We are now about 1700 hackers willing to meet each other in almost 700 locations worldwide.
Since then, some requested features and bug fixes have been implemented:
- locations are now searchable and not restricted to a simplistic city-country pair
- locations work with diacritics and diverse languages
- new socials: personal website, email, Mastodon, Discord, GitLab, Google Scholar, YouTube, etc.
- upon user request, I can now showcase your local meetups on your location listing, as it's done for Old Toronto: [1]
About actual meetings, I'm aware of around a dozen so far, but I think many more occurred.
Why am I writing this post?
About 80% of the ~1700 signups happened in the first 36 hours after launch. As expected, signups dropped pretty quickly, and now it gains about one new user every other day.
I think a ton of global value (and local joy) can emerge from HN users meeting each other. That's why I'm writing this post. To answer the question: how can we meet more? and how can meet.hn help?
What I thought about:
1. Implementing RSS for each location: helpful for RSS users only, and not that useful if there are no new registrations.
2. Email notification system: wide audience, but requires users to give their emails.
3. Turning meet.hn into some sort of an atproto [3] project, or at least leveraging it somehow. Might be more Bluesky centric (if we use labels, for example), but maybe not?
4. A bookmarklet which, once clicked when on a HN post, would insert a meet.hn logo next to all user names of users commenting there and registered on meet.hn
5. An HN "proxy website" which would copy HN in every way, but would add the meet.hn logo just like the bookmarklet described point 4 would do, but everywhere and automatically.
6. Create Telegram (or equivalent) channels for each location
But all of these ideas are unideal fixes. The lowest common denominator between everyone on HN... is HN. Hence, meeting right from HN would be best. An MVP for this could be to have a "willing to meet" attribute with a boolean value (like the "showdead" or "noprocrast" attributes). When enabled, an icon would be shown next to the user name in threads.
I talked to dang, and even if the idea of implementing something on HN is not out of the question, it is not on the roadmap yet.
Let's discuss all of this in the comments. Looking forward to hearing what you think.
[1] https://meet.hn/city/43.6534817,-79.3839347/Old-Toronto