What would a FOSS dating app look like?

  • vfreire85@lemmy.ml
    1·
    36 minutes ago

    My two cents on dating apps in general:

    1. I would rather have something that actually marks someone as willing to have a relationship instead of clinging to people that for some reason are not available; maybe I’m just lazy of knowing people, but on the other side it skips some hurdles and puts me on contact with someone I might have taken a long time to know, if at all;
    2. on the other side, dating apps really reward someone physically attractive or at least that uploads the best photos. I’ve met several people who in person are alright for me which I wouldn’t swipe if I met them in an app. Also, after I actually paid a professional photographer to shoot a set of me and uploaded the pics on apps, I received more likes in a single week than during my entire life, even though nothing fundamentally changed and I’m still the same.
  • nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    7·
    8 hours ago

    having a lot of people on it would be the thing that makes it good.

    for real though, here’s my formula to fix a major dating app problem:

    1. women can swipe men, but men cannot swipe women
    2. men can view and chat with women who have swiped them

    now I can simply look cool, instead of trying to swipe 500 girls for an hour

    no for-profit dating app will ever do this, because it means that men are not swiping 500 girls for an hour

    • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
      11·
      1 hour ago

      This is very heteronormative and gender binaried. Queer people exist and date.

      That said, anecdotally, from the handful of women I’ve talked about this with: many don’t like making first moves on these apps.

      Using dating apps is a skill, and if you haven’t been practicing sending messages you’re going to be bad at it. The vast majority of first messages I got from women were “hey”. Trash tier. Probably because they just haven’t done it very often.

    • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world
      4·
      3 hours ago

      95% of your male users would have zero swipes on the app, and then stop using it

      and most of the women will swipe on 5% of the men, and also leave because those 5% of men will only respond to like 5% of the swipes they get, so 95% of them get shafted.

      and this is why dating apps don’t work. people don’t use them logically or reasonably. dating is all about chasing hot people who won’t give you the time of day and ignoring people who would actually date you because they are not as attractive as the people who ignore you.

      • nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        3·
        3 hours ago

        95% of your male users would have zero swipes on the app, and then stop using it

        and most of the women will swipe on 5% of the men

        so it’s the same result as the current tinder system, except im not swiping 500 girls for an hour. yea, it sounds good

        the app could give the guy some performance metrics. view count, swipe ratio. he can make tweaks to his profile, a/b test. it could actually be pretty interesting

    • thevoidzero@lemmy.world
      7·
      5 hours ago

      Maybe add a feature where if someone is chatting with >10 people, they aren’t shown for swiping? I don’t know exactly what the limit should be, but I feel like the apps use ‘hot’ profiles that attract people and make them swipe a lot that won’t lead anywhere.

  • dax@feddit.org
    6·
    11 hours ago

    Unless you have a massive marketing budget, it’s futile. Any such app, and that includes social media in general, needs a massive user base to be viable. And outside of a geeky minority, most people wouldn’t care it’s open source.

    • AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
      5·
      7 hours ago

      The geeky minority who care that it’s open source might be predisposed to liking each other, though, so the user base wouldn’t need to be as big as a general-purpose dating app.

    • mirshafie@europe.pub
      21·
      6 hours ago

      I think lots of people would care if it had a fair algorithm. Tinder is hated for several reasons, but that’s probably the main one.

  • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    82·
    14 hours ago

    What it would look like is a badly themed badly optimized front end that isn’t in the App store, was recently removed from the Play store, with a rape awful name like CLIT or CL Isn’t Tinder or LibreMeetCute and a nonsense icon. It would rapidly become recognized as the engine used by the huge number of extremely sketchy personals sites that popped up all of a sudden that contain only virtual prostitutes. It would also be the engine that powers Truth Romance. It would have the worst Github issues page in human history.

  • gtr@programming.dev
    2·
    11 hours ago

    I have had this idea in my mind of building a privacy-first, open source dating app built on “privacy by design” principles. Still didn’t get to it tho.

    • gtr@programming.dev
      5·
      11 hours ago

      Tried it, doesn’t work. Too many bugs. I can’t input a location and it fails to auto-detect so I am just living in cyberspace apparently.

    • thatradomguy@lemmy.world
      7·
      19 hours ago

      Same. I installed it on my phone but in the end, I’m still stuck with the dilemma if I go through with giving them my data/info or not. At this point, I’d have better luck just loitering around Target and asking someone out.

      • robber@lemmy.ml
        3·
        7 hours ago

        Exactly this. Since it does not seem to be federated, you’re still forced to give your data to a third party you can’t choose. And this makes the open source aspect a rather marginal benefit, at least for the privacy-concerned end user. Still, I appreaciate the effort.