Recently, I've found myself annoyed with having tech companies gatekeeping my ability to create events and invite my friends. I've started running my own events server and wanted to write about the tradeoffs when stepping away from the major platforms.
Network Effects
Facebook/Meta Events used to be the go-to place for creating events and sending invites. It used to have this benefit of "all your friends are there", but from what I'm seeing, there's a psychic penalty for spending time on Facebook. It's a mess. Even with tools like FBPurity to clean up the experience, it's not great. "Events" isn't even in my left sidebar, I have to click through it and it's near stuff I would never use.
Regardless, Partiful is the place people are going these days. Its interface is fine, and I'd just take some issue with its notification system where people are often getting overwhelmed by notifications even after they're invited to 3+ events.
There are some MAJOR things that creep me out about Partiful though, namely:
- its founders are ex-Palantir, which has to be one of the most transparently villainous companies
- The metrics they show you on their platform look like a popularity contest. Nobody needs to see how many events you're invited to & attend, even if the company thinks that's "cool info to metric-ify"
- They're starting to take VC money, which means that their current values of "we just wanna help people party" will give way to something more marketable later on
The Open-Source Alternative: Gath.io
Gath.io is privacy-focused, and even allows people to create events right from their homepage.
Customizing My Instance
Since I'm comfortable coding, I cloned their repo (Github here ) and started hosting my own instance. I wanted to use it for some 50-person parties and some board game nights. What I had to customize for myself was:
- stylizing event landing pages
- making notifications more specific (i.e. users need to opt-in before notifying all attendees)
- allowing "event group" mailing list signup from the event RSVP page
- working to keep bots out of my mailing lists
The bots part was surprising to me, since I'm hosting on my own weird domain/subdomain, and I'm not sure why spammers or adversaries would want to subscribe to an events list that's not relevant to them and they're not empowered to send messages out to the "event group" list.
It was easy to cut down on spam signups by
- Adding a hidden input field i.e. a "honeypot" field that no human would see, but bots fill out
- Adding another hidden field that's always submitted with a specific value; on the server, I make sure that the code's submitted with the request, and I automatically rotate the code each time I publish changes
Besides that I had to write some scripts to manage records in the db - basic stuff like manually adding or deleting users, getting the mailing list, and sometimes checking email addresses against services like cleantalk.org
What's Not Free
Text notifications. There's work there, service integration specifically. And things get more complicated - accidentally sending an email isn't such a big deal, but accidentally texting people will annoy folks or get you blocked.
For that reason, I just let that requirement go.
The Hard Part About Events
Events aren't scalable in the way that the tech world makes you think they are. Events are just you, using your existing communication platforms, to ask people to come to a thing.
Coming from tech, sometimes I wish that invites were just data, communication data with a type "invite" that could be displayed in a list and managed better. However, when you treat invites like that, then data gets ignored along with all the other crap coming from your computer or phone.
Email is one of the few open technologies people use and rely on. Despite the fact that it's dominated by Gmail, and it's hard to get email in your phone without ads - it's still one of the best hopes we have in terms of not being completely colonized by big tech.
Anyway my philosophy of events is just:
- Maintain an email list of people who have affirmatively expressed interest.
- Talk to people (on whatever platform they're on) and send a link to your event.
- Respect people's attention and time.