1 yr. ago • 91%

Would a federated dating site work well? What would it look like?

Basically title, every bit of online dating nowadays is either Match or Meta, and we're all about breaking corporate chains right?

So these are the thoughts I had:

Matches based on simple user selection: age range, lifestyle, hobbies etc. None of that dumb algorithm stuff that makes you reset your profile every month.
ActivityPub protocol so that anyone can run their own instance, but can also be blocked if anything heinous happens.
E2EE for messaging (and anything else if it's possible).
Someone wrote an open-source anti-CSAM script for Lemmy recently, I hope we could adapt that to our use.
Just, like, everyone have a good time on this app, we're here for love lol

I am not a coder, so I would have no idea how to do this, but I wonder about the interest in such a creation. Maybe some of you out there could make something I could use to get a date (pls).

80 comments

ActivityPub protocol so that anyone can run their own instance, but can also be blocked if anything heinous happens.

The overlap between the users who will run their own instance and the users you want for a dating app is the empty set.

(Speaking as someone that runs a personal Lemmy instance here)

129
- I'll bring you a grass box
  
  9
  
  Is that some kind of advanced seed box? At least that'll help keep my torrent ratios up!
  
  7
Neckbeards fighting about Linux. No girls in sight.

Like Lemmy.

117
- Sausages everywhere
  
  5
I don't think there's any chick's here dude. It's just us.

72
- Can we please leave this awful mindset behind on reddit
  
  26
  
  it's probably true though, and when talking about a dating site that's an important factor
  
  3
- bats eyelashes
  
  19
  
  briefly forgot men have eyelashes too and got excited
  
  11
  
  Do bats even have eyelashes 🦇
  
  8
- My wife is here, but for obvious reasons, her identify will remain hidden.
  
  9
  
  Permanently Deleted
  
  15
- Speak for yourself
  
  1
You need actual moderation to keep people safe.

61
- Lmfao fuck no
  
  All lack of moderation gets you is spam bots. Current platforms are unmoderated
  
  -2
In theory? Yes. In reality? No.

Besides all the practical reasons already mentioned, it's simply a question of marketing to get people into it. Which costs money noone wants to pay because it kills the principle of breaking free of corpo-hold. Without marketing you'll end up with the nerds that are already here (majority). And of those, the majority are probably also male.

And on top of that, you might find other people living in NYC but what about smaller cities or even foreign ones? With reddits userbase you probably could, but you don't reach them because they already prefer mainstream-stuff 😐

58
- And of those, the majority are probably also male.
  
  Ok we start with a federated Grindr, then once that takes off we use the network effects to pull in other orientations..
  
  25
  
  Lol. But... We already have grindr. If I'd be gay, why should i use anything else? 😁
  
  4
- Yep. Dating services are hard mode for the network effect, because you need to find a bunch of users that are close to you.
  
  15
  
  Aye. Would kinda defeat the purpose if there'd be noone near. And the chances that one person near you does also like you is.... Well... Let's say, it sucks for the majority of men.
  
  3
I swear there’s a group of people who want everything to be “federated” without really understanding what that means. It’s cryptobros 2.0. Let’s make a block-chain based dating app too!

Congrats you discovered a new technology - not everything needs to run on that technology.

53
- Can we federate a block chain?
  
  16
  
  Need to sprinkle in some AI!
  
  12
  
  If you're actually interested:
  
  Ethereum was originally supposed to scale by sharding - essentially splitting the chain into X shards that are independent but can talk to each other.
  
  Better solutions have been come up with so it didn't end up happening, but it's the closes thing to a "federated" blockchain.
  
  5
- Federation is not just a new technology, it's a new (imo better!) way to govern and distribute power in online services. Of course we should explore the possibility of creating federated alternatives for everything, we would be dumb not to. And it's fine if for some of the services the answer is no, that doesn't make the question bad!
  
  The problem with Crypto imo is that many people don't actually want to improve things, especially the loud ones. They just want to make a profit and have no problem scamming others for it.
  
  8
  
  a new (imo better!) way to govern and distribute power in online services
  
  I'd argue federation is the old way, the original way the internet was built, and the centralized walled-garden ecosystems ran by FAANG is the new way. Email, usenet, even http and world wide web itself are examples of federation.
  
  8
I think people need to go outside and interact with each other in person. That's the best way to date.

39
- It's true. At 28 I'd been dateless for 10 years, doing the sad neckbeard incel thing. One day a friend of a friend received two free tickets to a speed dating event. He didn't want to go, but he said he would go if someone else went with him for moral support. In a very out-of-character move for me, I volunteered and went along with him. It was the first time in over 5 years I'd been to a bar. We did 5 minute dates with 15 different women. It was the most women I've spoken to in one night in my whole life. There was only one candidate I connected with, I submitted her as a match. The next day I got an email saying that she had matched with me too! I got her email, and chatted via email for about 6 weeks, then organised to go on a real date. The rest is history from there, we're coming up to our 10th wedding anniversary.
  
  So yes, going outside, interacting with people, it works. Its not a trick guys.
  
  29
  
  That's not "going outside", that's going to IRL tinder
  
  3
- the true federated dating app, touching grass
  
  4
I don't think it federates, but there's Alovoa, an open source dating platform.

35
- You know, I am single and have been curious about dating apps for a while. But I never really got over the hurdle of making a profile because of how much of a hellscape it seems. I may be curious enough to make a profile in this website tonight (fully expecting 0 users in my entire country)
  
  25
  
  I took the leap last year into algorithmic dating, and it's been a great experience. Go in with no expectations just try to have as much fun, delight, conversation, wonder as possible and roll with the punches. There is always an adventure waiting.
  
  I've meet with people all over, done little adventures, and got good friends out of it, and even some romance. Toally worth it to explore.
  
  14
- Thanks! I'm almost wondering if a federated dating platform would even work, given the moderation challenges.
  
  Edit: Also there were like, three women in my area, so that's problematic.
  
  15
- I tried it. Pretty cool, but the closest user to me was 270 km away. Maybe one day I'll meet her, but for now I guess it doesn't have critical mass for me.
  
  3
Wouldn't work.

Much of the online dating market is an oligopoly run by two main players: Match Group and Bumble Inc.

Bumble Inc own Bumble and Badoo while Match Group own nearly every other major platform like Hinge, Tinder, OkCupid, POF and a few others.

This oligopoly is the reason why mainstream online dating is an unmoderated mess filled with scammers, OnlyFans advertising bots and otherwise fake users. Said users inflate the company's registration metrics massively and sucker people into paying several times the price of a WoW subscription just to see who liked their profile. Major switches to mobile also make it much harder for users to run reverse image searches and weed out these fakes more quickly.

A dating platform on the fediverse would be an even worse experience, not because of corporate greed but because inviting everybody and their mother to create a new instance creates serious content moderation issues. Expect this platform to be even more flooded with bots, spammers, scammers and other bad actors.

29
I never understood reddit as a dating site. And the problems there are only amplified on Lemmy.

user density in the geographic region I would date within. With reddit, at least I was quite sure there were other users within an hours drive of me

it's not a dating site and not set up with the guardrails needed to make it even marginally safe. If a person on Bumble starts being scary, there are some ways to report then and they will possibly be removed or restricted from the platform. On reddit and Lemmy, the responses will be one of the following "free speech, get wrecked", "if you don't want to be abused/harassed, you shouldn't go into public spaces", or "you signed up for the site, you asked for it", or "give them a chance, they are probably just not good at dating skills" or even Andrew Tate acolyte bullshit that I don't want to think about.

distribution of gender and of sexual orientation across the platform. I would be surprised if Lemmy userbase is less than 95% men. Unless those men are gay/bi at an improbably high rate, there aren't going to be many people available to match with.

"everyone have a good time, we're here for love" says the hordes of people who are actually here to waste time with no intention to actually date, cruise for nudes, or to data mine peoples personal information.

Tl;Dr if actual dating apps are not bringing a person dating success, nothing about Lemmy will be any better.
29
- Gay nerd dating site
  
  9
That is a terrible idea

19
- Yes, as so many others have said.
  
  0
Federated or not, dating sites don't work well

19
- I'm getting married next week. Met her on Tinder. Sometimes they absolutely do work
  
  10
  
  I used some dating apps on and off for about 4 years and got probably a couple dozen or so genuine not bot matches. Most of which didn't last for more than a message or two. Even ran my profile by some of my women friends who I trust and they said it looked good. While obviously it works for some people, the experience for most people isn't that great. These apps make their money by keeping people on the platform so getting matches goes against their main profit motive. The traditional methods work a lot better.
  
  2
- Why would they work well? Their business model doesn't incentivize dating apps to work well. They sell subscriptions so they'd rather their users stay perpetually single and become increasingly desperate.
  
  9
- Maybe if ur ugly lol
  
  0
  
  cries
  
  1
The main hurdles I see are

moderation of troll users, the unending flood of dick pics.

Spammers, catfishers, who love to flood these sites.

Not giving away too much privacy in terms of location sharing, or seeing who matches with whom.

Safety, what if something goes wrong with a date, what recourse do people have?

I think the upside is bigger then the downsides. It's worth the effort to build, just needs lots of thought to do in a decentralized way.
8
- Every app is a dating app: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwRncCTSz_U
  
  0
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  
  https://www.piped.video/watch?v=rwRncCTSz_U
  
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
  
  1
Somehow you'd want to continuously federate new instances to keep the userbase connected.

5
- Does Lemmy do this? Like I said, almost no coding experience here, I took a couple of years of AP Comp Sci (Java) in high school and it stuck like the couple of years of Spanish class in middle school (es un tigre in mis pantolones).
  
  3
the problem with dating platforms is like they open and people start mixing and then many just leave the dating pool as they match up or give up. The remaining people lean a little less dateable. Once this short term process repeats a hundred times there's always some degree of permament toxic residents on a dating site.

This begs a feature dating sites should have is a shutdown date the minute they open.

5
Each person could keep a log of people they know who are single, and then when someone asks if they know anyone who might be interested in going on a date, they could instantly recall a suggestion from their cache! Distributed, peer reviewed recommendation, local. The best part is that it doesn't even require a computer!

5
- Be friendly to the people around you, if there are any middle aged+ asian aunties anywhere in your life... they will start trying to match make... doesn't matter how they know you. Dentist, Noodle Seller, Coffee Seller, Barber... if they know your name, they will be making plans, your nothing but a pawn in their socal scheming!
  
  I go in for a a haircut and walk out with a date with their neice I've never seen... no idea what happened.. (real story lol).
  
  2
- if the list is supposed to be restricted to single people, how am I supposed to grow my gay polycule?
  
  1
I'm a coder and I have no idea how to do this

Do you want it to show matches with people who are around your location, or anyone on the internet? If it's the latter, maybe try starting a dating community, if there isn't one already.

You could have people start a thread with the basic info: age, location, gender, sexuality, etc. Then what you're looking for: age range, hookup or long term, etc.

The comments could be general questions like an AMA to get a better idea.

If someone likes your style, they can send OP a DM

4
- You literally just described tinder
  
  1
https://alovoa.com/?lang=en

https://github.com/Alovoa/alovoa

1
If it’s on Lemmy it would be a hilarious political purity test to see who could virtue signal harder. It would be insufferable. That’s why most users don’t have any kids or spouses. I honestly couldn’t think of a worse place to set up a dating service.

-3
- I had to look up „virtue signaling“ because I‘m old.
  
  This was the best explanation I found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAmM872874A
  
  0
  
  That's hilarious! Here's another one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev373c7wSRg
  
  This one's great too! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohm9C4u63qk
  
  1
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  
  https://www.piped.video/watch?v=sAmM872874A
  
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
  
  1

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