Old City Bitcoiners is a Bitcoin-only meetup in St. Augustine and Jacksonville Beach, Florida. One of the objectives of this site is to minimize the reliance on meetup.com. I use open source software to provide coordination features similar to Meetup.com! I used my open source project Sovereign Stack to create and manage the website.
Website
The public-facing website is provided by Ghost and the design is the Firma Theme. I've made several modifications to the theme including adding Social Links. I tag each post using relevant tags such as location, meetup type, etc. This allows you to view cross-sections of all the posts on the site. The logo is provided by DarkSquare Design, a local design firm accepting on-chain Bitcoin payments! Nice! The default behavior of the site is to respect your system's dark-mode settings.
Public Notifications
If you're interested in staying informed of new posts, you MUST subscribe to the RSS feed of the website. I have REMOVED all email newsletter functionality from the site and have gone RSS-only.
RSS keeps the user in control. It also makes it so I don't have to collect any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) such as names and/or email addresses. Plus, I don't have to pay for a third party email provider for newsletters! By not relying on email I can eliminate a Trusted Third Party and not have to manage email infrastructure myself. But, it does require a behavior change by the end-user. Personally I like using Feedr on F-Droid. After subscribing to Old City Bitcoiners, I configure Feedr to send new RSS updates from Old City Bitcoiners to Android's Notification system and everything opens up in the Browser.
Nostr
I'm also in the process of integrating Nostr into Sovereign Stack. Nostr is an interesting Twitter-like replacement, but it's more like a general-purpose censorship-resistant messaging service. I'll be using it for all social-like features with commenting being the first use case implemented for Old City Bitcoiners. I also plan to use Nostr for real-time application logging and push notifications.
The Nostr ecosystem is still under heavy development and I'm working on making improvements to my various websites to better support it, including adding a Nostr relay requiring Lightning payments for message relay. Revenue this service will be applied to the monthly crowdfunding goals of the meetup.
Donations
The Old City Bitcoiners website leverages my BTC Pay Server at btcpay.farscapian.com to accept bitcoin. These funds help offset the operational costs of running the meetup. Lightning payments are the only option available to users. I no longer share Bitcoin receiving addresses with the general public due to their on-chain doxicity.
For more information about my lightning node, check out this page.
Conclusion
Check out the site today! It's a great case study for monetizing a Bitcoin meetup!
If you appreciate all of my hard work in organizing this meetup and associated efforts like the Old City Bitcoiners website, please consider donating to the Old City Bitcoiners crowdfund. This helps me meet operating expenses and avoid operating at a loss! 🙏