I liked OkCupid’s question system, but since that place has become unusable there is no good way of meeting people online without investing considerable effort sifting through discord servers and whatnot. I had high hopes for Matrix, but Matrix turned out to have a fair share of rooms full of really mentally ill people set on evading moderation.
I’m not talking about romantic or sexual dating, that is not the aim. So far I’ve only met one person online who proved to be a consistent friend.
The whole conundrum is so troubling to me that I have started thinking about building a crude matching algorithm and using that for a FLOSS chatting site that doesn’t have pictures, bios, searchable profiles and all that jazz. Just: ‘yes’/‘no’ and 6 pt scale questions. Maybe also a contrast mode to discover radically different people. The biggest obstacle here would be certain legal questions (especially around liability.)
Before I start doing that I want to ask if anyone here knows of a decent site to meet people.
As a gamer: For only online communitys i’d say MMO Guilds are still a thing and can be a gateway into existing friendsgroups. VR Chat was doing ok in that regard too a few years back, no idea where they stand now. A guy i know spends most of his evenings there and has had several real live meetups with a group thad bonded there. A bit niche maybe. I have had regular contacts that build trough gaming and people inviting me into their discord servers (yes, yes, i know…), which lead to me joining some online Pen and Paper groups that often lead to releative good ways of finding cool people, because you tend to learn a lot about them when doing pen and paper.
If you’re not into online gaming but are ok with board games, there are several open meetups, at least in my area.
And finaly, local communitys are a thing. We have groups here that meet regulary and go pick up trash in the forest, for example. Or abowling, art or what ever club.
They killed OkCupid’s question match thing because it was working too well for giving you conversation starters.
Online dating sites aren’t profitable if you have successful dates and stop being single
Meetup.com is going strong. Lots of groups even in my relatively unpopular area
Meetup has recently doubled their prices to run a group, and it’s definitely impacting groups that I’m in. It’s not unusual for organizers to ask for $10-15 from attendees to cover these high organizer subscription costs.
It also feels excessively greedy that they have locked more features behind a user subscription.
I just checked this out but $10 a week just to find local groups is ridiculous! I’m not even looking for dates and now even the not-really-for-dating app is paid. No wonder people can’t meet anyone anymore.Edit: I was duped by their subscription screen. I was wrong
Wow, that’s pretty nuts. Good for them to not make it riddled with ads but $10 a month?!
$10? How do you get to that price? I see groups in my local area without even logging in. There is a Pro option, which is for organizers who organize more things.
I was duped by their subscription page during setup. I’ll edit my comment.
Do you mean online friendships, or meeting people online that are open to IRL friendships?
Anything, really.
For friendships, meetup is a nice way to meet people and do activities together. There’s a bunch of different groups that focus on different activities (board games, hikes, book clubs, etc.)
Dating wise, unfortunately the big popular apps are the way to go. (Tinder, hinge, coffee meets bagel). The problem with making your own is that you’d need users, ideally nearby. Not saying it’s not possible but it would take a long time, while the above apps already have that.
It’s true I’d need users. But what I am planning on making has one significant advantage, namely the, forgive my poor wording, overcoming of traditional economical constraints. The big technical challenge would probably be dealing with bots and finding the constraints that make it hard to act antisocially. I really want people to have access to a straight forward method of connecting with strangers that is unenshittifiable. Even if it doesn’t go anywhere, it’s still a practice in doing something better.
Oh please tell us more about Your matrix experience, you can’t leave us hanging like that
It’s multi-layered.
I tried out rooms that were a bit off the beaten path. It seemed like the smaller a room was the more racist and misogynistic the users, sometimes even flat out advocating fascism. I was not dealing with skinheads, these people were too awkward to have the experience necessary to understand why you would not want to be bigoted. We’re talking people with very narrow perspectives.
Then there was a person who I later found out was a l*li**n whose instance I joined. The tone of discussion there wasn’t terrible, certainly not as bad as the other smaller rooms, but the admin of the instance was prone to meltdowns and slightly controlling. I would have fights with him over politics since he was libertarian and I wasn’t. He would accuse me of not respecting other people’s opinions, including his own. Opinions like “ICE good, darn immigrants bad.” He would also accuse me of being combative and not being able to deal with criticism because I dissented when he gave his takes on politics that were verbatim positions from Ayn Rand Institute articles. He’d call me a collectivist without giving any argument as to why. My criticising and not letting myself be swayed by half-arguments somehow meant (to him) that I couldn’t handle or didn’t expect criticism.
At some point he sent me a meme insinuating he was, ahem, interested in his friends’ younger sisters when he was in high school. I regretfully tolerated that, but I stopped being able to take him seriously on some level. I decided to end the relationship after he wrote to me about sexual experiences he had when he was sixteen. I told him I didn’t want to hear any of it and went ahead non the less. Luckily the content wasn’t quite as explicit. If it had been I would have ended things on far colder terms.
Matrix is in general quite the different different experience. A handful of governments use it because Matrix is basically being marketed towards the security sector. I think a lot of the oddness also stems from that.
In my experience as a former free speech absolutist, I find that the best communities are well-moderated. Unmoderated ones inevitably become full of scam ads and csam links.
I’m all for Dread and Tor but I now understand them has necessarily double-edged swords
