I'd take a look at how Luma (The only seemingly competitor in that niche these days) is doing it, they are focused on a very small group of large cities and started being mostly for crypto related events. Only these days it feels like there's more variety in the events depending on the city. Doing a generic "I was annoyed with Meetup" strategy won't work.

Open up the site, (click away cookie consent banner), only way to see nearby events is to give location permissions for some reason (why? I just need to know what's happening in and around Amsterdam, not within x kms of my current actual location), look for a way to search by city while getting distracted by what seems to be the live event log of random people in different countries.

Go to "browse groups", click map view, now I have a teeny tiny globe on the bottom pretty much entirely covered by symbols. Drag the slider up, zoom in enough to see bits of the map in between symbols (which is pretty hard because it doesn't let me zoom if either of my fingers happened to be on a symbol, which again is most of the screen), finally find the Netherlands, and there's a single cryptic symbol. Tap on it, nothing happens. Tap a couple more times, then think to drag the slider back down to find that it's two "communities" of one person each.

Overall, not a very pleasant first impression. I'd put a nice search bar in the landing page, for searching by location or by group type. I'd also put some categories to filter by in the groups view.

I think the hyper-local discovery thing is pretty neat. Kinda reminds me of Tom Scott's pub flare idea. I'd much rather see that above the relatively pointless activity feed and events.

Also, the website has strong "vibe coded ui" vibes. I have no idea if that's the case or not, but the colors, the cards, the "x people online" pill, all just scream llm-ism, which makes me less likely to trust it.

Eg meetup at least has critical mass of users and meetups