This is a great space for FLOSS and federated software to fulfill a need.

What I mean is that Tinder and otherwise for-profit software uses drop feeds, so they deliberately give you only a bit of what you like in your feeds. How do they know what you like? The same way Facebook (via Facebook.com, Instagram, and WhatsApp) and all other for-profit social media companies do: they collect absurd amounts of data from you based on your behavior on the platforms. They then build predictive models to know what to show you, when to notify you, how to ask for money in the forms of “boosts” or “unlimited superlikes”. For example, “you found some attractive people today but didn’t kick it off with anyone just yet? Well, come back! Tomorrow we’ll send you a notification telling you someone liked you! Oh, you could also just boost your profile by paying.”

In effect, this keeps you on the verge of finding someone you would really kick off with quickly. This doesn’t have to be the case at all given what we know of how humans develop relationships and how algorithms can be used to arrive at clear-cut goals.

So FLOSS and federated software has the opportunity to actually define those algorithms in such a way as to satisfy people, either in a hookup-y sense or a relationship sense. That incentive, and not the one to maximize engagement and profits, is what could make stuff like Alovoa flourish.

I do think any FLOSS (and federated) dating app should leverage this as a marketing point: people are really kicking it off quickly.

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“Privately” and sign up with Google and Facebook are opposites statements