alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Radius – A Meetup.com Alternative
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!
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40717398
[3] https://radius.to/documentation/activities/post-an-activity
Comments
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.
Congrats on the relaunch!
why should I use this versus luma or something similar?
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.
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.
Somehow Radius seems like the perfect app to have in prison.
congrats on the relaunch! I've never used meet up platform before, I usually use facebook groups to find my badminton play friends.
What's the point in showing me events half way across the country? Is there a narrow-down filter available?
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
Meetup.com is terrible and we definitely need a replacement. But this is not it.
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?
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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 should need to prioritize the core UX off the landing page. 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.
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.