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.
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.