Would a federated dating site work well? What would it look like?

ActivityPub protocol so that anyone can run their own instance, but can also be blocked if anything heinous happens.

The overlap between the users who will run their own instance and the users you want for a dating app is the empty set.

(Speaking as someone that runs a personal Lemmy instance here)

Neckbeards fighting about Linux. No girls in sight.

Like Lemmy.

I don't think there's any chick's here dude. It's just us.

In theory? Yes. In reality? No.

Besides all the practical reasons already mentioned, it's simply a question of marketing to get people into it. Which costs money noone wants to pay because it kills the principle of breaking free of corpo-hold. Without marketing you'll end up with the nerds that are already here (majority). And of those, the majority are probably also male.

And on top of that, you might find other people living in NYC but what about smaller cities or even foreign ones? With reddits userbase you probably could, but you don't reach them because they already prefer mainstream-stuff 😐

You need actual moderation to keep people safe.

I swear there’s a group of people who want everything to be “federated” without really understanding what that means. It’s cryptobros 2.0. Let’s make a block-chain based dating app too!

Congrats you discovered a new technology - not everything needs to run on that technology.

I think people need to go outside and interact with each other in person. That's the best way to date.

I don't think it federates, but there's Alovoa, an open source dating platform.

Wouldn't work.

Much of the online dating market is an oligopoly run by two main players: Match Group and Bumble Inc.

Bumble Inc own Bumble and Badoo while Match Group own nearly every other major platform like Hinge, Tinder, OkCupid, POF and a few others.

This oligopoly is the reason why mainstream online dating is an unmoderated mess filled with scammers, OnlyFans advertising bots and otherwise fake users. Said users inflate the company's registration metrics massively and sucker people into paying several times the price of a WoW subscription just to see who liked their profile. Major switches to mobile also make it much harder for users to run reverse image searches and weed out these fakes more quickly.

A dating platform on the fediverse would be an even worse experience, not because of corporate greed but because inviting everybody and their mother to create a new instance creates serious content moderation issues. Expect this platform to be even more flooded with bots, spammers, scammers and other bad actors.

I never understood reddit as a dating site. And the problems there are only amplified on Lemmy.

1. user density in the geographic region I would date within. With reddit, at least I was quite sure there were other users within an hours drive of me

2. it's not a dating site and not set up with the guardrails needed to make it even marginally safe. If a person on Bumble starts being scary, there are some ways to report then and they will possibly be removed or restricted from the platform. On reddit and Lemmy, the responses will be one of the following "free speech, get wrecked", "if you don't want to be abused/harassed, you shouldn't go into public spaces", or "you signed up for the site, you asked for it", or "give them a chance, they are probably just not good at dating skills" or even Andrew Tate acolyte bullshit that I don't want to think about.

3. distribution of gender and of sexual orientation across the platform. I would be surprised if Lemmy userbase is less than 95% men. Unless those men are gay/bi at an improbably high rate, there aren't going to be many people available to match with.

4. "everyone have a good time, we're here for love" says the hordes of people who are actually here to waste time with no intention to actually date, cruise for nudes, or to data mine peoples personal information.

Tl;Dr if actual dating apps are not bringing a person dating success, nothing about Lemmy will be any better.

That is a terrible idea

Federated or not, dating sites don't work well

The main hurdles I see are

1. moderation of troll users, the unending flood of dick pics.

2. Spammers, catfishers, who love to flood these sites.

3. Not giving away too much privacy in terms of location sharing, or seeing who matches with whom.

4. Safety, what if something goes wrong with a date, what recourse do people have?

I think the upside is bigger then the downsides. It's worth the effort to build, just needs lots of thought to do in a decentralized way.

Somehow you'd want to continuously federate new instances to keep the userbase connected.

the problem with dating platforms is like they open and people start mixing and then many just leave the dating pool as they match up or give up. The remaining people lean a little less dateable. Once this short term process repeats a hundred times there's always some degree of permament toxic residents on a dating site.

This begs a feature dating sites should have is a shutdown date the minute they open.

Each person could keep a log of people they know who are single, and then when someone asks if they know anyone who might be interested in going on a date, they could instantly recall a suggestion from their cache! Distributed, peer reviewed recommendation, local. The best part is that it doesn't even require a computer!

I'm a coder and I have no idea how to do this

Do you want it to show matches with people who are around your location, or anyone on the internet? If it's the latter, maybe try starting a dating community, if there isn't one already.

You could have people start a thread with the basic info: age, location, gender, sexuality, etc. Then what you're looking for: age range, hookup or long term, etc.

The comments could be general questions like an AMA to get a better idea.

If someone likes your style, they can send OP a DM

If it’s on Lemmy it would be a hilarious political purity test to see who could virtue signal harder. It would be insufferable. That’s why most users don’t have any kids or spouses. I honestly couldn’t think of a worse place to set up a dating service.