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+++ title="Local Meetups" mediatype="struct" conference="seattle-2022" date="2022-11-16T12:00:00-08:00" description="Handmade meetups around the world" thumbnail=""
videos title="Memory Strategies" embed="https://player.vimeo.com/video/774890907" service="vimeo" download_link="https://player.vimeo.com/progressive_redirect/playback/774890907/rendition/720p/file.mp4?loc=external&oauth2_token_id=1777364455&signature=3c443137144bf46966f5607ab00f818dfa5f98e1ac7643e62160f55e0bb27792"
speakers name="Abner Coimbre" bio="" image="" +++
meetup.com but handmade
We’re building a self-hosted alternative to meetup.com, though it’s still in its early stages.
Right now, our meetup hosts use a command-line app developed by Abner and the wider community: Meetup Invite 2000. It’s user-friendly, packed with features, and generally works like this: you feed it a Markdown file, and it sends out a polished email to all meetup subscribers.
When someone subscribes to notifications on the Meetup page, the host for that city automatically sees it in their command-line tool. Hosts can also export their mailing list whenever; if they decide to part ways with Handmade Cities they can take their current audience with them.
In the future, we plan to build a web dashboard to complement Meetup Invite 2000 (we already have a basic prototype.) For now, we’ve lucked out because our meetup hosts know their way around terminals. Which leads us to one final observation.
In early 2025 Abner launched the closed beta for Terminal Click (see Appendix for why it's relevant). Around that same time we started meetups in Tokyo, Japan—a milestone that’s been a long time coming. It was very rewarding to see our host, Migue-san, use a terminal emulator written by us to invoke Meetup Invite 2000, also written by us:
Dogfooding what we preach is essential to achieve Self-Hosting for All.