I built an api/mcp for local events: pop-ups, one-off events, concerts, etc. currently covering the SF bay area.
I've been building a bunch of consumer apps lately around personalization and recommendation and have had a hard time finding this data in one spot. agents can find useful stuff through tool calls / web search, but slow.
you can scrape on demand too, but i wanted a faster data set and couldn't find an existing provider for the mix of event types I was searching for.
the methodology for it is to find influential accounts/posters/etc. and do a fan out across things that they co-post with.
I'm considering adding other cities. If you're building something that needs local event data, would something like this be useful and where would you want coverage?
tokioyoyo 41 minutes ago
Which sources does it support? Discoverability is a huge problem for smaller events, as most get posted on IG, and it’s hard to even find them through IG.
I started relying on a mix of Muse/ChatGPT/Gemini depended on which data sources I want to combine, as they all seem to have special deals with different sources.
invalidmonk 32 minutes ago
at the moment, there is a fan out across social media accts from a few different platforms, relying mostly on co-posting to discover new accounts.
any particular events that you'd flag that I could do some eval against?
shrinks99 an hour ago
This is pretty cool, does it scrape Instagram? A lot of events where I live (Toronto) are posted there and not many other places. It's a real problem if you don't want to spend time on that app.
invalidmonk an hour ago
amongst a few other data sources :)
is this something you'd use if we added toronto support?
shrinks99 an hour ago
Personally, I don't have a project that requires it right now, but aspirationally maybe! I agree with another commenter that mentioned this is basically a public service that should exist similar to Wikidata / Musicbrainz.
I know this is currently a paid service you're trying to make happen and the scraping part is a reasonable amount of effort, but if you wanted to make the data source public, you could publish community.lexicon.calendar.event ATProto records and it would be very cool. At the very least, you could ingest it as a data source!
moralestapia 29 minutes ago
x2 for Toronto.
There's hundreds of events happening every week but finding them takes a lot of time.
egonschiele 20 hours ago
This feels hard to maintain and keep up-to-date, but I would definitely use it! Great idea.
invalidmonk 2 hours ago
If an agent maintains it, is it hard? :D
aleksiy123 an hour ago
Cool idea and I really like the design of the landing page.
invalidmonk an hour ago
thanks!
fellowniusmonk 3 hours ago
Solving this issue a core problem for humanity, and it goes hand in hand with the need for a public service.
I'm actually working to do this at ultra low cost as a public service like Wikipedia or musicbrainz.
I'll be publishing global costs to serve and letting people donate to support.
invalidmonk 2 hours ago
please share!
kylecazar an hour ago
Two unrelated monks working on the same thing? What are the odds
invalidmonk an hour ago
events apis and green chartreuse
lap248 21 hours ago
super slick! got results quickly and am getting more interesting and in the know kind of events than other tools
