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Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com Alternative

by radius89 | 20 points | 8 comments | 2026-09-20 11:51:26 Central

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Open on Hacker News

Post

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 10amPeople 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-activ
ity

Comments

rtvn83
congrats on the relaunch! I've never used meet up platform before, I usually use facebook groups to find my badminton play friends.

hamedb
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.

datadrivenangel
Congrats on the relaunch!why should I use this versus luma or something similar?

> radius89
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-e vents [2] https://radius.to/documentation/organizer-tools/embed- widget [3] https://radius.to/documentation/activities/post-an-act ivity

atmanactive
What's the point in showing me events half way across the country? Is there a narrow-down filter available?

VeryGoodMorning
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.

AIorNot
The problem with this is not technology- its the lack of interesting meetups i want to join in my cityEg meetup at least has critical mass of users and meetups

yosh102
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?