I was trying to explain federated websites to a friend and she asked if there is a federated dating app. She recently went through a break up and the apps are dreadful as I’m sure many of you know.
It’d be hard to launch a dating system on the fediverse because it the type of service that relies heavily on network effects. People want to be on the dating app with the most people. However, I think there is an opportunity because the mainstream apps are so notoriously awful, monetized, and enshitified.
It could be a community within an existing network or it could be its own website. I don’t know, I’m just putting the idea out there.
We should recreate that old OkCupid matching system where users make, answer, and vote on the importance of different questions.
Already did it for https://cupid.careers/… I can easily port it to another site to make a dating Fediverse actor
Probably very difficult due to network effect indeed. Also privacy would be a challenge I guess?
This could be used for privacy.
https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilid
There’s also a new technology that allows sharing of proximity data without sharing location. I’m not finding it now, though.
Ps. I tend to think that NOSTR is a far better protocol for this type of idea for the same reasons I’m looking at NOSTR instead of Pub/Sub for my federated inventory idea.
forgot about DMs lmao, thanks blaze for correcting me
Isn’t privacy basically irrelevant to a dating app? you’re giving your own info (headshot, name, hobbies, location i think?) voluntarily. Do correct me if i am wrong though.(There is some information that is sketchy for the company to be collecting though, such as app usage and contacts)Not everything needs to happen in the Fediverse. E.g, you can have the messaging part delegated to email, xmpp, matrix… Then you add a system where the other party needs to send a “request for contact info” separate from the public profile.
Indeed. A lot of places that offer encrypted messaging are just built on things like XMPP without most people realising. WhatsApp is, I believe.
It’s more how to keep the information between two people, such as messages. As we know, messages on Lemmy can be seen by admins
Right. I forgot about those. E2EE is probably especially necessary for a dating app.
You could give a handle for matrix chat for that.
Matrix chat are private between the participants.
I feel like not everything has to be federated and this is one of those things
Would you mind explaining your reasoning behind this?
I feel like most people, myself included, would not want to link their dating profile to their “everything” account.
yeah but what about creating a second account that is for dating, that is federated?
What is gained by federating it?
Would you really want to see dating profiles while scrolling lemmy?
no, it could be a separate, but also federated network.
My problem is that conventional dating apps do not work in favor of the users. So the users should community-host it. But since such community-hosted instances tend to be small, it makes sense to federate them. That is what i propose(d).
I think the dating app model that’s currently popular kind of can’t work well for users. They’re all set up so they benefit from users paying a subscription for a long time, but users want to find a match and get out. Those are contradictory.
I think a match making model would be better. Pay a single fee and they try to set you up with someone. They already got your money so their incentive would be to set you up happily so they don’t have to work on you anymore. But users don’t want to pay for anything, so we’ll continue having garbage and garbage incentives.
I am working on website that is Okcupid for Jobs. You follow @thecupid@cupid.careers and it posts questions that help you match with other professionals that might work well with you.
and the apps are dreadful as I’m sure many of you know.
What about Federation would make the apps better?
What about Federation would make the apps better?
Rooting out the incentive the company have for you NOT to find a stable partner and uninstall.
That’s a good point.
Not owned by a corporation driven by a profit motive.
It has come up before, although the instance is gone and I suspect it only lives on in the Internet Archive. I generally stand by the points I make there - different instances could work for people into different things and federation would allow people to adjust their settings to fling out a wider net. So I might be on a regional instance but want to throw my net wider to include furries or uniform dating or sugar daddies or feet. However, you’d need quite a few people signed up to make an instance viable but that also might be where federation comes in, although that might not help if you are a lonely guy in Tokyo looking for a girl who likes cats and the only other person around is someone in Belgium who is looking for a guy who will dress up in an inflatable unicorn outfit.
I also thought that the approach in this study could be useful.
FediMatch is a project that’s pretty cool.
I kid you not I was thinking about this TODAY while taking a shower.
I think it’s funny to imagine how silly it would be and everyone would joke around with couch + Vance memes, except for a single couple that actually met and fell in love and everybody asks for updates all the timeIn reality I don’t think it would work, but I have been wrong once before so go for it
Honestly. A FOSS dating site might be enough, it doesn’t need to be federated, I suspect most people would get what they are looking for from FOSS. Also, safety is a big deal on dating sites, I guess defed helps you to not show people who don’t moderate well, but I wonder if a well moderated FOSS dating app is the ideal.
https://github.com/Alovoa/alovoa exists.
As others pointed out, there’s little infrastructure cost recuperating possible with an on-off service model.
Lemmy is among the worst places for this, but there could be something like a standard tag (looking for dates/sex/friends etc) that is hashed against geodata on more personalised accounts (like Pixelfed or Mastodon or Friendica(?)).
There’s no federated dating apps, but the cream of the crop are currently Hinge and Feeld. That changes every few months.
And they all end up being bought by match.com
I think feeld recently was revealed to have all of their information and apis public. Like anyone could find any message and photos, and do CRUD operations on them.
https://fortbridge.co.uk/research/feeld-dating-app-nudes-data-publicly-available/
Also the app kind of sucks, at least as a free user. It does the same bullshit as all the others where it doesn’t actually connect you with people. And some classes of users (eg: women) get bombarded with low quality content while others get nothing.
Hinge also kind of sucks for the same capitalism reasons, but it’s better than the others I tried.
Hey, I didn’t say the crop was great.
Since that research went public, they had a redesign of the app, I dunno if that fixed the security issues, so don’t quote me on that. I do know that their socials are decent.
In general though, dating apps are a female lead experience. Misogyny means that a lot, (most in my personal experience), reject that experience. So where women being the commodity should be finding the men and initiating contact. Instead they believe it’s more romantic if a guy finds them and messages first. I’ve got friends that don’t open the apps except to check likes and respond to messages, not being proactive in the least. There’s a bunch of profiles without faces citing work reasons. Women will demand creative opening messages and then respond with the lamest, low effort response ever. Women on dating apps need to realise they rule the world and lead by example.
I think Bumble has the closest thing to the perfect model, but holy fuck the Match group decided to turn it into a piece of shit. The Match group should be broken up, it’s a monopoly and it’s a hindrance to happy healthy relationships.
I know about the app where women message first. I also know men set their gender on the app to be a woman, so they can message first, and proceed to spam with dick pictures. So I still won’t use it.
I am sorry about the women who want but won’t give in return.
If it’s worth anything to you, I’ve been the initiator in almost every romantic relationship I’ve been in. I’m a woman. Unfortunately I’m also used to being the initiator in all my relationships, including friendships, so I also want a guy to initiate with me, like the women you are complaining about… but that doesn’t stop me from making the first move anyways. Saying this not for “pick me” stuff (please don’t, nothing against you personally but I’m still a little old school in wanting to meet someone in real life first, not online) but to give hope that not all women are going to do all the things you are complaining about.
I also won’t be found on dating apps because I’m convinced that’s a quick road to getting hit with misogyny, racism (I’m nonwhite in the United States of America), and idiot bigots trying to make me change my orientation (asexual, only romantically interested in men). I’ve never experienced it before, and I do not want to open the door to it. I have seen so many online complaints about how nasty people game systems meant to protect us (like in the example I gave about the app that makes women message first). So for anyone looking to make a Fediverse dating app, you might want to look into both how to prevent/punish that type of interaction, and how people get around it. I’m not actively looking for love but if I ever do I’m not going to be doing it online.
