It definitely has things in common with meetup.com. But it looks meaningfully distinct to me because the appear to specifically have some kind of strong preference against connected devices. Honestly, I've been wishing for things in this vein recently because of the feeling that our world is growing too superficial with our faces buried in phones and being fed by addictive algorithms.

That being said, I think you're right about some of the challenges that an effort like this will encounter.