or not, but the colors, the cards, the "x people online" pill, all just scream llm-ism, which makes me less likely to trust it.

Between Partiful, Posh, Luma, Instagram, and yes even Meetup, I'm not sure how people aren't "finding events" around them. I literally get invited to like 100+ random things every week.

The Activities idea is interesting. How do you handle the problem of people joining an activity and then not showing up? Do you have any reputation or attendance mechanism planned?

I set the radius to 1000 (instead of 100) in the URL and it looks like I get a feed for the whole world. I'm more than 1,000 km from California and Europe and I see all of everything, it seems. Wanted to let you know in case that wasn't intentional.

Please create a better UI and make it easier to view events / try posting one before signing in. Something card-based where I can quickly type in my location and see what events are nearby.

This isn't just a complaint about the UI being "vibe-coded-coded" or incomplete, but the product itself not making the happy path very useful or confusing.

For example why is the landing page trying to sell this like a b2b saas app or hit me with a bait and switch login wall, or why is the screenshot not just the actual directory/a search bar, why do I have to know to go to groups? (Also, why are you showing me activity feeds or funneling me into that when I'm on your website primarily to look at groups and events? Why would I go to your site to look at that) Then on the group page it would be very convenient if there were just an edit/post button that I can click to draft or actually make a group (and then maybe quickly group by / filter by location or region). Same thing with adding an event, you could have a + button with a modal to draft it and only hit me with the login wall when I try to post.

The event/group UI actually looks decent but I really think you need to prioritize the core activation flow and design. Right now it makes activation, understanding what the product is, and doing the first thing I would want to do (look at groups or events) not obvious. I'm somewhat of a hypocrite on this but also speaking from experience - there's no point in spending time marketing a product with own-goals like that.

Why are your docs so much better designed/clear than the first thing I see or want to do! You don't need docs for this, it's like three database tables you can search and post to! Why the globe?? I'm not even sure why I would want or need to directly browse your users but why is there so much more effort here than in the groups UI (the thing I would be using this for)?

Since this is a pretty conventional crud app the only reason people would really have to use it is UX (or an audience you don't have yet). Trying to be helpful here because I think you should keep working on it and it's something I'd want to use if there were more attention to detail, which you could prob fix in less than a day with a coding agent.

I really appreciate the work and polish put into the project, but I would always think why would someone switch from direct communication (WhatsApp groups, Facebook groups..etc) to a dedicated platform. I know it has a lot of other features that might be useful to coordinate events, but in the age of AI and social media addiction people are already mentally statured to remember another less popular platform. going B2B I think would be smarter move to organize professional events.

Congrats on the relaunch!

why should I use this versus luma or something similar?

I think it makes it too complicated to post a meetup request.

It should be as easy as here on HN:

Hello! I think Hamburg in Germany needs a good solopreneur meetup. If anyone is interested, let me know!

This is what I would have posted, but I got stuck somewhere along the long signup process.

> it's built with Ruby on Rails, for those interested. I highly suspect it would have taken me 2 more years to get to this point without Rails!

Lovely. I am working on something on Rails myself, and this framework works really, really well with LLMs!

Small bug, Firefox/MacOS: if I search for a location, use the suggestions that appear to select it, remove it by clicking on the x button, and then try to search for a different location, the suggestions no longer appear. I had to refresh the page to get them back,

Looks nice! I created something similar, an app called Connective. It’s available for both Android and iOS. Check out our website www.connective-app.com. Please contact me if you want to discuss further

What's the point in showing me events half way across the country? Is there a narrow-down filter available?

Does it support ActivityPub and can i self-host it?

For an app called radius, it took longer than expected to find activities near me. Showed me a lot of info I wasn't interested in at all.

congrats on the relaunch! I've never used meet up platform before, I usually use facebook groups to find my badminton play friends.

The problem with this is not technology- its the lack of interesting meetups i want to join in my city

Eg meetup at least has critical mass of users and meetups

Why did you move away from focusing on event listing? I’ve been thinking about this problem recently.

Good to know, I think meetup is now $15 per second or something crazy

Somehow Radius seems like the perfect app to have in prison.

And yet you kept the “classic vibe colour scheme” ie the general crowded dark colour scheme (so every 999 out of 1000 sites generated since the era of LLM began), with no option to change it to light, let alone reading the OS’s. I am genuinely curious at this point — how many tokens are saved by skipping this. Because surely someone “relaunching” a product would have thought of something (as basic accessibility?) like this?

Do people really not see that? Or has it already become “le colour scheme of le new Internet”?

I'm doing a meetup app too and my biggest issue have been avoiding spammers, scammers and local criminals abusing the userbase and risking getting myself in legal trouble while not making any profit. What are your thoughts on that?

Rails choice shaved years off development time.

Good domain name. Few things: When you detect someone's location, switch to Miles if they're in a region that uses them, not KM. Have a physical mailing address (even if it's just a lawyer's office). Your logo is a "big O", get something more unique. Even Lucent had a paint brush splotch in a circle. (Oh, also fix your favicon, it's a white circle on a black square, but it could be round if you used transparency properly). Bug: When typing a zip code in, the "powered by Google" popup only appears until you type the final digit, then it disappears, and pressing enter does nothing, making it impossible to enter the zipcode. Consider having geographic filtering (meaning checkboxes with countries to filter the results, a la ebay) - many people don't want to see results in a nearby country, even if it's technically the nearest meetup.

Meetup.com is terrible and we definitely need a replacement. But this is not it.

Really very cool, I've been using meetup and the website is just absolutely trash so any alternative is very welcome

I have to say the site is quite bad, unfocused, disappointing essentially by design... I signed up and immediately pinned me in the UK (I'm in the Bay Area), it's called radius and ironically has no radius to limit groups around me...

I don't know exactly WHY this site should deserve the user's time.

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Seeing the activity flow made this click for me. I like that someone can just say “I’m cycling next week,” let people join, and figure out the time afterwards instead of creating a fully formed event upfront.

That feels meaningfully different from Meetup.

Curious which has been the better wedge so far: bringing existing groups and their members over, or creating new local connections through individual activity posts?