I recall hearing about Alovoa a year ago and while it sounds nice with no ads or paid features, being open source, and private data being encrypted I have to imagine the userbase is incredibly small relative to other services. Google Play lists it at over a thousand downloads but it’s also available through F-Droid so that may not mean much. I have to imagine the userbase is mostly men which might prevent some users from joining or sticking around.
Either way (TL:DR) I’d be curious to see what your experiences are with open source dating apps or even apps designed around making friends.
The problem is most of us techy people that care about open source are introverts …
Try meeting some normies via websites like meetup or local hobby communities.
I’ve had good luck meeting fellow computerphiles because we’re in the same circle of friends and we even have our own events now IRL (LAN parties, retro arcade nights, programmer trivia nights etc)
I miss hanging out at bookstores, with comfortable seating areas and coffee shops and maybe a quiet musician on weekends… met some really smart and educated people that way.
I recently wandered into an old Borders like that where I used to spend a lot of time years ago, which is now a Books-a-Million. It was like being in a K-Mart. Dirty, dimly-lit, product stacked randomly everywhere (including just left on stocking carts abandoned in the aisles), hot because they had the A/C set to barely run at all (everyone inside was sweating), all seating gone, the kitchen area just ripped out and bare plumbing left exposed, with hardly any staff or customers in there at all. The book selection was gutted down to be mostly romance, horror, manga and self-help. I guess that’s what the few people still coming in buy.
It was pretty depressing.