@alice I liked OKC back in the day, under its original owners. But after I answered a bunch of questions, it turned out that I knew everyone it wanted to match me with, because even my major metropolitan area still was a small town for my specific subculture. There's no clear fix here. 5/

@alice 1. I'd be most interested in a platform that allows me to meet new people based on mutual (niche) interests. Finding potentially compatible buddies to share time with, do something together, build trust and find out who they are before dating even starts. It would be nice to each specify a handful of topics to connect over.

2. Being able to somehow specify must-haves, what's important, "yellow flags" / maybes, deal breakers and then filter profiles based on those to narrow things down a bit more efficiently. Needs to be free text, no pre-selected answers.

3. Any platform that puts me under pressure to quickly decide whether I want to date a person or not doesn't work for me. I move like a glacier and am not usually attracted until I know people. Which can take months of talking online.

4. Any requirement to upload photos of my face or other identifiable parts means I'm out for privacy reasons. I'd like to visit profiles without those people seeing it, mistaking it for interest and pestering me.

@alice Good search queries. Maybe I'm looking for Gender P for romance and Gender Q for friendships. Can I search both at once? Maybe I want friendships and I want to search for others who are open to friendships vs only open to friendships? For things with standardized values, have both "I am" and "Looking for" fields. Some "Looking for" fields are Nice to Have, others are Must Have.

1/

@alice 1. No features.

2. Just the knowledge itself that people on the site are interested in dating.

3. All the automation and questions to preselect.

4. Fake profiles are easy to spot.

So, for me, a dating platform on the fediverse would come down to something simple like deciding on a small set of labels for people to use in profiles to signal that one is open for dating. Everything else is just the fediverse the way it is, really.

@alice real DMs. I like my semi anonymous internet profiles

@alice there has to be a kink selector. Wouldn't be interested in dating someone that hates people who wear leather motorcycle gear often.

@alice added context: when I was on dating apps, the vast, vast majority of the sexual harassment I received came from straight cis men who wanted hookups or casual sex and who ignored the multiple references on my profile to being demisexual and only wanting a LTR.

This is no way meant to be an offence to members of those groups who read profiles and do not send out abusive messages to people who don’t want hookups.

But strong filters are essential in this dating climate.

@alice 1. The ability to fully hide oneself from specific groups (e.g. straight cis men, people looking for hookups or FWB).

2. When I was dating, I liked how verbose you could be on OkCupid.

3. Silly questions. Whether or. Not someone likes grilled cheese sandwiches is irrelevant to whether I was compatible with them.

4. People shouldn’t be allowed to delete and create new profiles over and over again. Reports of sexual harassment should be taken seriously and a bannable offence.

@alice

1. A social feed of sorts. Seeing how people interact in community is a valuable barometer of their behaviour. E2E encrypted messaging too! Maybe a limited pool of matches each day that correspond to metrics rated on importance.

2. Lex's social feed, and the ability to create group chats with like minded folk.

3. Swiping, its designed for engagement farming.

4. Encryption!

@alice can't think of anything not already mentioned in this very thorough thread, but wanted to endorse the idea and add to the consensus that this should be a thing. Also, have to agree that for a long time pre-tinderized OKCupid was the benchmark for online dating, there's a lot to learn from their early days.

@alice mentioning just because it seems to not be a feature on any dating site or app I've ever seen: The ability to restrict matches by country, not just distance. For example, I live close to the Canada-US border but will never ever visit the US ever again (The last thing I need is my disabled ass to be disappeared into a concentration camp). So matches 30 km away in the US might as well be 3,000 km. I would like to restrict matches to within Canada only in addition to whatever distance radius I set.

@alice

1 + 4) a verification and reputaion system (to prevent scammers and honeypots better)

2) simple filtering systems to target search

3) Paywalls and persons who either just RP or have no serious intent to join.

@alice For me at least, I think it would have to be on a separate Fedi profile. Because any dating thingy is going to need me to disclose some info that I might not otherwise want to disclose. Eg, my real age (within a ballpark at least), my real physical location (again, roughly), my sexuality, and probably eventually a real photo of me. Most of those can probably be easily obtained with a few minutes' well-intentioned doxxing, but I still don't want to permanently pin them to my profile.

@alice@lgbtqia.space I've been on dating apps for a long time, and am prone to strong opinions:

1. Features

• I like specific profile fields for things like hobbies, interests, hell even just top 5 movies, over bios. I'm bad at actually talking about myself in large quantities. Could be a mix and match where you can fill out the ones you like.
• Filterable opinions on having children
• Actually respecting what people put in their interested in section, and preferably not showing people to people they wouldn't be interested in. Specifically talking about gender here, I put in no men in my preferences, and after a while about 90% of my feed was men.
• Fedi specific, but a relay would be nearly essential for anything federated like this. Having one that's a default option to connect to would probably be a good idea, along with a site where people can list their own relays for more specific purposes, like a general area.
• Filter for people looking for romantic/platonic/sexual relationships, potentially with combo options? (i.e. someone looking for an FWB could put platonic+sexual)
• An expected seriousness of the relationship (are you just looking for a consistent casual sex partner on a month-long work trip, are you expecting to move after college, do you want to look at settling down, etc)

2. Features from other sites

• I really like OKC's questions they ask. Simple yes/no, with a place to explain questions. Obviously not perfect, but a decent way to filter people for big questions.

3. Features I don't like from other sites

• My desire to find love being sold for a profit is a big one I don't care for
• If swiping is present as a mechanism, please, please make it a toggle. I don't mind swiping as a concept, but it is very easy to accidentally pass on someone that I was scrolling a profile for, and they're just gone now. It's easy enough to undo an accidental like, but an accidental pass is usually something you can't undo

4. Safety features

• Allowing people to put in where they're physically located rather than going based on IP/Geo data
• Not showing where people are from publicly would stop at least most people from getting that info. That would be harder to do consistently, and wouldn't stop server admins from seeing it, but it'd mostly stop random people who're just skimming the surface.
• Maybe allowing people to select the areas they're willing to date from, since X distance would be a touch less consistent if the service doesn't know where you're physically located
• Require a certain amount of messages before you can receive images, potentially even disabling receiving images entirely. I emphasize receive because federation has weird ways of getting around rules, and just disabling images from being displayed would probably be more consistent.

I think that's it, but we'll see what comes to me after I hit reply

@alice

1. Being able to find someone 😉

2. and 3. Can't say, as I did not try them.

4. Idk.