What gives
Actually, there is a catch.
Your event data becomes public. Title, time, place, description: all of it. It flows out of your Merrie page into the Neighborhood Commons, an open data layer that any local-events app can read from. So when you publish "Saturday morning hike, 9am, Schuylkill banks," it doesn't just sit on your page. It shows up on Fiber. In iCal feeds. In any other local-events app anyone ever builds. One publish, lots of reach.
Event listings used to live in alt-weeklies and church bulletins, public and copyable. Then platforms swallowed them. Listings are infrastructure, not product. The Commons is our attempt to put them back.
What you actually get
Your event reaches further. Publish on Merrie and you show up:
- On Fiber, the Philly-rooted social events app. Same event, no second post.
- In any iCal or Google Calendar feed someone subscribes to.
- In any other local-events app anyone ever builds. The data is CC BY 4.0. Anyone can use it, with credit, without asking us.
You don't have to do anything special for this. The reach is baked in. You publish once. The Commons handles the rest.
What stays private
Your subscriber list is yours. Your members' email addresses don't go anywhere. The data we treat as fiduciary stays fiduciary, never shared with the Commons or with anyone else. The catch is the event metadata. Public, on purpose. Everything else, locked down.
If you want to organize your group privately, that's reasonable, and Merrie probably isn't the right tool. We're for the events you want people to find. The chess club at the Y, not the secret one in your basement.
How we keep this free
The business model lives elsewhere. Holler, our companion product for venue broadcasts, is where the economics happen. Merrie is a public service we're funding from a different surface entirely. Not a freemium tier waiting to mature.
What we ask of you: be the kind of organizer whose members text their friends about your event. Welcome the people who show up. Take care of each other. Treat the platform like a public good and the platform will keep being there for you.
Fiber is one consumer of this data. There will be others. We hope yours is one of them.