Meetup has recently doubled their prices to run a group, and it's definitely impacting groups that I'm in. It's not unusual for organizers to ask for $10-15 from attendees to cover these high organizer subscription costs.

It also feels excessively greedy that they have locked more features behind a user subscription.

I just checked this out but $10 a week just to find local groups is ridiculous! I’m not even looking for dates and now even the not-really-for-dating app is paid. No wonder people can’t meet anyone anymore.

Edit: I was duped by their subscription screen. I was wrong

Anything, really.

It's true I'd need users. But what I am planning on making has one significant advantage, namely the, forgive my poor wording, overcoming of traditional economical constraints. The big technical challenge would probably be dealing with bots and finding the constraints that make it hard to act antisocially. I really want people to have access to a straight forward method of connecting with strangers that is unenshittifiable. Even if it doesn't go anywhere, it's still a practice in doing something better.

It's multi-layered.

I tried out rooms that were a bit off the beaten path. It seemed like the smaller a room was the more racist and misogynistic the users, sometimes even flat out advocating fascism. I was not dealing with skinheads, these people were too awkward to have the experience necessary to understand why you would not want to be bigoted. We're talking people with very narrow perspectives.

Then there was a person who I later found out was a l*li**n whose instance I joined. The tone of discussion there wasn't terrible, certainly not as bad as the other smaller rooms, but the admin of the instance was prone to meltdowns and slightly controlling. I would have fights with him over politics since he was libertarian and I wasn't. He would accuse me of not respecting other people's opinions, including his own. Opinions like "ICE good, darn immigrants bad." He would also accuse me of being combative and not being able to deal with criticism because I dissented when he gave his takes on politics that were verbatim positions from Ayn Rand Institute articles. He'd call me a collectivist without giving any argument as to why. My criticising and not letting myself be swayed by half-arguments somehow meant (to him) that I couldn't handle or didn't expect criticism.

At some point he sent me a meme insinuating he was, ahem, interested in his friends' younger sisters when he was in high school. I regretfully tolerated that, but I stopped being able to take him seriously on some level. I decided to end the relationship after he wrote to me about sexual experiences he had when he was sixteen. I told him I didn't want to hear any of it and went ahead non the less. Luckily the content wasn't quite as explicit. If it had been I would have ended things on far colder terms.

Matrix is in general quite the different different experience. A handful of governments use it because Matrix is basically being marketed towards the security sector. I think a lot of the oddness also stems from that.

I'm trying it out. It's pretty decent.

This is like saying "hop on Firefox" once you have the app, where do you go?