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.
This. I feel like over the long run anti-commercial should be able to win most consumer apps because they don't degrade and AI makes it even easier now. Doesn't seem to be that easy though. Signal and bluesky are growing but slow.
Yeah, I've had a bunch of recruitment agencies and similar companies try to create groups - I'm mostly managing to flag those and keep them down with a combination of auto/manual moderation.
Regarding the messages - that's one reason I've opted not to have user-to-user DMs. You can DM organisers of a group, but all messaging outside that is public (on activities and groups for example).
Thanks! Yeah that's on the horizon! I'm fondly reminded of the old vBulletin-style reputation squares [1] when I think of this - might be interesting to add something like that.
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 think you're right that to start up something like this, it needs a niche, but at the same time, these kinds of apps are for discovering and meeting new people, do you have any ideas of how to find the balance between the two opposites?
Building a social network / two sided marketplace will always be one of the most complicated projects as the technical part doesn't really matter so much but the distribution is the only thing that is important and there's not really a single way to make it work. The only thing that doesn't work is "build and they will come".
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.
How do you find events on instagram? I absolutely hate that everyone uses it to publish events. Even when you think, what's going on at location X, you get a feed of asorted photos and you need to doom scroll until you find what's on next weekend. Yeah, sure, the algo puts randomly events into your feed, but when you want to search for a specific type you just out of luck. I am seriously considering writing a scraper, that scrolls for me and just puts all events into a DB, so I can display the events in a sane way.
I wrote a bot to scrape the feeds of local event organizers and extract their events for me so I wouldn't have to look at that damned site just to find out what's going on. My account was banned for bot activity.
Never posted, commented, liked, or interacted in any way. Just read feeds and exported data.
Abandoned the project and blocked instagram at the DNS level for all my devices.
I once did real events on meetup. It has become utterly worthless and finally terminated my membership. Basically, it's really sad since it was once one of the good things online.
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.
Gave it a try, neat idea. I would like something better suited for more ad-hoc meetups that is less commercial feeling.
- would like if the member map defaulted to my location
- open in sidebar on the member map doesn't do anything for me in chromium and I feel like that should be the default when you click on someone
- option to suggest new interests
- Profile should have an edit button versus totally separate pages for profile and edit profile
- Custom social links would be nice, would love to have my github there
Would love to see something like this get more traction!
> The problem with this is not technology- its the lack of interesting meetups i want to join in my city
Maybe! Or maybe there's more going on than you know about? A meetup I regularly attend now existed in my city for 9 years before I found out about it - they just had no good way to advertise themselves easily.
> Eg meetup at least has critical mass of users and meetups
It definitely does. That's part of why I've made the Activity [1] feature - to give individual users something useful to do even before we have that critical mass of established groups.
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?
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.
Thanks for the great feedback - much of which I agree with! If you think the UI is bad now, you should have seen it in 2024 :)
For context, I think many of the decisions I've taken have been due to a lack of activity to surface. I completely agree that there needs to be an /events page, but it doesn't make sense with the low volume of events right now (IMO, at least).
Fair points on the landing and groups page - I've tried to address some of those issues tonight.
> you could have a + button with a modal to draft it and only hit me with the login wall when I try to post.
Not something I'd considered, to be honest! I usually get annoyed when I fill out a form only to find I need to sign up to finish the process - maybe others prefer that? I've gone and added that for groups and activities (well, when my CI finishes). Events are dependent on a group (for now at least), so that's a task for tomorrow, I think. Thanks for this suggestion!
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.
> social media addiction people are already mentally statured
Yeah, I don't disagree! In a way, I'm trying to combat that by facilitating people actually getting together in the real world, through events, activities and shared interests. I've deliberately not allowed free-form text posts or DMs between users, so it doesn't just turn into another social media feed.
> why would someone switch from direct communication (WhatsApp groups, Facebook groups..etc)
Yup, I think it depends on the size and nature of the group. A meetup between friends probably doesn't need a web presence at all, and WhatsApp would be perfectly adequate.
For larger clubs or public groups that want to attract new people, though, there's value in having somewhere discoverable with proper event pages, recurring events, RSVPs, waitlists, calendars, etc., so that's who this is for.
cool! although keyboard navigation doesn't quite work. ditto with a few of the other comments that there are a few technical issues. ran a probie navigator and there are a few quick wins in it: https://probie.dev/report/34/radius-to
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.
So I think Luma is mostly focused on beautiful event pages (which they do well) and event calendars rather than the community/group itself being the core unit. In that way, we're more of a competitor to Meetup.com. I don't think a local cycling club would use Luma to organise a weekly cycle, for example.
Compared with Meetup, I'm trying to keep Radius a bit simpler and more flexible for organisers. Pricing is a flat £12/month for Pro groups, and things like our Events API [1], embeddable event widgets [2], calendar subscriptions, guest RSVPs and waitlists are all available for free groups as well.
There's also the Activities [3] feature I mentioned - not super applicable to you if you're an organiser but regular users might find it useful. You don't need to create or run a group at all and can just say "I'm going cycling Saturday, anyone want to join?" and see who nearby is interested. AFAIK, I don't think Meetup or Luma etc have anything like this.
Do not implement any more documentation/pricing/marketing until you've really nailed down the UX. I'm not sure what your background is but you can just write down a list of things like "person looking for events, visiting the site from social/search" and think through the steps/impression they'd take from your landing page to completing their task. It helps to follow actually users/dogfood your app/have some basic analytics to see where traffic drops off or churns to understand this if you have trouble understanding it.
For example, do you think it makes more sense to aggregate groups by subject matter, or by location? Why would I want to browse events on the other side of the world/guess which category a group got bucketed into? The group/events UIs are actually good but the groups directory in the way is not, and your landing page makes the activity feed/posting something prominent for some reason (why would I care about the activity feed or want to post an update to some random site?) instead of the thing that they would actually want to use (groups/events), that actually makes an activity feed/status update make sense.
Sincerely trying to help because I've made the same kinds of mistakes before and it pains me so so much. The main reason is that I find it very hard to trust a product that seems to prioritize aggressive conversion, or strange prioritization of actual user needs vs larping as a saas, and I think it's hard to recognize that in your own work because you're thinking "I'm building a saas" and your users are seeing something that cares more about Being SaaS or prioritize random stuff more than even the basic thing it's supposed to help them do.
The impression you get isn't "more is nice to have even if it arrives in the wrong order", it's actual frustration/distrust seeing all this random stuff and what you want it do or be perceived as, prioritized over the actual thing it's supposed to do. Make it easy to find a group or trust that this is an actual thing people can use, I promise you that you don't need an Events API with embeddable widgets until you can do that.
I looked up Luma and some events near me have 100s of people attending. Is it fake numbers, pulling them from somewhere else or is Luma very popular and I've just never heard of it?
1. Luma is quite popular with some communities, and has been for a while.
2. Disoverability still kind of sucks on luma, both the platform itself and between events even on the platform, so not really surprising.
3. Online rsvp's almost always exceed actual attendees by a lot if you aren't charging money or otherwise penalizing people for no-showing... it's typical to see 30-50% attendance.
Thanks for the feedback! I see you did manage to post your activity in the end - nice.
The sign-up form only asks for name, email, password and a pre-filled location - there's some quick "Interests" selection after that, but I felt it was fairly easy/quick to fill out. Maybe I could move that out of the sign-up.
Which part specifically felt too complicated? I'll revisit it and see if there's anything else I can shave off or make it smoother!
Makes me wonder if an RSS feed with a namespace extension for a GPS coordinates field would be enough, with a basic Web page client with a radius limited with a reasonable default based on threshold of results and user adjustable.
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.
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?
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
Yeah, early days still - mostly choosing to surface everything on the main feed until we have enough users/groups/events to be able to have city-specific pages, etc.
You can still filter by nearby, category, etc though!
Mostly due to the cold start/dead platform problem - I do plan on listing them more prominently but the critical mass isn't quite there yet, hence the focus on activities for now!
That matters for discovery, but lots of event organizers and hosts just need a consistent, simple UX for event signups, sharing details to attendees, and managing updates/invites/changes.
If they have a mostly consistent or invite-only set of attendees, the network effects don’t matter. Imagine a Boy Scout troop, Alcoholics Anonymous, pub trivia, blood drives, local alumni association, churches, user groups.
Many businesses have this problem but don’t use Facebook or discord because of the login wall and unprofessional vibes. They would pay for a real tool that makes consistent event/group hosting easy. IMO you’re getting interest/engagement in spite of the critical feedback because people who regularly hosts events need that
> but don’t use Facebook or discord because of the login wall and unprofessional vibes
Just to clarify, your improvement on the login wall is the suggestion you made earlier to allow forms to be filled out before login/sign-up, right? I've done this for groups [1] and activities [2].
Btw, anything in particular you'd like to see in a self-hosted version? Would you be using it for an individual group, or want to host multiple groups?
I think multiple groups would be nice. I thought of hosting meetings for a book club, music nights, DnD/DSA, Critical Mass or Birthday and Linux Install Partys.
Some privat, some public.
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.
Thanks for the feedback! Did you by any chance set your location to London on sign-up? If you check the groups and activities page filter there are 5-100km distance filters.
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”?
They do, ALL those websites are failing or will fail soon enough (I'd love anyone to prove me wrong by sending me a link of a successful company that use that kind of "design" that isn't in the actual vibe-coding business). It all boils down to the lazyness of the dev not wanting to type "the prompt" that will change that UI permanently, and yes it is a single prompt (cascading into a bunch of loops and typical model-zoo auto-adversarial and whatever, but it IS a single prompt).
Yes, this project will very likely die, because of this alone.
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?
> 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.
Thank you! Nice to hear this makes sense to someone other than myself :)
> 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?
I'll have to get back to you on that hah! I've only launched the activities this week, so we shall see!
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.
This. I feel like over the long run anti-commercial should be able to win most consumer apps because they don't degrade and AI makes it even easier now. Doesn't seem to be that easy though. Signal and bluesky are growing but slow.
how would it make $ then?
these are businesses, after all. curious to hear what you guys think.
Yeah, I've had a bunch of recruitment agencies and similar companies try to create groups - I'm mostly managing to flag those and keep them down with a combination of auto/manual moderation.
Regarding the messages - that's one reason I've opted not to have user-to-user DMs. You can DM organisers of a group, but all messaging outside that is public (on activities and groups for example).
Sounds pretty promising, good luck. You could consider a reputation system too if you haven't got one already.
Thanks! Yeah that's on the horizon! I'm fondly reminded of the old vBulletin-style reputation squares [1] when I think of this - might be interesting to add something like that.
[1] https://www.theadminzone.com/resources/post-reputation-in-po...
Frankly, many of these things should just be public utilities.
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 think you're right that to start up something like this, it needs a niche, but at the same time, these kinds of apps are for discovering and meeting new people, do you have any ideas of how to find the balance between the two opposites?
Building a social network / two sided marketplace will always be one of the most complicated projects as the technical part doesn't really matter so much but the distribution is the only thing that is important and there's not really a single way to make it work. The only thing that doesn't work is "build and they will come".
Agreed. There was book called The Cold Start Problem on this by Andrew Chen.
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.
How do you find events on instagram? I absolutely hate that everyone uses it to publish events. Even when you think, what's going on at location X, you get a feed of asorted photos and you need to doom scroll until you find what's on next weekend. Yeah, sure, the algo puts randomly events into your feed, but when you want to search for a specific type you just out of luck. I am seriously considering writing a scraper, that scrolls for me and just puts all events into a DB, so I can display the events in a sane way.
I follow local coffee shops, hotels, bars & coworking spots. They always post events on their social media.
Same with Facebook. It is extremely hard to follow events published on Instagram or Facebook.
Fucking instagram.
I wrote a bot to scrape the feeds of local event organizers and extract their events for me so I wouldn't have to look at that damned site just to find out what's going on. My account was banned for bot activity.
Never posted, commented, liked, or interacted in any way. Just read feeds and exported data.
Abandoned the project and blocked instagram at the DNS level for all my devices.
Fuck instagram.
Move out of the apple cisco bubble.
Then try again.
I once did real events on meetup. It has become utterly worthless and finally terminated my membership. Basically, it's really sad since it was once one of the good things online.
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.
Gave it a try, neat idea. I would like something better suited for more ad-hoc meetups that is less commercial feeling. - would like if the member map defaulted to my location - open in sidebar on the member map doesn't do anything for me in chromium and I feel like that should be the default when you click on someone - option to suggest new interests - Profile should have an edit button versus totally separate pages for profile and edit profile - Custom social links would be nice, would love to have my github there
Would love to see something like this get more traction!
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
> The problem with this is not technology- its the lack of interesting meetups i want to join in my city
Maybe! Or maybe there's more going on than you know about? A meetup I regularly attend now existed in my city for 9 years before I found out about it - they just had no good way to advertise themselves easily.
> Eg meetup at least has critical mass of users and meetups
It definitely does. That's part of why I've made the Activity [1] feature - to give individual users something useful to do even before we have that critical mass of established groups.
[1] https://radius.to/documentation/activities/post-an-activity
Sometimes you gotta be the one to start the group.
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?
Thanks! Yes, that's planned- a reputation score of some sort would be fairly easy to add, I think.
Can you make a sweet spot for fansionably late for extra points?
An actual good idea! I'm keeping a note of this, thanks!
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.
Thanks for the great feedback - much of which I agree with! If you think the UI is bad now, you should have seen it in 2024 :)
For context, I think many of the decisions I've taken have been due to a lack of activity to surface. I completely agree that there needs to be an /events page, but it doesn't make sense with the low volume of events right now (IMO, at least).
Fair points on the landing and groups page - I've tried to address some of those issues tonight.
> you could have a + button with a modal to draft it and only hit me with the login wall when I try to post.
Not something I'd considered, to be honest! I usually get annoyed when I fill out a form only to find I need to sign up to finish the process - maybe others prefer that? I've gone and added that for groups and activities (well, when my CI finishes). Events are dependent on a group (for now at least), so that's a task for tomorrow, I think. Thanks for this suggestion!
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.
> social media addiction people are already mentally statured
Yeah, I don't disagree! In a way, I'm trying to combat that by facilitating people actually getting together in the real world, through events, activities and shared interests. I've deliberately not allowed free-form text posts or DMs between users, so it doesn't just turn into another social media feed.
> why would someone switch from direct communication (WhatsApp groups, Facebook groups..etc)
Yup, I think it depends on the size and nature of the group. A meetup between friends probably doesn't need a web presence at all, and WhatsApp would be perfectly adequate.
For larger clubs or public groups that want to attract new people, though, there's value in having somewhere discoverable with proper event pages, recurring events, RSVPs, waitlists, calendars, etc., so that's who this is for.
cool! although keyboard navigation doesn't quite work. ditto with a few of the other comments that there are a few technical issues. ran a probie navigator and there are a few quick wins in it: https://probie.dev/report/34/radius-to
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.
Congrats on the relaunch!
why should I use this versus luma or something similar?
Thanks very much!
So I think Luma is mostly focused on beautiful event pages (which they do well) and event calendars rather than the community/group itself being the core unit. In that way, we're more of a competitor to Meetup.com. I don't think a local cycling club would use Luma to organise a weekly cycle, for example.
Compared with Meetup, I'm trying to keep Radius a bit simpler and more flexible for organisers. Pricing is a flat £12/month for Pro groups, and things like our Events API [1], embeddable event widgets [2], calendar subscriptions, guest RSVPs and waitlists are all available for free groups as well.
There's also the Activities [3] feature I mentioned - not super applicable to you if you're an organiser but regular users might find it useful. You don't need to create or run a group at all and can just say "I'm going cycling Saturday, anyone want to join?" and see who nearby is interested. AFAIK, I don't think Meetup or Luma etc have anything like this.
[1] https://radius.to/documentation/api-reference/create-events
[2] https://radius.to/documentation/organizer-tools/embed-widget
[3] https://radius.to/documentation/activities/post-an-activity
Do not implement any more documentation/pricing/marketing until you've really nailed down the UX. I'm not sure what your background is but you can just write down a list of things like "person looking for events, visiting the site from social/search" and think through the steps/impression they'd take from your landing page to completing their task. It helps to follow actually users/dogfood your app/have some basic analytics to see where traffic drops off or churns to understand this if you have trouble understanding it.
For example, do you think it makes more sense to aggregate groups by subject matter, or by location? Why would I want to browse events on the other side of the world/guess which category a group got bucketed into? The group/events UIs are actually good but the groups directory in the way is not, and your landing page makes the activity feed/posting something prominent for some reason (why would I care about the activity feed or want to post an update to some random site?) instead of the thing that they would actually want to use (groups/events), that actually makes an activity feed/status update make sense.
Sincerely trying to help because I've made the same kinds of mistakes before and it pains me so so much. The main reason is that I find it very hard to trust a product that seems to prioritize aggressive conversion, or strange prioritization of actual user needs vs larping as a saas, and I think it's hard to recognize that in your own work because you're thinking "I'm building a saas" and your users are seeing something that cares more about Being SaaS or prioritize random stuff more than even the basic thing it's supposed to help them do.
The impression you get isn't "more is nice to have even if it arrives in the wrong order", it's actual frustration/distrust seeing all this random stuff and what you want it do or be perceived as, prioritized over the actual thing it's supposed to do. Make it easy to find a group or trust that this is an actual thing people can use, I promise you that you don't need an Events API with embeddable widgets until you can do that.
I looked up Luma and some events near me have 100s of people attending. Is it fake numbers, pulling them from somewhere else or is Luma very popular and I've just never heard of it?
1. Luma is quite popular with some communities, and has been for a while. 2. Disoverability still kind of sucks on luma, both the platform itself and between events even on the platform, so not really surprising. 3. Online rsvp's almost always exceed actual attendees by a lot if you aren't charging money or otherwise penalizing people for no-showing... it's typical to see 30-50% attendance.
Luma is meetup 2.0
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.
Thanks for the feedback! I see you did manage to post your activity in the end - nice.
The sign-up form only asks for name, email, password and a pre-filled location - there's some quick "Interests" selection after that, but I felt it was fairly easy/quick to fill out. Maybe I could move that out of the sign-up.
Which part specifically felt too complicated? I'll revisit it and see if there's anything else I can shave off or make it smoother!
Makes me wonder if an RSS feed with a namespace extension for a GPS coordinates field would be enough, with a basic Web page client with a radius limited with a reasonable default based on threshold of results and user adjustable.
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.
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?
What's the point in showing me events half way across the country? Is there a narrow-down filter available?
Are you on mobile? Click the filter and the "Nearby" button at the top under the location section :)
“Nothing happening near you yet” womp
Damn. Go start something :) - https://radius.to/activities/new
> 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!
> works really, really well with LLMs!
..and humans too! But yes, completely agree - if you stick with Rails' conventions, at least!
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,
Thanks for the report! Should be fixed now :)
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
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.
Yeah, early days still - mostly choosing to surface everything on the main feed until we have enough users/groups/events to be able to have city-specific pages, etc.
You can still filter by nearby, category, etc though!
congrats on the relaunch! I've never used meet up platform before, I usually use facebook groups to find my badminton play friends.
Thank you! :)
Why did you move away from focusing on event listing? I’ve been thinking about this problem recently.
Mostly due to the cold start/dead platform problem - I do plan on listing them more prominently but the critical mass isn't quite there yet, hence the focus on activities for now!
That matters for discovery, but lots of event organizers and hosts just need a consistent, simple UX for event signups, sharing details to attendees, and managing updates/invites/changes.
If they have a mostly consistent or invite-only set of attendees, the network effects don’t matter. Imagine a Boy Scout troop, Alcoholics Anonymous, pub trivia, blood drives, local alumni association, churches, user groups.
Many businesses have this problem but don’t use Facebook or discord because of the login wall and unprofessional vibes. They would pay for a real tool that makes consistent event/group hosting easy. IMO you’re getting interest/engagement in spite of the critical feedback because people who regularly hosts events need that
> but don’t use Facebook or discord because of the login wall and unprofessional vibes
Just to clarify, your improvement on the login wall is the suggestion you made earlier to allow forms to be filled out before login/sign-up, right? I've done this for groups [1] and activities [2].
[1] https://radius.to/groups/new
[2] https://radius.to/activities/new
Partey.io exists
Good to know, I think meetup is now $15 per second or something crazy
all of these SAAS B2C are ads based, have you something different in mind?
The Pro tier for organisers is all I have planned at the moment, for large groups or organisers who want more features. No plans for any ads.
Does it support ActivityPub and can i self-host it?
Btw, anything in particular you'd like to see in a self-hosted version? Would you be using it for an individual group, or want to host multiple groups?
I think multiple groups would be nice. I thought of hosting meetings for a book club, music nights, DnD/DSA, Critical Mass or Birthday and Linux Install Partys. Some privat, some public.
Not yet! I'm very interested in both, though - something I'm looking into. Stay tuned!
Somehow Radius seems like the perfect app to have in prison.
I'll add that to the list of use cases!
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.
> I signed up and immediately pinned me in the UK
Thanks for the feedback! Did you by any chance set your location to London on sign-up? If you check the groups and activities page filter there are 5-100km distance filters.
nope, I just created a user with google single sign on I believe.
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”?
They do, ALL those websites are failing or will fail soon enough (I'd love anyone to prove me wrong by sending me a link of a successful company that use that kind of "design" that isn't in the actual vibe-coding business). It all boils down to the lazyness of the dev not wanting to type "the prompt" that will change that UI permanently, and yes it is a single prompt (cascading into a bunch of loops and typical model-zoo auto-adversarial and whatever, but it IS a single prompt).
Yes, this project will very likely die, because of this alone.
Rails choice shaved years off development time.
Meetup.com is terrible and we definitely need a replacement. But this is not it.
https://www.LokiList.com is more in the spirit of Craigslist casual encounters but it might also be used to plan strictly platonic group activities.
Fair enough - appreciate the feedback either way :)
What would make it “it” for you? Is there a specific feature(s) you think is missing?
Really very cool, I've been using meetup and the website is just absolutely trash so any alternative is very welcome
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?
> 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.
Thank you! Nice to hear this makes sense to someone other than myself :)
> 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?
I'll have to get back to you on that hah! I've only launched the activities this week, so we shall see!
Slop