Hey there!
Last year, I fell into the Fediverse-rabbithole and I really like it so far. We already have alternatives for Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and so on.
But today I realized, there actually isn’t an alternative for tinder. But I think there could be a huge demand for it. This could also motivate people to change platforms, since no one wants to buy tinder premium for a lot of money.
But I think I’m maybe not the first one coming up with this idea. What do you think about this?
~ sp3ctre
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There’s nowhere near a reasonable number of users on Fediverse to sustain a geo-local dating app. Tinder already has to rate-limit matches so people don’t swipe through their entire dating pool in one day. You’d be better off turning to your geo-located communities on Lemmy and encouraging meet-ups or other ways to connect.
Dating is a numbers game, so ya gotta go where your preferences are.
i have a preference for big booty goth latinas, where do i go for that??
Brazil
Let’s not clone trash. Tinder sucks because it has no matching mechanism to filter out incompatible people. To find one interesting profile on Tinder I have to swipe about 500 profiles. To get more matches, I risk some false positives and like ~2% of profiles. Then I need to filter the matches in person. Very inefficient, a waste of time.
The opposite of that was OkCupid before Match Group destroyed it.
OKCupid was awesome. The questionnaire matched on a bunch of different categories and you could add clarification to the questions.
Bummer it sounds like it’s toast. I met my wife on OKC.
This could be a symptom of being corporate-driven. They suggest you incompatible people, because they want you to pay (to get better results). I assume you only tried the free version. I never tried the paid one.
I think this problem could be solved.
Even if you pay they have no incentive to get you to stop paying (i.e. find a partner).
If anything it’s the opposite. They want user retention so they have an incentive to show you people that won’t work long term.
What would the matching mechanism do? Look at your fediverse activity and match people who like the same things as you?
Could be interesting but creepy
Just like match and okc you’d have to take a quiz and match against core values. Social media data mining would be a terrible way of matching.
I actually think observing your actual behaviour would be a better more honest way of matching.
And technically it’s all public info so it’s not technically a privacy issue; they’d get it over activitypub the same as all fediverse platforms already do.But it feels wrong to do.
It would be, if it were comprehensive and applicable to match making, but I don’t think for most people that can be gleaned from fedi. Most people only lurk, few even directly follow communities, and the content people do interact with likely does not represent them well unless they put themselves out there like that.
Well put.
I guess I also don’t really know the average users behavior, or more specifically typical fedi behavior of users who would use a matchmaking service.
I’m just highly skeptical of compatibility quizzes, it feels like there must be a better solution.
I’ve heard of FediMatch: https://github.com/Lypsilonx/FediMatch I have not used it personally - might one day though.
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There’s a Foss dating app called alovoa, I think I saw something on the subreddit when I was taking a look at it again a while back about potentially implementing activitypub
Looking at their github and they havnt merged a PR since October. Feels a like it might be dead.
My last impression was that alovoa would need a lot of work still. It’s also the best thing I’ve seen so far but it’s very buggy unfortunately.
Not exactly federated, but open source: https://github.com/Alovoa/alovoa
Looking at their github and they havnt merged a PR since October. Feels a like it might be dead.
Last commit was two weeks ago.
Cool, didn’t know that one. Maybe it’s a good first step. Since it’s open source, people can work with it and develope it further.
The trouble is that with this sorry of thing you really do need some form of moderation or quality control (of the users, not (only) the platform) because it will be inundated by fake profiles and nasty content.
As much as I’m cheering for Alovoa I don’t see how this is solveable. 🥲
Solvable by requiring verification of every user by government ID?
Then you’d need some organization with resources to store this data? You’d still need to trust someone to do this correctly.
Oh, I was more thinking in the context of a centralized service, although technically it should be possible to do this in a federated manner too. I don’t think the resources would be an issue, but the liability of holding this data would be. I don’t know how that works on sites that currently do this though.
from the images on the front page, i get the feeling the userbase is tiny
Haha, I don’t think those are real users. But yeah, they could have done a better job selecting a pool of stock photos.
Every social media is dating App!
Why not instead make “meet” communities like reddit but on Lemmy or piefed or anywhere else, make community and let people meet that way, or you could use general conversation or whatever name is to engage in communication and that way find someone.
Uh, h-hi~
twirls hairHi (with rizz)
Get a room!
like, on matrix or something 😄
A/S/L?
People are used to seperate apps for dating I guess. And the matching-concept like on tinder is nice as well if there wouldn’t be a big profit-oriented company behind it. It could be a tinder with equal chances for everybody. At least it would be driven with an algorithm, which doesn’t have profit as a goal.
I understand that and I wish it wasn’t the case, idk I feel like point of social media / or at least one of the points of using social media is to share your experiences, what you like or don’t like and find like minded people and if lucky enough meet love of your life. Basically what dating apps are for.
I would have serious concerns regarding data privacy. You share intimate and very private details about yourself on these apps that could be used for blackmail. I wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing that on a federated network. For example, how would you ensure data isn’t logged by a hostile server operator. A company is at least forced to play lip service to privacy laws. The theoretical operator of
fedi-date.rucan do what they want.How about doing some fine-grained control mechanism: you share little data publicly, then once somebody likes you, you can decide to share more with them. With some cryptography tricks should be possible to share this information only with the other person and not with their home servers.
I don’t think control features help much when one of the most basic question that you can ask is “What is your gender and who would you like to date?”. As I have already outlined in another comment in this thread, this information has to be shared with the federated network and is already enough to get people into serious trouble should it get into the wrong hands.
Alternatively think about it this way. Would you hand over this kind of information to a total stranger? Would you take on the responsibility of handling data that could literally kill someone if you make a mistake?
How about another type of control: by default your profile is not federated. Then you manually select the instances you trust. And your data getcs shared only with those. Dating usually is kind of local anyway. If i live in australiay I’m likely not interested in matches from the UK. So instances could already serve as some pre-selection based on your region and possibly community type.
There’s nothing you can do for profile data, public key encryption is an option for DMs.
But thats a problem with dating-networks in general because of the intimate character. I think if you want to do it, then it should be done in a safer way than tinder. And the security of your instance should be checked today already. The federation could be a safety advantage, because you can choose on your own, where you think it’s the safest.
No, data must be shared between instances for federation to make any sense and the operators of other instances don’t necessarily share your views about privacy and security. Lets take for example a matching algorithm like the one OkCupid used to use. You answer some questions and based upon those people are recommended to you. If you want to see people from other instances as well, the answers to the questions must be shared between all federated instances; but at the same time these answers contain private details about you. I don’t think a workable solution to this problem exists, even if you come up with an algorithm that allows you to make decisions on anonymized data. The danger of deanonymization due to a bug is too high.
But what about defederation from malicious/insecure instances? Couldn’t this solve these kind of problems?
Of course, there will still be a risk. But isn’t it a step in the better direction?
You already lost the data at that point and you really don’t want to play roulette with data that has the potential of killing your users. Just imagine what could happen if a gay man from Saudi Arabia joined your instance and that data leaks.
There is a Mastodon frontend with a Tinder-like interface: https://apps.apple.com/de/app/fedimatch/id6503460577
I want to make an effigy out of the corpse of tinder. I would not use a FOSS version of it.
