Why Meetup.com fell off and what replaced it in London

Right, let us be honest about Meetup.com. There was a stretch — call it 2012 to about 2019 — where if you wanted to find a Python user group, a board games night, a midweek 5k or a hackathon, you went to Meetup.com. That is just true. It was the default.

It is not the default anymore. And honestly it has not been for a couple of years. The interesting question is what replaced it, because the answer is not as simple as "everyone moved to Luma."

What actually went wrong

A few things, all at once.

First, the WeWork era ate them. Meetup got bought, then sold, then bought again, and through all of that the product just stopped getting better. The mobile app is still bad. The notifications are still bad. The discovery is, somehow, still bad.

Second, organisers got tired of paying. The "organiser fee" model meant a lot of decent groups quietly stopped renewing and moved their list to Mailchimp or Substack. Once your list is somewhere else, the meetup page is just a relic.

Third, and this is the big one — the people running good London events realised they could just post a Luma link in a WhatsApp group and get the same RSVPs without paying anyone. That is the actual story.

What replaced it (it is plural)

Here is where everyone gets it wrong by saying "Luma won." Luma did win the tech-adjacent stuff in central London — AI evenings, founder dinners, builder hackathons. It is the default for that.

But Luma is mostly useless for, say, a north London running club, or a south London board games night, or a salsa social in Brixton. Those moved to:

• WhatsApp groups, which is where most informal London community organising actually happens now.
• Eventbrite, still the default for paid ticketed events with a venue.
• Partiful, which has eaten the "house party with 60 people" use case.
• Instagram event pages, particularly for nightlife and arts.
• Substack invites, for the slightly more curated dinner-party scene.

If you only check one of those, you will miss most of London. That is the problem with the post-Meetup world — it is fragmented in a way that Meetup, for all its faults, was not.

The thing nobody admits

A lot of the people who used to run Meetup groups just stopped. Running a free monthly event is alot of work, and once Meetup stopped being the place where new members could find you, the maths got worse. So a chunk of London community life that used to be visible just went private — closed WhatsApp groups, friends-of-friends only, you only get in if someone vouches for you.

Whether that is a net good or a net bad is up to you. I think it is mostly bad — it has made London harder to break into if you are new, and it has made the public events scene more dominated by paid events with sponsors.

What I actually use now

For tech and AI: Luma plus the free tech meetups list, which catches the long-tail stuff Luma does not surface. For nightlife: Resident Advisor and Instagram. For paid talks and theatre: Eventbrite plus Time Out. For everything else: WhatsApp groups, but you have to actually know people to get in.

The honest summary — Meetup did not get replaced by one thing. It got replaced by five things, and the joining-up is now your problem. That is annoying. It is also the truth.

Should you still bother with Meetup.com?

Honestly? Only for one reason — there are still a handful of long-running, organiser-driven groups that have just never moved. London Python, some of the running clubs, a few of the language exchanges. If you are looking for one of those specifically, fine. As a general way to find your London tribe in 2026, no, you are wasting your time.

The thing I would actually do is bookmark a couple of curated lists, follow the organisers you trust on socials, and accept that no single platform is going to give you the full picture again. That ship sailed.