Fetlife is not a dating app. They have actively not implemented features such as filter by age/gender in order to avoid becoming a dating app. If you are looking to get involved in your local kink community, Fetlife is the answer [0]. For anything else, it is garbage. If you try using it to get laid, you will just be pissing a bunch of people off.
[0] At least for my local kink community. Other areas might vary.
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
Bumble is terrible for meeting people. Once you match someone they have 24 hours to respond. I'm fine with the woman needing to message first, but if you don't respond in that 24 hours their match is removed. What if that woman has a life and didn't open the app that day? Oh but you can spend money to extend that window. So if she's on vacation yay you get to buy extensions for a week. It's just a scam.
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.
Seriously, the free tier in every app allows for enough opportunities to match with someone. Whether that happens is really a matter of your looks (or well, the photos you're using).
Getting lots of matches is useless when you're looking for a handful of great matches. For that you need a great matching mechanism with thousands of parameters - what OkCupid used to have before Match Group destroyed it.
Just so you're aware, Match owns OkCupid now, as well as Tinder, Hinge, Plenty of Fish and a bunch of other smaller dating sites. I don't think they've all been ruined as much as Match yet, but it's probably only a matter of time.
And one of them (Match?) apparently hsd a decency algorithm that matched people on things like religion and politics, but was disabled after being bought out.
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.
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.
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.
Okie dokie. Didn't really think so, but it's by far the best app I have used with essentially no pay well so I figure I'd mention it for anyone else who sees this thread.
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.
The fediverse as designed is actually pretty inefficient. If it ever were to go to Reddit scale it would melt down.
That's because there's effectively no batching for federation currently ... every single vote from an instance is forwarded back to the instance hosting the community and must be processed individually. So if you get 500k votes on something even if it's from 200 servers, the servers hosting the community have to be able to withstand the flood of votes and store the associated data... And that's just votes.
Worse yet, those votes then get replayed to every single one of those 200 servers one by one. So every server needs 500k vote entries and all the associated traffic ... even if half of the servers are just 1 guy looking at cat videos once a month.
Federating actually is way more expensive than just adding another user as designed.
That's kinda the exact opposite. Not many people want to use small instances, so not many people are interested in fixing something like that. However, let's say lemmy.world becomes unusable because of too much cross-server communication. That would cause inconvenience to way more people, increasing the likelihood that someone will do the work to fix it.