this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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Basically, what the title says. Do you use any app, that is proprietary, but either has no OSS alternatives or they're all not good enough? If there is an alternative, what keeps you from switching?

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[–] DarkCloud@lemmy.world 27 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)

Dating apps.

We need an open source completely free dating app.

No paying for matches, no limits ...just they're in your town, you look at their photos, you can talk, anyone can block anyone.

[–] fossphi@lemm.ee 16 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I don't really care for online dating, but I remember coming across this. They claimed to be open source.

https://alovoa.com/?lang=en

[–] noughtnaut@lemmy.world 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm honestly pleasantly surprised to see that this project seems to be rather actively developed.

Which is completely separate from having a meaningful user base (near you), so 🤷

[–] fossphi@lemm.ee 4 points 2 months ago

Which is completely separate from having a meaningful user base (near you), so 🤷

Yep, this unfortunately seems to be a much hard problem

[–] noughtnaut@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

I'm with you, but see a million obstacles (aka. reasons for why things require payments).

You would need some form of moderation, to weed out illegal content as well as simply bots, spam, and dead profiles. Also for message content. I've given it some thought and suspect it can be crowd sourced to some degree, but also needs counter balances. Instead of limiting a profile to be live/banned, you could have a percentage score of peer-reported subjective legitimacy (ditto for message responses, heck you could even have a section of outright reviews of the person's behaviour - although that, again would be subject to abuse and moderation).

Hosting, traffic, etc. would be an unavoidable cost, but can be mitigated with low resolution photos (VGA should be "good enough" for an initial impression, no?)

For sure, an open source solution would offer way more fine grained filtering.

[–] filister@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Great, but creating such an app would require someone to foot the bill for hosting user data, the web app and this can easily amount to quite a substantial sum. Not to mention that supporting this app would also be quite time consuming.

[–] DarkCloud@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

So write it to be decentralized, like BitTorrent or limewire, but for dating.

[–] iturnedintoanewt@lemm.ee 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Not to mention you'd need moderation for all kinds of scams or even pedo stuff... It's a risky one.

[–] DarkCloud@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Legal waiver (no one under 18) and six picture limit, you can only change your pictures once a week.

[–] chebra@mstdn.io -5 points 2 months ago

@DarkCloud create a Mastodon instance, write your instance rules, moderate. That's it. Plus you'll be connected to the whole fediverse, existing client apps will work.