Decor in @SandinistaMCR good night meeting a new group pic.twitter.com/1o8SuacsoZ
— Matt Tuckey 🇬🇧 (@matthewtuckey) March 2, 2025
Back in October I ran a meetup with Manchester Nightlife to Off the Square, to a night called Dissociate, a tech house event. See my writeup. One of the members, a young autistic lad, was quite open with me about his condition. We talked about house music and such on the night, but then I didn’t hear from him until maybe early February when I rolled into a WeRoad meetup somewhere. He told me about a new website called Social MCR, a free platform designed to rival Manchester’s Meetup scene with events being ran throughout the week, and offering the public the opportunity to meet new people.
I joined Social MCR, and I was thrown into a WhatsApp introductory chat where the organiser explained the premise: one overarching WhatsApp group, with sub chats of different themes: event suggestions, sports, movies, unfiltered (edgy humour), gym and fitness, etc. etc.
These seem to have been going reasonably well, but the organisers decide that the system would work better on Discord, a different social media platform. Think of Discord as a mix of Reddit – discussions with replies appearing in a little like a family tree-like format – and maybe X (Twitter). It takes a bit of time to get your head around, but eventually you can work out the different discussions and replies.
There was an in-person event ran a while ago, but I was already running a meetup myself that night. It seemed that at this Social MCR event there was a bit of a to-do between this person and that, and a breakaway WhatsApp chat was formed, not including the SocialMCR organisers. I was invited into this chat not long after this. A couple of weeks’ chatting later, we organised a meet for a Saturday night.
That took place last night. I finally got to meet this group – sarcastically self-titled The Adopted Family – in Grade-II-listed Sinclair’s Oyster Bar, Manchester’s oldest pub dating back to 1720. We sat outside where people could find us. I wasn’t wearing a warm enough coat, sadly, but the group were all chilled out, clued up people and we gelled well. We moved onto Sandinista, a place I’d had on my list for a while. Not my kind of place – too rock oriented - but I had a good chat with people about movies and suchlike. Started early, left early. 6-11pm outing.
Hoping to meet with The Adopted Family again. Hopefully get them involved in some of my meetups.
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