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Fedigrow @lemm.ee
Cool_Name @lemm.ee

Federated Dating App?

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.

32 comments

  • 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.

      • 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

  • 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.

  • 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.

32 comments