What would a FOSS dating app look like?
My wife wouldn’t be thrilled…
Well, if we weren’t doing it together.
Rather do Matrimonial Tech meet
Allowing you to meet meet people more like yourself!
My two cents on dating apps in general:
- 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;
- 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.
About me: Arch btw
It would be like old-school OKCupid, minus all the paid bullshit.
old school okcupid was from 2004, before video on the internet meant a 320x240 quicktime clip that was 2 minutes long.
nobody in 2026 is ever going to use the internet like we did in 2004. they don’t have the patience or the attention span. it also would be a phone app, not a website. nobody uses websites anymore
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:
- women can swipe men, but men cannot swipe women
- 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
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.
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. and women would be driving the experiment. it could actually be pretty interesting
the tinder system doesnt’ show you how 99.9% of women are rejecting you. just like the lottery, the point is the delusion that you might ‘win’ even though statistically, you won’t ever.
if the average user saw that reality, they’d give up. they would not try to improve.
apps can’t fix biological imperatives. all they do is magnify them. i’m a guy who gets matches on apps regularly… most women interpret my profile as the complete opposite of what it says. it’s hilarious. but that’s because people see what they want to see, they don’t see what you literally tell them.
biological imperatives
not my problem honestly
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.
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.
This is very heteronormative and gender binaried
it’s an idea meant to address a problem which is specific to the heteronormative gender binaried online dating experience. it probably wouldn’t do anything to improve other dating configurations
Nah, In person for the win!
not if you have no rizz (me)
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.
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.
it would work if it was a gay/furry specific app.
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.
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.
I feel like it would be almost impossible for the app ti reach critical mass in any local area
“David has requested your public key, do you accept?”
How do you think Alice and Bob met?
In an insecure love triangle with Mallory.
I love this in theory. Just needs a big user base.
It claims to have 18k users. I didn’t see their criteria for “active”, though.
Is it good?
As an experiment - try setting up a dating community on Lemmy - report back with how that goes.
Why did I automatically imagine that hot dog gif…
To be fair there is a decent amount of people here who may enjoy that though. Straight males would likely struggle here like most other dating sites.
One here:
Do lemmons even need a dating community?
This isn’t a dig at Lemmy users
Does anyone even need a FOSS dating app?
I think they would be run better if the users had a say on how they’re run, so we could all probably use it.
I think it would be mostly men. I like the idea of it though.
how many straight women do you know that are FOSS?
even among men, how many care about FOSS? like .1%?
I know what Foss is, but I don’t care about it. but i do find it amusing the how superiority complex FOSS people have and how they fail to realize how the average windows/mac users is just going to find that weird and offputting, as they do most foss software.
Men and trans girls
Sounds like a viable app now that you mention that.
