Are there any open source alternatives to Partiful?

Grunt4019@lemm.ee to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 27 points –

A lot of my friends use partiful for event planning. Is there any open source or self hosted alternative to it? I checked alternative to and couldn't find anything, even alternative to evite or the like seems lacking.

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Is email really worse than SMS for invitations? Sounds like partiful is collecting phone numbers. How many people are you talking about? I did the RSVP's for a tech conference of 100+ people just handling all the emails manually (i.e. interested attendees wrote to a published address and I responded and added them to the appropriate lists). It was a little bit time consuming but worked fine. Any high tech approach would have been more trouble than it was worth.

What does it do? Could you use a shared calendar?

It makes a nice event page where you invite everyone by phone number. It then texts everyone with the details and asks for RSVPs. It then automatically follows up with everyone to get RSVPs and sends out automatic reminders to all the guests a week before and a day before etc.

I would think something that sends text messages would be hard to implement as self hosted

Nah you just need to use a provider that has an SMS API like Vonage, Telnyx, Twilio, etc. Many of them support replies too, so you can have something like "Reply with Y to RSVP"

SMS isn't too popular any more but it seems like a decent fit for a use case like this, as it effectively gives you nearly real-time push notifications without requiring everyone to install an app.