Building developer conferences with Greg Fawson

You talk about COVID.

I'm just curious because I've been also an organizer of very small events for GDGs.

How do you think COVID influenced the community and the people? Because I feel like that from COVID, there were like less participation in the local communities for in tech or in every other community.

I mean, I think you've launched on a topic there, which is right for another hour or two worth of podcasting.

We're going to have to reconvene on that.

But I will say a quick summary of that is I think definitely we saw post-COVID that it was really difficult for a lot of meetups to gain momentum.

I mean, and I talked to meetup organizers, GDG organizers all over the world.

And I mean, the most common figure I hear is that it's about 50% of what it once was, if it's not completely dead.

There's a lot of meetups that just never revived post-COVID.

And I think there was...

And it's not just COVID.

I think there were a lot of things that happened there.

I mean, you look at where was the community meeting? So we were doing meetups, but where was the community getting together and talking? It was on Twitter at the time.

And, you know, that was really cool.

I loved that.

You know, and you looked at, of course, Stack Overflow was still relevant.

There was a lot of things that were relevant to the community back then.

And of course, you know, he who shall not be named destroyed Twitter and it became a

cesspool of, you know, hate and awful nonsense.

that I think we all bailed from.

And then Mastodon tried to take over a little bit or be a safe place for the community.

And we actually helped.

We put some money into it to try to fund the service and things like that.

But I felt like I was posting in a black hole.

I felt like it never really took off.