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mikkelam | 5 months ago

I've been thinking a lot about building an open source dating app as a non-profit offering.

I have a sense that succesful dating contributes highly to overall human happiness. It should be a public service similar to wikipedia or libraries.

Free forever, fair and safe, and responsibly managed. It's probably not that expensive to run. But idunno, i'm kinda frightened to "compete" in this market

discuss

frfl|5 months ago

As I understand it, it's not a technical problem, rather a social one first off: you can build it but it'll be "empty" compared to all other options out there, even if it's technically superior to them. Network effect and all that.

There's also a technical problem you'll have to contend with: bots and scammers... so many bots and so many scammers.

mikkelam|5 months ago

Totally. It's a very boring part of this that one would have to contend with.

I kinda feel the same way about Facebook. Groups, events, marketplace are amazing for community building. But it's just so hard to compete with Meta.

paxys|5 months ago

What would make this app safer than the alternatives?

mikkelam|5 months ago

Safe can mean a lot of things to different people i guess. I would love to incorporate some sort of reputation signal.

Perhaps positive reinforcement after people have met? Or just having social links?

But yeah, i dont have it all figured out yet

Mistletoe|5 months ago

I think you should do it. The costs for all these services are still priced like the AOL days where bandwidth mattered. I really don’t think the hosting costs could be much. I had a small dating site decades ago and the cost was almost nothing.

ambicapter|5 months ago

I've watched speed dating events go from free to $45 in the past couple years. Not sure if that's b/c of inevitable factors in running those events or pure opportunism.

gloxkiqcza|5 months ago

Do you think this could be facilitated via ActivityPub or is that not a viable choice?

mikkelam|5 months ago

I think something like the matrix protocol would be better. I would be especially interested in not storing unencrypted user messages. Matrix would be a good choice for this.