Are there any MetaFilter meetups via Zoom or other such medium? February 9, 2021 12:54 PM   Subscribe

I would like to meet up with some faces/voices. If not, does anyone know of anything similar elsewhere?
posted by DMelanogaster to MetaFilter-Related at 12:54 PM (39 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite

Stanczyk's hosted a Zoom IRL, "Online: Saturday Morning Online Baking Club" ("cooking and chat") these past two weeks.
posted by Iris Gambol at 1:45 PM on February 9, 2021 [6 favorites]


I posted one in the meetups section a while back. I'd be happy to attend if you do similar and I am available! (I am unlikely to be up and chatty Saturday mornings, myself, though Stanczyk's event sounds nice!)
posted by ferret branca at 2:00 PM on February 9, 2021


Sat morning is a bit early for me to be social too, but maybe.

ferret branca, where is your meetup post? or has it passed already?

I'm available pretty much every evening except Mondays and sometimes Tuesdays from 5-6 are not good for me. And much of the daytime hours I can be available too. I'm in NY, so EST.
posted by DMelanogaster at 3:37 PM on February 9, 2021


It was a while ago; it happened. I can make a new one, or you can, if you like! I'm also NY based and free many evenings.
posted by ferret branca at 5:09 PM on February 9, 2021 [1 favorite]


Post a meetup! Make a meetup! I don't know what it takes to create a Zoom meeting or Discord server or whatever, but once you get all that worked out, then pick a topic and post it! Virtual means only time zones will matter.

Make the meeting be as ludicrous or as specific as you want. Get together to read stupid (non-political) tweets at each other. Do a poetry reading. Sit around and crochet while shooting the shit. Get on twitch and play a video game together. The possibilities are pretty endless.

Make the Meetup you want to be!
posted by hippybear at 8:24 PM on February 9, 2021 [7 favorites]


I’m not sure if this has been tackled or not, but we’ve been having Tokyo meetups virtually (less so now) but one stumbling block to online meetups is that the auto generated memails notifying nearby members of a meet up don’t go out for online meetups. If you select online, you’re kind of at the mercy of people stopping by irl and happening upon it, or going through and mailing members one by one (as memail can’t go to more than one address).
posted by Ghidorah at 3:39 AM on February 10, 2021 [3 favorites]


Whereby.com and Jitsi.org are videocall platforms to consider, too. Both make it easy to start a free meeting and to do audio and/or video, share your screen, and/or watch a YouTube video together (ad-free), with accompanying text chat. I use them to watch videos with friends, including exercising together along with instructional videos -- YouTube audio takes over and everyone else is muted, but you can still see everyone else's camera. Meetings on Whereby's free tier are limited to 4 people; Jitsi can deal with, like, 25 people at least. Both Whereby and Jitsi work fine in the browser and invitees don't need to download a new app or plugin, or create a login account.

Jitsi also includes built-in speaker stats so it's easy to tell if one person has been super-dominating oral discussion, which I find handy and which I wish was in every videocall platform!

Would anyone be interested in mostly-silent co-working videocall meetings? 5 minutes of talking about what we want to write/do/make, 45 minutes of silent work, 5-15 minutes of chitchat?
posted by brainwane at 8:10 AM on February 10, 2021 [8 favorites]


PET MEETUP PET MEETUP
posted by phunniemee at 10:56 AM on February 10, 2021 [16 favorites]


Thanks, phunniemee! Partner is allergic to pets but I will love your pets and/or show you my plants or sourdough starter, Herbert :D
posted by ferret branca at 11:32 AM on February 10, 2021 [6 favorites]


Stanczyk’s hosted a Zoom IRL, "Online: Saturday Morning Online Baking Club" ("cooking and chat") these past two weeks.

Stanczyk sent a very nice invite to me for this as well - but yes, as a west coast person it was just too early for me. I wouldn’t mind doing a west coast version of this, though, even an early-ish one.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:43 AM on February 10, 2021 [1 favorite]


I did a watch along for a movie, would attend similar. Will do a bake-a-long when some kitchen issues are resolved, also got a nice memail from Stanczyk. A card-making or papercraft session would be fun.

What do you like to share? Books, music, movies, cooking, knitting, games? start with that and set up an IRL.

In Chat, there's a watch-along room available.
posted by theora55 at 12:10 PM on February 10, 2021 [1 favorite]


Pretty sure that baking club has been going for months. I expressed mild interest once and got the impression if I remember correctly that they'd be happy to try to accommodate a time change if needed.
posted by aniola at 3:32 PM on February 10, 2021


We've been baking since December (?). If west coast friends want to pick at time, I'd be willing to hop on.

I might set up a coloring one.
posted by kathrynm at 4:15 PM on February 10, 2021 [2 favorites]


I would enjoy a coloring one and also maybe a drawing one. I just finished taking a drawing class.

Or also "what's a favorite song of yours, play it for us, ("play" could mean "on YouTube", you wouldn't have to actually play a song!) and tell us why you like it so much" -- would that be interesting to people? Including when did you first hear the song, what life associations does it have for you, etc.?

Or painting?
posted by DMelanogaster at 10:29 PM on February 10, 2021


We did a remote halloween party this past October and one of the events we did was a totally low-stakes Show And Tell time. It was maybe 90 minutes of people just talking about an object they had and what it meant to them. It was really charming and well received. Might be a meetup worth doing, maybe.
posted by hippybear at 5:51 AM on February 11, 2021 [2 favorites]


I just posted an online baking club event for this Saturday and moved it to 11 am eastern to hopefully accommodate those living further west. If you click yes or maybe on attending then I'll memail you a link Saturday morning. Hope to see you there. Last week I made this Chocolate Dump-it Cake and it didn't last through the weekend.
posted by Stanczyk at 5:52 AM on February 11, 2021 [4 favorites]


I would love to attend the baking event in general but this Saturday I have a work-related workshop so I can't. Another time I would love to.
posted by DMelanogaster at 10:14 AM on February 11, 2021


A pony, can the page for the meeting display the time and timezone somewhere, without relying on the organizer to put it in their text description? I noted some comments about that in the pet meeting.
posted by maxwelton at 11:03 AM on February 11, 2021 [1 favorite]


Pony 2, can virtual IRLs show up in the Upcoming Meetups in the Metatalk sidebar?
posted by Stanczyk at 2:56 PM on February 11, 2021


I've used Jitsi as well and it seems to work pretty decently. Saturday won't work for me but I'd be open to meetups at other times!
posted by wuwei at 3:48 PM on February 11, 2021


I'm not sure there will be any programming changes made to change the meetup page display, but I think we can go back to the old way of announcing Meetups here on the Grey, which was common practice before the IRL site. And if mods could sidebar Virtual Meetups, that would be most excellent.
posted by hippybear at 7:54 PM on February 11, 2021 [1 favorite]


Heyo -- wanted to let you know that I put this thread in the banner but I can't do the other programming parts, so we've got to see what frimble's availability might be for any of that.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:25 PM on February 11, 2021


Can we do sort of a casual poll about times? Like, do people want weekday evenings, weekend early days, weekend afternoons, or weekend evenings?

We could get a lot of milage out of this idea if we have some idea of what the community is for it and when it is available.
posted by hippybear at 8:34 PM on February 11, 2021 [1 favorite]


I'm assuming people don't want weekday days, but that is also an option!
posted by hippybear at 8:35 PM on February 11, 2021


I could see a Workday Lunch Meet option, obviously across time zones, but you step away from work and sit down for an hour with fellow MeFites for food and chatter, and then back to work.
posted by hippybear at 8:37 PM on February 11, 2021 [1 favorite]


Thank you, Brainwane, for mentioning Jitsi. It's my platform of choice and also more secure than Zoom.
posted by Too-Ticky at 2:20 AM on February 12, 2021


While I hesitate to out myself here as the coolest and most popular party kid around... would there be any interest from folks in a do-your-taxes-a-thon?

I'm one of those weirdos who actually likes doing my taxes every year. I'm not a tax expert or anything but I'm always happy to be an accountabilabuddy for friends who hate doing taxes.
posted by phunniemee at 6:57 AM on February 12, 2021 [7 favorites]


My experience attempting a virtual meetup is that nobody came or expressed any interest. My spouse and I had a good time watching the live video. I don't know if that's because it was a dumb idea that nobody liked or because nobody ever saw it. Both may be true.

Perhaps a very specific theme would be useful? Metafilter has something like twenty thousand active users. I'm sure at least 8 of them are excited about cross-stitch or any other topic. The holiday MST3K thing was fun.

I don't have any idea how to make IRL notifications more useful without geography and without making the mods do a huge amount of work. Maybe just reminding us to check the site is enough? For what it's worth, I like the idea.
posted by eotvos at 10:12 AM on February 12, 2021 [3 favorites]


I'm not familiar with Google Forms, but I can try to put together one to poll times when people would like to do meet ups.
posted by kathrynm at 11:33 AM on February 12, 2021 [1 favorite]


(As not to abuse edit)

I've found Eventbrite to be a good place to find things to do. There's an online zen art group I'm going to join tonight.
posted by kathrynm at 11:34 AM on February 12, 2021 [2 favorites]


I would attend a do-your-taxes-a-thon.
posted by aniola at 12:56 PM on February 12, 2021 [3 favorites]


TAX MEETUP TAX MEETUP
posted by phunniemee at 1:02 PM on February 12, 2021 [4 favorites]


I think it went really well. I think there were nine of us at our peak and foodstuffs were made and conversations were had. Join us next week if you can make it.
posted by Stanczyk at 11:59 AM on February 13, 2021 [1 favorite]


If you're bored on Thursday nights (around 8-9 est), we watch MST3k movies (and other stuff) here. It's like a thing.
posted by valkane at 9:41 PM on February 13, 2021 [4 favorites]


Here is the usual promo for MST Club, where we watch movies and Mystery Science Theater 3000 (although without voice or video chat, just text) every Thursday evening.
posted by JHarris at 2:09 AM on February 14, 2021


Ah valkane just beat me to it, heh.
posted by JHarris at 2:09 AM on February 14, 2021


Stephen Colbert pointed out that Zoom happy hours are either happy or Zoom, not both.

I'd be interested in joining one though. I filed my taxes today.
posted by bendy at 7:05 PM on February 15, 2021


I run assistive tech maker build events online for a charity. I'd be happy to run one, but the bits and logistics have some costs — and I'm only with them until the end of March. I've run one where we had attendees from Yellowknife, Phoenix and Nova Scotia all at the same time, and it worked well.
posted by scruss at 1:04 PM on February 16, 2021


Crutons meet up? I feel like I'm the only one still in that garden.

How hard would it be to set up a MeFi sims? I'm no gamer. The last game I played was Donkey King in 1990-something so I have no idea of how much work would be needed for that. It would be cool for those of us who are camera shy.
posted by ihaveyourfoot at 3:19 PM on February 27, 2021


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