I live in an area where the low population doesn't support language-specific meetups. So I run the 'Nelson Dev Group' meetup, where we have a short talk (on anything) then a lean-coffee style group discussion. The idea is that if a topic is outside of your interests, there'll be something else for you. It works pretty well and we've been running monthly for about two years now.
Huh, I live in the other Nelson on the other side of the world that commonly gets mistaken for yours and just thought "no way there is a dev meetup in Nelson!".