Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com Alternative

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Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com Alternative

169

by radius89

Hello HN!

I'm relaunching Radius [1] - far too long after the original Show HN [2] (I'll blame the day job for that).

Radius started out from my frustration with not knowing what was going on around me. The initial plan was to "show all and every type of event" from big to small, but over time I narrowed the focus to communities, groups, events, and helping people connect through them.

The initial Show HN gave me 150+ comments (surprising, looking back, given how terrible the plain Bootstrap UI was...) with a huge amount of useful feedback and feature requests. I've spent the time since then working through that, along with additional requests from groups using Radius, and it finally feels ready for a proper relaunch.

I've also recently added "Activities" [3] - which are lightweight events, independent of groups, intended to help people find others to do things with - for example:

> John is going for a cycle and a coffee in New York at 10am

People can join and vote for a time that works for them.

I've got a bunch of ideas for where to go next with this, including things like open sourcing and federation, but those are for another day!

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

P.S. 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!

[1] https://radius.to/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40717398

[3] https://radius.to/documentation/activities/post-an-activity

cedws
75d
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.
1. port11
  01h
  Meetup was fine enough before being acquired by private equity. Development had stalled and there were quite some bugs, but we could put up with it. My group has been slowly moving off it after the acquisition and subsequent entshitification. It’s ok to be commercial, but Meetup’s approach is spectacularly stupid.
2. heychristoph
  15d
  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.
  1. moomoo11
    02d
    how would it make $ then?
    these are businesses, after all. curious to hear what you guys think.
3. radius89 • OP
  25d
  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).
  1. cedws
    15d
    Sounds pretty promising, good luck. You could consider a reputation system too if you haven't got one already.
4. snovymgodym
  05d
  Frankly, many of these things should just be public utilities.
dewey
35d
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.
1. sshussain270
  25d
dvt
65d
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.
1. _ink_
  35d
  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.
ozyschmozy
04d
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.
AIorNot
25d
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
1. radius89 • OP
  05d
  > 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
mshafir
13d
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!
1. radius89 • OP
  018h
weitendorf
15d
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.
adityamishra241
35d
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?
1. radius89 • OP
  25d
  Thanks! Yes, that's planned- a reputation score of some sort would be fairly easy to add, I think.
hamedb
15d
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.
1. radius89 • OP
  05d
  > 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.
phendrenad2
05d
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.
datadrivenangel
56d
Congrats on the relaunch!
why should I use this versus luma or something similar?
1. radius89 • OP
  15d
  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
gabrieldev
03d
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
VeryGoodMorning
25d
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.
1. radius89 • OP
  05d
  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!
2data222
04d
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.
atmanactive
35d
What's the point in showing me events half way across the country? Is there a narrow-down filter available?
1. radius89 • OP
  25d
  Are you on mobile? Click the filter and the "Nearby" button at the top under the location section :)
owebmaster
05d
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?
mft_
15d
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,
1. radius89 • OP
  05d
  Thanks for the report! Should be fixed now :)
khamba
15d
> 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!
1. radius89 • OP
  05d
  > works really, really well with LLMs!
  ..and humans too! But yes, completely agree - if you stick with Rails' conventions, at least!
joacon
05d
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
sram1337
15d
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.
1. radius89 • OP
  05d
  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!
rtvn83
15d
congrats on the relaunch! I've never used meet up platform before, I usually use facebook groups to find my badminton play friends.
1. radius89 • OP
  05d
  Thank you! :)
readbeard
45d
Why did you move away from focusing on event listing? I’ve been thinking about this problem recently.
1. radius89 • OP
  25d
  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!
throwitaway222
05d
Good to know, I think meetup is now $15 per second or something crazy
exiguus
35d
Does it support ActivityPub and can i self-host it?
1. radius89 • OP
  13d
  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?
pelagicAustral
15d
Somehow Radius seems like the perfect app to have in prison.
1. radius89 • OP
  05d
  I'll add that to the list of use cases!
luckydata
25d
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.
1. radius89 • OP
  15d
  > 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.
gianlucabertell
13d
all of these SAAS B2C are ads based, have you something different in mind?
1. radius89 • OP
  03d
  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.
crossroadsguy
15d
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”?
1. pixel_popping
  05d
DylanMerigaud
05d
Rails choice shaved years off development time.
katspaugh
25d
Meetup.com is terrible and we definitely need a replacement. But this is not it.
1. RunSet
  05d
  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.
foven
05d
Really very cool, I've been using meetup and the website is just absolutely trash so any alternative is very welcome
miraline
05d
[dead]
launch48alin
05d
[dead]
deankong
05d
[dead]
vladsiu
05d
[dead]
yosh102
25d
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?
1. radius89 • OP
  05d
  > 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!