The destruction of OkCupid by Match Group looks like a politically motivated attack against the minorities and intellectual power users who used to flock there.
OkCupid used to be the best place to match diverse people.
They crowdsourced thousands of multiple choice questions from which you built your search filter:
- Which answers you accept
- How important each is to you
- Your answer for the other side of the match equation
- Voluntary explanation
The match results were factored into friendship, dating, and sex. “Friendship” contained ethics and communication style, so it also worked for business partnerships.
Then Match Group bought it.
For a while they let it be, but then they:
- Removed the factoring - no more looking for friends or sex, only complete packages
- Removed search - no more finding the best matches anywhere on the planet, now you just swipe like Tinder
- Removed keyword search - no more finding niche interests not included in the questions, like “furry”
- Removed the search filter - now everything has to be the same to match: both of you must have or not have tattoos for example, never mind what you like - one of my likes went from 95% to 50% match
- Deleted the voluntary explanations without warning, so no one could back theirs up
- Deleted ~95% of the match questions without warning
- Deleted all accumulated likes, which were the best matching people around the world with maximal couple/friend/sex partner potential except, for example, location for now. They broke the profile links, so bookmarks became useless.
- They delete matches (mutual likes) if they haven’t been messaging in a while, as if that meant they’re not a match - no, they have a temporary problem, such as life situation
- They police inconvenient statements in the users’ introductions as the political situation evolves - the day after the mass murderer healthcare insurance CEO got shot, the section in my profile containing (for months) “fuck the healthcare system - make a better one” was deleted without sending me a copy to edit
Would it be feasible to make an activitypub based successor?
It was a great service to find people with similar worldview, values, and interests.
There’s an open source dating app, I think its called alovoa? I think I remember seeing discussion on the subreddit about activity pub but I haven’t followed it or used the app for quite a while
Pretty sure it’s on f-droid though
The problem I see in trying to implement it using AP is that a node on an AP network knows nothing about other nodes by default. Whereas a dating site wants to match people with as many other likely partners from the pool available. These two features aren’t really compatible.
You’d need some kind of “master list” of instances, which isn’t really how AP decentralisation is meant to work.
e.g. lemmy/?bin. A new instance knows nothing about other instances when first setup. It works like a standalone forum. However a user, if they know a community name and instance name, they can search for that combined value and their instance subscribes to the remote instance. After that they will receive all new content for that community.
So it’s a subscription based system.
You could have location based instances as most people will be mainly interested in contacts geographically close to them. Federation would be more of a nice to have feature in that case for nearby cities that run their own instance for example.
Yep. But then the need for federation at all is a question mark. I guess users could “subscribe” to whole instances or some categorical subsets. Like lemmy/?bin you’d be able to see those other instances/categories on your own instance if someone else specifically added it before.
That’s about as close as you could get I think. Doing a full search on criteria could only match your own instance and others that are sending data to your own.