That’s exactly what Retromeet was trying to do :)
Though I do agree that having a broader scope than just the hot-or-not swipe thing would really help to attract enough people to join. Retromeet doesn’t seem to do that, though I haven’t used it so I could be wrong.
Other apps do have some good anti-bot measures which could be adopted for a FOSS project. The problem with a lot of cryptographic solutions for this is that often cryptography is usually more about proving your identity more than proving something about your identity. Tor is also focused on privacy from middle-men, which doesn’t really make sense for a dating app.
I think the challenge boils down to how to prove you’re human without biometrics or other PII. And I think the sad reality is that you can’t prove it. Though you may be able to prove you have unique PII with some sort of zero-knowledge proof…
Unfortunately I think projects like this have extra challenges over even regular social media platforms. There’s also retromeet which seems even more dead (it may have not even made it to a stable release).
The idea is great but for a dating app to work, it needs to quickly get past two network effects: the global network effect (there must be enough people globally, or in a larger region, to get other people interested in trying out the platform) and the local network effect (there must be enough people to match with in most users’ local areas to keep enough people interested). With corporate backing that’s easy enough to do with a dedicated team to market and develop, but FOSS rarely has that sort of manpower. Slow growth is hard too, since users tend to leave dating apps quite often.
There’s also the funny problem if the dev gets a partner usually the partner doesn’t appreciate them staying on dating apps. Developing a dating app could be even worse for the relationship… actually now that I think of it, maybe I should make start a similar project since I don’t like dating…
The mainstream apps (at least the ones that have been around a while) have bot ratios which are much better. They also have active moderation teams which remove profiles that make it through the automated protections. I’d guess they have ratios closer to 20:1 than 1:20 (people:bots)
I can only guess but I think it’s a combination of a lack of effective anti-bot protections and it being a sort of dead platform (so the only users that remain are largely bots which never leave)
I’ve used it before. The bigger problem for me was the people to bot ratio was worse than 1:20
This reads like LLM slop.
According to technical reports from Phoronix, the milestone was reached by Alyssa Rosenzweig, a key figure in the graphics driver development for the Asahi Linux project.
The linked Phoronix article (published yesterday) credits Michael Reeves, noopwafel, and Shiz and does not mention Alyssa Rosenzweig at all.
The speed at which the M3 was tamed—booting into a KDE Plasma desktop environment so soon after the hardware’s retail release—
The M3 is two generations old at this point…
Booting a kernel is one thing; rendering a fluid graphical user interface is entirely another. The M3 achievement is particularly notable because it involves the GPU, historically the most obfuscated component of any System on Chip (SoC).
Again, the Phoronix article (and its linked Xwitter post) completely contradict this, saying instead the rendering is done with “LLVMpipe CPU-based software acceleration”. The GPU is only involved in so far as is necessary to send data to the display.
This article is misinformation, which is against this community’s rules.
Maybe we can agree to disagree because I don’t think a specific demographic is enough to overcome the negative network effect at the start. The problem, imo, is that the attrition rate of dating apps is really high and dating apps are only good if a lot of people are located geographically nearby. You either need broad appeal to avoid running out of people early on or a demographic that is unusually geographically concentrated and usurps the attrition rate (ENM comes to mind for the latter).
Of course, you could always make something for dating without the geo proximity, but I think most people won’t want to use something like that at all.
The beauty of new FOSS projects is that they’re quite often hosted and developed for free, so I don’t think that’s much of a limiting factor as long as the community is there. That’s also why I think it’s important to make it big quickly, because that’s the way to get a big enough community before the creator loses interest.