Let’s solve social event organising
2024-09-30 — 2026-02-04
Wherein the problem of arranging casual gatherings is considered, and calendar-link generation and niche invitation services are offered as means to coordinate dates and collect RSVPs.
One weak spot in contemporary social internet infrastructure: Scheduling events with friends, or potential friends.
Facebook effectively had a monopoly on this in the West, and I wasn’t a fan of it. But maybe that was still better than the current situation, where nothing really works.
1 Tools
If we run a DIY social network, I guess we can use that. They’re not great for public discovery, though.
1.1 Partiful
“Do one thing and do it well.” Earnest, cute, low-feature invite service. Free.
1.2 Luma
Luma:
A slightly nerdier, full-featured service that can integrate with fancy software and such.
1.3 Mixily
We created Mixily in 2019 because we had a vision for a better way to host events. Mixily started as an event hosting platform that allows the sending of invitations, collection of RSVPs, and selling of tickets. […]
Imagine a world in which you can easily set up and host events, find a convenient day for all parties involved, and make the event look exactly like you want with simple and stylish design.
1.4 Meetup
Meetup was for thematic, regular community discovery stuff. It was OK for that, but at some point it got bought out by private equity or something. Now it’s mostly spam from Meetup itself, trying to sell me wine vouchers and AI-slop job ads.
1.5 Facebook events
It still works even for people who don’t use Facebook, I think? I’m not totally sure, since I kinda stopped using Facebook. It’s still feeding the Meta Social Graph Moloch, though, so many Facebook deniers will refuse to use it (including, sometimes, me).
2 Incoming
Calagator is an open-source community calendar platform written in Ruby on Rails that runs calagator.org, a Portland tech calendar. Think open-source Meetup. Seems to have been abandoned since 2021.
addcal creates calendar links.
Create universal calendar links that work with Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook, and more. One click for your audience, zero hassle for you.