Hey there!
Last year, I fell into the Fediverse-rabbithole and I really like it so far. We already have alternatives for Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and so on.
But today I realized, there actually isn’t an alternative for tinder. But I think there could be a huge demand for it. This could also motivate people to change platforms, since no one wants to buy tinder premium for a lot of money.
But I think I’m maybe not the first one coming up with this idea. What do you think about this?
~ sp3ctre
How about doing some fine-grained control mechanism: you share little data publicly, then once somebody likes you, you can decide to share more with them. With some cryptography tricks should be possible to share this information only with the other person and not with their home servers.
I don’t think control features help much when one of the most basic question that you can ask is “What is your gender and who would you like to date?”. As I have already outlined in another comment in this thread, this information has to be shared with the federated network and is already enough to get people into serious trouble should it get into the wrong hands.
Alternatively think about it this way. Would you hand over this kind of information to a total stranger? Would you take on the responsibility of handling data that could literally kill someone if you make a mistake?
How about another type of control: by default your profile is not federated. Then you manually select the instances you trust. And your data getcs shared only with those. Dating usually is kind of local anyway. If i live in australiay I’m likely not interested in matches from the UK. So instances could already serve as some pre-selection based on your region and possibly community type.
I don’t think you can offload these kind of decision to the user. Just think about how effective the various fishing and social engineering attacks are. No, a fediverse dating app would have to be secure by default. The only possibility I see for this is something that involves homomorphic encryption, an encryption method that allows you to operate on data without having to decrypt it first, but I know nothing about that topic so I could be completely wrong. This vague idea of a solution might be technically impossible after all.