A few concrete mechanisms that made this work (happy to expand):

  * “Host layer”: greeting newcomers + making it safe to arrive alone mattered more than we expected.
  * Curation as governance: coherent music changes how people behave in the room.
  * Offline outreach outperformed posting: visiting local businesses in person built trust faster than Instagram.
  * Scale changes the social physics; we stayed small on purpose.

Curious if anyone here has built local repeatable formats (meetups, reading groups, hackerspaces), what made them stick?