Local furries keep making different group chats for meetups and such but ultimately it feels like the same groups of people in each one. More or less the same people are interested in going to multiple furry meetups, and it’s the same subset of people who tend to be chatty online. The Bay Area is small enough that everyone who wants to travel across it, can. Or even just join the group chat and lurk for a potential to join in the future, when they happen do be doing other stuff in the area.

There must be a better way to do this than have tons of more-or-less parallel group chats, and it really doesn’t help that there is so so much off-topic, non-meetup-related conversation in each one. People are social, I get it! And they would prefer to socialize with people who they might meet in person eventually. But it’s kind of difficult to keep track of meetups and details with so much noise in between, and it’s honestly rather distracting to be in so many groups.

I thought about a shared calendar of events that people can add to. Then you could just check what was going on at any particular time. No matter what, the process to adding an event will never be as easy as sending a message to a group chat, though. The kicker really is the friction in making a centralized place to view events and updates, and wanting some sort of vetting of attendees as it’s generally open to anyone. Partiful has a good thing going on where you can send updates to everyone and make comments in one particular instance of an event, though it’s not suitable for furry open-invite-style parties. There’s a BAF group on Meetup but I don’t know how I feel about their monetization deals, and again, too much friction to make a Meetup account & join & have the power to create events. Meetup sucks specifically because it’s trying so hard to make money with junk and recommendation algorithms. I’ve always hated its lack of simplicity.

Maybe a single maintained channel where people post their events or something?

Sidenote, I would not have the courage to host anything to the general furry community. I’m too scared of randos. But maybe a bring-a-friend deal would be fine.