Sssssoooo the Seattle meetup went well and I have a couple people going 'there was a meetup? how can I find out about the next one?' and now I'm wondering if we should just have, like, one account Seattleites can follow to hear about these things, maybe share the passwords to it among a few people or something?
I dunno I'm sleepy and need to go hide under the couch for a week after pretending to be a social being, it was fun but I am no extrovert!
@anthracite I like how @reasdoinaheckinmeetup worked out; maybe just turn it into a bot that @-mentions people and gives out reminders to those who sign up? Thinking out loud
@nolan @anthracite have some way for people to opt in/out by mentioning(/following?) it, record those names, then send out reminders.
If whenisgood has an API then we could automate the process entirely... :thinking:
I do think it would be worth busproofing the process from me in case I fall off the earth for some reason ir can't come.
@reasdoinaheckinmeetup @nolan shit it could probably be run entirely through a few tooted commands couldn’t it. Propose a meetup, cancel/change one, add/remove people to the list of Meeting Commanders...
@anthracite @reasdoinaheckinmeetup @nolan Whatever it does, it should also have a means of getting an ICS that you can subscribe to, or get ICS meeting attachments sent via email or something (which works better for the cross-platform case at least on Apple).
@fluffy @anthracite @nolan That would be the really slick business, wouldn't it? Could allow people to say "remind me (instead) at email@addre.ss". Probably not hard to get an ananas bot sending emails.
@reasdoinaheckinmeetup @anthracite @nolan Presumably a properly done ICS attachment wouldn't need actual email updates because the calendar event would end up on the recipient's calendar, but Meetup does the belt-and-suspenders approach.
Heck now I just want to make an F/OSS Meetup replacement because, seriously, screw meetup.com
@fluffy @anthracite @nolan
There are not one but two python ics libraries; at least one should work. I already have a decent handle on an email library. Do you just send a message with an attached .ics or is it more involved than that?
The other wide-audience feature of meetup is that it's non-self-hosted. Unless we could just acquire some hosting for it.
Actually, side note, I will say that I'm not 100% comfortable running this account on the same box as my other bots; "reliable" it ain't.
@nolan @anthracite @reasdoinaheckinmeetup I was feeling procrastinatey enough to look into this some more. The invitation is sent with the following MIME headers:
Content-Type: text/calendar; method=REQUEST
Content-Transfer-Encoding: Base64
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=iCal-20171223-024247.ics
Accept/decline/maybe links go to a thing on the CalDAV server itself though, which implies Outlook does something more (and proprietary) under the hood.
@reasdoinaheckinmeetup @anthracite @nolan anyway it looks like at its core it really is just a regular .ics attachment, although that method=REQUEST is interesting to me. But simply having the attachment on the message isn't causing, say, Mail.app to automatically add it to my calendar.
Ugh, I just wish ICS subscriptions were better-implemented on literally any platform I've ever used. Android+Google is the least bad outside of Outlook but it's still bad.
@nolan @anthracite @reasdoinaheckinmeetup of course now I'm wondering how one might go about just adding Facebook-style events (with private ICS feed/CalDAV/whatever for devices to subscribe to) as a first-class citizen to Mastodon. I should go to bed before I find myself learning ruby.
@reasdoinaheckinmeetup @anthracite @nolan the ICS format itself is very simple and I believe mail invites are just a MIME attachment with a disposition set although I haven’t looked into it much. I know using a normal file attachment is not sufficient.