Is there a chat/dating app that isn't complete shit and pay wall restricted?

Grindr. It's only partly shit.

RIP if you're looking for women.

The hard to swallow answer here is this:

Dating apps, like all apps, are majorly funded by giant companies, because there's no realistic path to scaling up from 100 users to millions of users without a bunch of investment money.

Say I want to create a new, decent app that takes us back to the days of stuff like early OkCupid which was smartly done and actually worked okay.

Well, if it gets any amount of quick adoption, I'll be going from really low costs to astronomical hosting costs almost overnight. Often, the "checks haven't cleared" as they say and while you've technically been paid, it's all waiting in escrow or bank transfers or what fucking have you and you have giant bills falling due and no way to pay them

That's why this happens to every single app under the sun. They're left making tough decisions and selling out to unscrupulous people.

Because what no one wants to admit is that the funding model to how to make almost anything function on the internet at-scale where millions of people use it is fundamentally broken.

I mean fuck, isn't that why we're on the federated splinter-net where people can justify the costs of their small corner of federation, easing the overall load of financial demand?

Corporate internet is broken and they're chasing ridiculously thin numbers to constantly be making more.

So, you'd probably need some kind of federated solution to not have it be destroyed by corporatized enshittification.

Dating apps have never been my thing but I think this would be a good fediverse project, maybe linked with something like matrix.

A better question is can a dating app be good?

Around 2010, every tech bro that's creaming shorts over AI today was trying to figure out how to make money behind the fact that everyone had smartphones. But it turned out, that smartphones can't solve every problem.

Dating I would argue, is just one of those things tech made worse. Never mind how often the damn thing fails, think about the conditions where it would function well. A dystopian world where everything is shallow and operating on incel-math.

And how could it be otherwise? Dating apps are just math people trying to solve for love. This is the plot to a comedy movie, not a business plan.

Well, I know this won't be useful for a lot of people. But HER is a femme focused app (but open to all queer folk) that is super duper generious with the amount matches and chat it allows.

Fetlife can get you laid

No idea about Europe but Hinge is the one that I've known lots of people have successfully used, myself included, to find a relationship.

Not likely as that is how they make money, lure men in with fake female accounts and make them pay for more swipes, more messages, more prominent messages, read notifications.

I used Bumble to find my now fiance. I didn't pay for it, but also was patient and treated it like an investment instead of expecting immediate results. Ymmv

I'm holding the torch for OkCupid. I've met my SOs there. Many queer folk, leftists, likes work reasonably well and you even get free "superlikes" once a week. Messages are free, likes are free.

I used the Boo app to find my now fiancee. You can talk with people and it has a quasi social media aspect to it that you can also use to chat with more people, I live in a major city and managed to talk to a handful of people on the time I was there, some of those were started by them too. The chatting wasn't limited iirc it's a friends/dating app.

Granted I was rated 8/10 on the rate me subreddit so take that as you will.

Fetlife if you’re kinky. You gotta use it to find local events with fellow kinky people, meet up, vet each other. Etc etc.

There is Alovoa, it's open source, still has a small user base, but you don't have anything to lose...