Is there a chat/dating app that isn't complete shit and pay wall restricted?

Yea it's a cool app called meeting people IRL, kinda obscure tho

Oldschool Runescape

No.

Next question.

Grindr. It's only partly shit.

RIP if you're looking for women.

Didn't grindr have recently some shit that they were selling the confidential user data forward?

The hard to swallow answer here is this:

Dating apps, like all apps, are majorly funded by giant companies, because there's no realistic path to scaling up from 100 users to millions of users without a bunch of investment money.

Say I want to create a new, decent app that takes us back to the days of stuff like early OkCupid which was smartly done and actually worked okay.

Well, if it gets any amount of quick adoption, I'll be going from really low costs to astronomical hosting costs almost overnight. Often, the "checks haven't cleared" as they say and while you've technically been paid, it's all waiting in escrow or bank transfers or what fucking have you and you have giant bills falling due and no way to pay them

That's why this happens to every single app under the sun. They're left making tough decisions and selling out to unscrupulous people.

Because what no one wants to admit is that the funding model to how to make almost anything function on the internet at-scale where millions of people use it is fundamentally broken.

I mean fuck, isn't that why we're on the federated splinter-net where people can justify the costs of their small corner of federation, easing the overall load of financial demand?

Corporate internet is broken and they're chasing ridiculously thin numbers to constantly be making more.

So, you'd probably need some kind of federated solution to not have it be destroyed by corporatized enshittification.

The fediverse as designed is actually pretty inefficient. If it ever were to go to Reddit scale it would melt down.

That's because there's effectively no batching for federation currently ... every single vote from an instance is forwarded back to the instance hosting the community and must be processed individually. So if you get 500k votes on something even if it's from 200 servers, the servers hosting the community have to be able to withstand the flood of votes and store the associated data... And that's just votes.

Worse yet, those votes then get replayed to every single one of those 200 servers one by one. So every server needs 500k vote entries and all the associated traffic ... even if half of the servers are just 1 guy looking at cat videos once a month.

Federating actually is way more expensive than just adding another user as designed.
- I'm sure if we reach that point, someone will add a method for batching cross-server communication. That's the beauty of FOSS
There is Alovoa, it's FOSS, it's just that nobody seems to be using it. Closest next user is ~10k km away😂
- And its a gigantic sausage party.
Say I want to create a new, decent app that takes us back to the days of stuff like early OkCupid which was smartly done and actually worked okay.

Ok, I WILL say that.

HEAR THAT GUYS??? THIS GUY OVER HERE IS GONNA GET US ALL LAID!!!!
- Don't deny me a GIF of my man Rodney!
Say I want to create a new, decent app that takes us back to the days of stuff like early OkCupid which was smartly done and actually worked okay.

Can confirm - got laid on OkCupid back in the day.

If you look good, they all work.

If you don't, they don't.

Seriously, the free tier in every app allows for enough opportunities to match with someone. Whether that happens is really a matter of your looks (or well, the photos you're using).

It's a shallow world out there.

Getting lots of matches is useless when you're looking for a handful of great matches. For that you need a great matching mechanism with thousands of parameters - what OkCupid used to have before Match Group destroyed it.
Unless you're match.com where they charge you to like or even message people. Don't ever use Match. OkCupid has been the most genuine one I've seen.
- Just so you're aware, Match owns OkCupid now, as well as Tinder, Hinge, Plenty of Fish and a bunch of other smaller dating sites. I don't think they've all been ruined as much as Match yet, but it's probably only a matter of time.

Dating apps have never been my thing but I think this would be a good fediverse project, maybe linked with something like matrix.

Not likely as that is how they make money, lure men in with fake female accounts and make them pay for more swipes, more messages, more prominent messages, read notifications.

A better question is can a dating app be good?

Around 2010, every tech bro that's creaming shorts over AI today was trying to figure out how to make money behind the fact that everyone had smartphones. But it turned out, that smartphones can't solve every problem.

Dating I would argue, is just one of those things tech made worse. Never mind how often the damn thing fails, think about the conditions where it would function well. A dystopian world where everything is shallow and operating on incel-math.

And how could it be otherwise? Dating apps are just math people trying to solve for love. This is the plot to a comedy movie, not a business plan.

Plenty of Fish and OKCupid were pretty good once upon a time. I used them in 2016 and most of the dates were alright.

No idea about Europe but Hinge is the one that I've known lots of people have successfully used, myself included, to find a relationship.

I used Bumble to find my now fiance. I didn't pay for it, but also was patient and treated it like an investment instead of expecting immediate results. Ymmv

Bumble is terrible for meeting people. Once you match someone they have 24 hours to respond. I'm fine with the woman needing to message first, but if you don't respond in that 24 hours their match is removed. What if that woman has a life and didn't open the app that day? Oh but you can spend money to extend that window. So if she's on vacation yay you get to buy extensions for a week. It's just a scam.
- Women don't even have to message first anymore in bumble, they got rid of their main gimmick. They're just yellow tinder now.

I used the Boo app to find my now fiancee. You can talk with people and it has a quasi social media aspect to it that you can also use to chat with more people, I live in a major city and managed to talk to a handful of people on the time I was there, some of those were started by them too. The chatting wasn't limited iirc it's a friends/dating app.

Granted I was rated 8/10 on the rate me subreddit so take that as you will.

Tried, it sucks.

There is Alovoa, it's open source, still has a small user base, but you don't have anything to lose...

Do note that, much like for example Telegram or Snapcraft, only the client is FOSS, not the network all the data is stored on.
- That sounds a bit misleading, the server implementation is FOSS too, at any time someone could setup their own instance.
- So it's not really FOSS at all, it's just a loss-leader to draw you into the network, trap your data, and then enshittify and monetize as per standard practice.

I'm holding the torch for OkCupid. I've met my SOs there. Many queer folk, leftists, likes work reasonably well and you even get free "superlikes" once a week. Messages are free, likes are free.

and you even get free "superlikes" once a week

... are we using the same OkCupid?
- not sure? I got one superlike to use for free a week. is that a regional thing? i have never paid for OkC in my life.

Fetlife if you’re kinky. You gotta use it to find local events with fellow kinky people, meet up, vet each other. Etc etc.

boo Try boo it's a little more like dating social media

Have you used it?
- Yes. Seems decent it's like mostly for dating but you have the option to just use it for friends. So that 'pressure' so to speak isn't there.
  
  There's even a social feed and you can make posts and just talk to other people
Idk, I didn't like it. Might just be the people around here who use it tho. The way the 16 personalities test thingy is ingrained there also kinda rubbed me the wrong way.

Fetlife can get you laid

Fetlife is not a dating app. They have actively not implemented features such as filter by age/gender in order to avoid becoming a dating app. If you are looking to get involved in your local kink community, Fetlife is the answer [0]. For anything else, it is garbage. If you try using it to get laid, you will just be pissing a bunch of people off.

[0] At least for my local kink community. Other areas might vary.
Can't find an app with that name
- https://fetlife.com/

Well, I know this won't be useful for a lot of people. But HER is a femme focused app (but open to all queer folk) that is super duper generious with the amount matches and chat it allows.

Yeah, I'm not going to cat fish as a girl
- Okie dokie. Didn't really think so, but it's by far the best app I have used with essentially no pay well so I figure I'd mention it for anyone else who sees this thread.