Open Source Can Save Meetups from Platform Decay

Seattle’s Pittsburgh Steelers Meetup Group is moving from Meetup, its home for over a decade, to the community platform of OpenMeet, an open source product built specifically for this purpose. It’s going to save money, time, and faith in software.

Meetup began as a scrappy little startup in 2002, motivated by a desire for in-person community after the terrorist attacks less than a year prior. I was intrigued by it almost immediately; it was part of a wave of more altruistic, less greedy, tech startups to emerge from the rubble of the dot-com bust. (For context, Google was also considered to be like this at the time.) Although the site became popular and profitable, it didn’t have the hockey stick-shaped growth that tech investors had come to value, and it started to get passed around from one owner to the next. In 2017, WeWork bought it, and they didn’t do much to integrate it with their rapidly growing, yet financially ruinous, coworking service. Also in 2017, I started administering the Seattle group for Steelers fans, which cost about $200 per year, reimbursed by a generous sponsorship from Fadó, our home location at the time.

The COVID pandemic wasn’t kind to in-person meetups. Meetup was sold to private investors in 2020, reportedly at a major loss, and Fadó went out of business shortly thereafter. Our group didn’t meet up at all during the 2020 NFL season, and we started meeting at the Ballard Loft in 2021. The Loft went out of business between the 2023 and 2024 seasons, so I moved the group a couple more times, before finding a good home for it at Slim Goody Sports Bar. Meetup, meanwhile, was acquired by Bending Spoons, and Bending Spoons began to do what it does best: milk money from users of products past their prime.

You might not have heard of Bending Spoons, which I’ll call “B.S.”, but you have probably heard of the products in their portfolio, and you might not be surprised about their approach to business. B.S. bought Evernote, the once-trendy note-taking app, in 2023, and within a year they had fired most of the staff, raised prices, and slashed features, particularly in its free tier. Shocked users had to either pay a much higher subscription fee, about double the previous level, or quickly move their data to another platform. B.S. also bought video-hosting site Vimeo in November 2025, and laid off their staff to cut costs. Their portfolio includes Eventbrite, Komoot, and the remains of AOL. They’ve lately been buying enterprise software companies like Airtable and Miro. If you’re using a service that announces its acquisition by B.S., make a plan to migrate off of it as soon as possible.

B.S.’s acquisition of Meetup in 2024 was, predictably, followed by a big jump in fees for administrators of big groups. My fee to run the Steelers group rose by 50%, from $200 to $300 per year. No major features were introduced to justify this increase, although in B.S.’s defense, they continued not to serve much advertising on their web site. Earlier this year, though, I deleted the separate “Meetup Organizer” app from my phone, and logged into the unified “Meetup” app for the first time in a while, and I was horrified by the onboarding process that was full of dark patterns. B.S. asked me to provide way more personal information than was needed to register for a casual meetup, it tried to upsell me to a paid “Meetup+” plan despite my insistence to my group’s members that they don’t need to pay anything, and after asking me about my other interests (“none” was not accepted) it automatically added me to a few other groups. This is classic behavior by platforms designed to meet key performance indicators for their product managers, rather than to meet the needs of their free users and paying customers.

After that experience, I decided to get off of B.S.’s Meetup platform after the 2026 NFL season. I looked at a few competing social platforms. Some members have suggested using Facebook events, but I deactivated my Facebook account over five years ago, and I’m not interested in reviving it. Some former Meetup groups now use Action Network, but that’s too overtly political for my needs. I considered Heylo, Partiful, and Luma, which have very stylish web interfaces and generous free tiers, but they seem ridiculously overbuilt; I worry that they’re amassing data to either launch creepy social networking features or to sell to a surveillance capitalist overlord. That led me into the world of open source.

Open source software (OSS) is free of cost and free to use, modify, and redistribute. I spent the last three years of my professional software career working on OSS code that Amazon and other corporations use as a foundation for their projects. I’ve used OSS projects for some purpose for at least 30 years. OpenMeet, which was created as an OSS alternative to Meetup, is charmingly small; as of this writing, I have one of only nine groups on its community instance with at least 10 members; none have more than 50. By contrast, my Steelers group on Meetup has over 500 members, although we only get between 20 and 50 attendees for most games, and many of those aren’t members of the group. Because OpenMeet is built on OSS, I can spin up my own instance if I want greater control over how my group’s data is managed; despite recent spikes in computer parts prices, running one’s own server has never been cheaper. I can contribute to the code on OpenMeet’s GitHub repositories; I’m also a member of the project’s Discord server, where I can chat with its maintainers and users. I don’t think B.S. would let me into their product prioritization meetings, by contrast.

I’m taking a leap of faith by trying out OpenMeet. It’s not even the only OSS community meetup application; there are others, like Mobilizon and Gancio, for example. The fact that OpenMeet is adopting other open standards, like the AT Protocol, is a good sign; it means that users can connect with other AT-compatible applications, such as Bluesky, a reasonably popular Twitter alternative. These applications are being built with a mixture of volunteer spirit and self-interested corporate backing.

danah boyd, as quoted in Gretchen McCulloch’s 2019 book Because Internet, said, “Most teens aren’t addicted to social media; if anything, they’re addicted to each other.” I’d extend that to adults, too; people desire connection, and despite all the advances in telepresence and video chat, there is still a strong appeal to in-person interaction, even for groups like mine, built around watching football on television.

At a time when it seems like technology is being built for dehumanizing reasons, the OSS community gives me hope that great software is still being built by humans, for humans. For every project that Bending Spoons tries to buy and squeeze, there are going to be alternatives that might require a little effort and some compromise to use, but that will last as long as people want to use them.