My exact feelings... It seems like some nice events are happening around, but I have trouble keeping myself in the loop.

I tried to use Meetup and find events, but I didn't have good luck filtering off events (especially ones happening in months or even weeks).

For demoscene events, check https://www.demoparty.net

They are announced well in advance.

Best way to stay in the loop is to join their Discord server: https://discord.gg/A4z4ccJCep

I don’t use Discord much, but it seems like a terrible way to “stay in the loop.” Am I wrong that you would need to either 1) receive a lot of notifications from irrelevant conversations, 2) spend some time making fine-grained choices about which discussions to receive notifications from, or 3) turn off notifications and instead remember to occasionally manually check up on what’s going on?

It seems like a great tool for active communities but when I just want to be notified that I can get tickets to an upcoming event, I’d really like to be able to sign up for that, not for a whole chat server.

I think you're wrong to expect community outreach and low-effort involvement from a demoscene event.

> It seems like a great tool for active communities

Yes. And to a degree, those who are not active are not needed or wanted at every single event. A little gatekeeping preserves communities for far longer than gates-wide-open does (speaking from experience). Having said that, the barrier is still immensely low - if you care then go on the discord and check every few weeks. Seems like a small ask...

>check every few weeks

That means scrolling up through weeks of general discussions to find the one morsel of information you need. I am on community discords. I do not want to be on community discords. Please, just publish the absolute minimum information on a webpage. Discord has a broken search and no permanence outside its servers, it's worse than even the most barebones mail group. All I ask for is to copy any announcement you make on the Discord to your webpage.

A community that's only on Discord is not a community, it's a group of friends chatting with each other.

Most servers have something like an announcements channel. Muting everything but that is the equivalent of subscribing to an events / other big news mailing list for (Discord-centric) communities, these days. You'll only get notifications for that, and can still engage with muted channels on a pull basis whenever you want.

Another good dependable source of demoscene events is https://www.demoparty.net/

You can be pretty sure that every demoparty will be listed there, as well as many demoscene adjacent events.