noughtnaut

Thank you for asking.

The theme can be answered a number of different ways.

• In one sense, I strive to at least support (if not outright focus on) minorities rather than simply catering to the mononormative.
• In another sense, one goal that doesn’t directly relate to dating is to offer a platform that is independent (of Match Group) and EU-centric in terms of both client focus and technical infrastructure.
• I want to bring back a lot of what has been lost to enshittification in other apps, things I’ve personally been missing and also seen being a common complaint when dating apps in general are discussed online. If you’ve been on, say, OkC more than a year, you’ll probably remember valuable, useful features that just aren’t there anymore.
• If you’ve been on any dating app, you know how icky and frustrating and just straight up annoying the apps themselves are (before you even factor in the behaviour of the users, and their reasons).

Ideally, a dating app should have massive amounts of transient users. If you have users who’ve been there for years, you’re not giving them what they want (but you might be giving them something else in order to keep them hooked…).

So as for the monetary goal, there are many gates that must be passed before finances become a critical issue. I’ve published things as open source, and if six users find you, you have six happy users. A dating app not only requires a massive amount of users, it also requires significant local user density for it to be useful. I am fundamentally aiming for low cost of upkeep with the goal of enabling the app to survive having relatively few users, even if they aren’t paying much.

I can say this much: I’ve done the math and am pretty confident in being able to deliver at a fraction of the cost of any existing offering. My plan is to offer no free tier (huge barrier, I am aware) but then offer a very-reasonably-priced paid tier that unlocks everything. I want the app to be transparent, helpful, and eschewing dark patterns and money-grabbing schemes. I don’t expect you to believe it, but I’m not doing this for the purpose of profit; I just don’t think a dating app that’s entirely free is going to work very well vis-a-vis attracting high-quality participants.

Do I think I’ve “cracked” or “solved” online dating? Absolutely not. There are things I know I will never do, other things I know I’ll be (almost) the only one to do, and a number of topics and issues that I don’t know even can be resolved in any meaningful way.

This is somewhat relatable: I’m building a dating app without blackjack and hookers. Well, at least without the blackjack.

Not gonna lie, it’s not a weekend project! And that’s before even considering the eventual launch and marketing.

I wonder if you would find Doctorow’s “Little Brother” more palatable. It’s set in “modern times” (ugh, depressing to admit that no, it’s more accurately set in recent past before things in real life went even crazier out of whack). Also, the main characters are teens and young adults, and while the target audience is “young adults” it can certainly be an eye-opening experience for adult “sheeple” too (not implying you’re one, to be clear).

I’ve never heard of this, that is very interesting and definitely goes to the top of my reading list. Thank you!

I do! I switched from KDE 3.5 (whenever that was current). I love KDE’s approach to making everything adjustable (as opposed to Gnome’s “you’ll get one button and you better love it”) but with KDE 4 on the horizon it seemed to bloat too much for my tastes.

I love how it’s a (for me) perfect mix of making a ton of things adjustable while appearing extremely no-frills. Easy on the ram, CPU, and eyes. 👌

Good questions.

That first one’s a real head-scratcher: who would ever want to be the very first member on a dating app? I hear Tinder had “launch parties” but then I’m sure they had about 100% more funding that I do (which is none). In fact, what even is the smallest useful density of users? It’s obviously quite varied across geography, it won’t matter if there are 100.000 real people if they’re all in Belgium (sorry, Belgium).

One approach to lessen scammers is to require phone numbers rather than email addresses, and yes I’m aware that “lessen” does not equate “fix” – not by a long shot. There’s plans for supporting national eID’s of various target countries, but that should/will be a voluntary thing for users, but not every nation has a solution that “random apps” can build an integration with. Another remedy, I’m afraid to say, is to have no free tier - in fact my plan is to have only a paid tier, but also only one paid tier (reasonably priced, even) so everyone get’s access to everything on a level playing field. Then peer review and moderation (if people can be made to be arsed about it).

Lastly, one way to answer that is the wry practical perspective of (a) having few users (in the beginning at least), (b) don’t aim globally, © efficient data schema, (d) offer relatively low-res photos (eg. 800px should be “good enough” for a 3-inch-wide display), plus a bunch of other practicalities. Seriously, you don’t need “real time”, if you can’t be patient enough to wait for ¼ second between swipes, you’re probably not going to be a fun date anyhow. The real selling point is the features, not the performance.

«Dating apps don’t sell love. They sell the feeling that it is one premium upgrade away.» is exactly the sentiment I want to combat. If the user can trust that there isn’t “just one more payment” holding them back, what might they truly want out of a dating app? I’m guessing one thing is “honesty”.

I am very carefully trying to find a space to share with people that I’m building yet another dating app. Ugh, yes, but…

I cannot believe that these offerings must be so expensive, and so enshittified. Where is the open source mentality?

I don’t want to be blocked for selling things (I’m really not), but I hope to find a place to start a conversation about what an actually user friendly offering could look like.

So you’re running bash “as if you’re on the host systen”. What’s the benefit?

Since the first time of seeing it on a Mac (Plus, probably), I’ve been in love with Palatino. It just seems to flow so nicely, and the italic is gorgeous.

I missed it for many years until I found TeX Gyre Pagella.

Same! I find sketchup so incredibly intuitive compared to the other apps mentioned here, it just vanishes into the background of what I’m creating. Granted, it’s got a few quirks running under Linux, and getting an STL file out if it requires a few hoops, but I can do things I can’t do otherwise - not that the other apps can’t make the shapes, but the parametric paradigm inhibits my creative flow.

I’ve never had a contract that didn’t say that. I always pushed back. Without exception, the response was that hobby projects and open spar stuff is fiiine as long as you don’t use company machines, time, resources, or compete with their market.

Serious question: what if I am, and have no idea how to prep for it?

My pension and other things are tied up in stocks and such, if there’s a crash coming I’d think cash under the pillow would be better than stocks. But how do you do that, with your pension?

Didn’t think one was needed.

It does need to be Internet connected. It’s critical for patching remote exploit vulnerabilities…

I don’t know you but I love you for that Palatino statement. I’ve used it since forever (ie. back when Macs were black and white) and just love the curves of the italic style. These days, on Linux, I use Tex Gyre Pagella for basically all my documents.

For UI like menus and such, I’m quite nostalgic for the Chicago font - yes, pixelated and aliased and everything.

Agreed on your last point. That’s when programs still had proper tool bars and keyboards shortcuts, before the “ribbon” shit started to fuck over everyone’s muscle memory.

It would have made sense for MS to start with “finger painting UI” and then work towards the power user UI - but the other way round makes zero sense to my poor brain.

This is what I call “confidently wrong”. If you ask it about things you have no clue about, it seems incredibly well-informed and insightful. Ask it something you know deeply, and you’ll easily see it’s just babbling and spouting nonsense - sure makes you wonder about those earlier statements it made, doesn’t it?

Precrime wioll haven be here.

Perhaps this is all just highly refined British humour?

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term “Future Perfect” has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.

It would be hilarious to see random civilians being casually followed by a policeman (policeperson?), overtly and cheerfully “nah mate, you haven’t done a thing. I’m just here to watch. For now. Carry on.”

Really, you’ll get proficient in no time. The trick is to go all in with touch typing, no hint and peck!

When I was in my late 20s I spent one low-activity work week transitioning to Dvorak. I have used it for 20+ years now (although it’s a bitch to get working on subpar OS’es).

You can maintain both skills, but I chose to let my qwerty skills fade - now I only use it on mobile (because, I loathe typing on glass and so swipe whenever I can - and swiping is hilariously useless with Dvorak because it’s so well laid out).