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.
Will your dating site have a theme?
Is there a monetary goal behind it and if so,
how would you deal with the service becoming a huge success,
while consequently memberships drop?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.
oooh so sorry, but that’s a meme. -12 piefed score, also your instance is now shadowbanned. Gotta deal with the consequences of your actions chief…
Tale as old as time…I’ve seen it so many times in my professional life and also in activism. Hell, I’ve done it.
Things look so easy from the outside. All the flaws seem like they can be fixed without much effort, why can’t the people in charge see it? Then you rush in and try to do it yourself without an understanding of why things are the way they are and BAM you hit a wall. Suddenly things aren’t so easy. Suddenly you can’t fix all the mistakes. And you are making new ones.
I’m not saying people shouldn’t try new things, but rushing in without trying to take some lessons from the existing systems without judgement is foolishness.
My secret is that I talk myself out of it before I even start : D
I’ve never been able to talk myself out of anything. Like I will have the entire thought process and think maybe it’s a bad idea, and I shouldn’t speak my mind, but I really want to so I do. It has not yielded good results
Wise af
Fun fact, Rimu takes after George Orwell and keeps lists of “undesirables:”
I’m so insulted by not being on that list!
new life goal
Seems people that post more than comment weren’t on the list, or maybe I am not familiar enough with the others.
I guess to be fair I never actually posted anything on piefed, I just called him out when he came to troll on lemmy.
I didn’t either, lol. Just @'d a certain “history major” social fascist from a Lemmy.ml thread, debunking claims about the 1930s soviet famine.
lmao that’s definitely a bannable offence
For the devout anti-communist Rimu? Absolutely. Here’s the MOG thread discussing it.
CW: Ableism, misgendering
these people just can’t help tell on themselves
Haha wow, I can’t believe I made the list for calling him an asshole that time. I was wondering why there was so much less crap on my feed lately.
To be fair, being banned does not mean you do not see it, just that they do not see you.
Fuck, I gotta post harder
You’ll get there!
Did he miss mine?
There are zero hexbear admins on there. I feel ashamed. We have failed. One of the legs of the stankie triad has been broken.
Hexbear is fall.
Millions must post hog
Pretty sure that’s more because Piefed.social is defederated from Hexbear.net, there are some powerful posters beyond the defed wall Rimu would probably happily add.
The great defed-firewall isn’t designed to keep the bears in the cage. It’s designed to keep us out of your cage.
Pre-emptively as a last resort
Although to be fair, defederation has been used by Hexbear to protect marginalized comrades from more dangerous instances, so this is both justified and still keeping bigots out.
We call those mosquito net firewalls. Those nasty little things carry nasty diseases we don’t want to get transmitted among the community, and also even if they were clean of infectious matter, their nips itch and they annoyingly divebomb our ears all the time at night.
Yep, agreed, some instances would just raise the moderator workload incredible levels to stay federated.
At least slop is represented
How did you do that “emoji”? Is it a feature of some frontend? Seems fun
Anything can become emoji sized if you just add emoji to the title (
)Lemmy also has support for adding custom emojies that will show up in the emoji selector (at least on the web ui, I think many apps don’t have support for selecting emojies). It requires the admins of your instance to add them though. You can get the emojies from another instance by using the addon mathemachristian linked to.
Anything can become emoji sized if you just add emoji to the title (
)Oh wow, that is invaluable info, thanks so much!
Lemmy also has support for adding custom emojies that will show up in the emoji selector (at least on the web ui, I think many apps don’t have support for selecting emojies). It requires the admins of your instance to add them though. You can get the emojies from another instance by using the addon mathemachristian linked to.
I thought that was just a regular old emoji picker, I didn’t know admins could add custom emojis there.
Thanks for explaining!
Something I didn’t say is that of course things have to be made for being emoji sized. Things can be hard to make out at that size, so just taking any picture and posting it as an emoji might not work.
Yeah that’s obvious enough I think, but thanks for making sure to mention it anyways :)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lemmy-emojis/
Alternatively make a hexbear account and copy it from a draft comment
That’s really useful, thanks!
We’re proud of our big beautiful pigs leading the vanguard to the trough of victory
@[email protected] add us to your list or your a lib
They secretly love yalls rad pictures. I love your rad pictures but its not a secret.
What the hell! How am I not on this list! Unforgivable.
Gotta grind those points up!
I thought this comment would have done it.
Fair enough, I would think that would earn you a ban over some of what the others posted.
deleted by creator
Fuck, I am not on the cool club list.
Better try harder to get on it for rev 2!
i’m somehow disappointed that i didn’t make the list. lol
We’ll all get there one day lol
Two years I’ve been posting communist propaganda straight from Bezos’s mouth, what have I been doing wrong that I’m not on the list 😔
I’m not upset, just would’ve been nice to be recognized
We’ll all get into the hall of fame eventually, comrade 🫡
A hall of fame I kind of want to be in. Perhaps I should take up posting.
P.S. I noticed that your image is missing alt text. Something like “Long list of users who allegedly harass Rimu” would probably fit.
I forget, how do you add alt-text again? I keep forgetting the right way to do it.
The syntax for images in markdown is
.Edit: Feels ridiculous to have to use a real image for this. Lemmy really seems to dislike image-like formatting in code blocks.
wrong
I think it’s
No it is alt text in the square brackets and title in the quotations
lets test it
yeah you’re right
<img src="https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/c09846dd-823e-4dc8-a486-f10a5696b620.webp?format=webp" alt="PFLP poster" title="PFLP poster that says 'Do you commend hamas?'">could have sworn I saw it the other way around and thought it weird which is why I remembered it but apparently it’s not like that…
But it shouldn’t do that when enclosed in a code/preformatted block?
It shouldn’t but the markdown parser is for whatever reason not that good.
Looks like it’s using markdown-it, a Rust port of a JavaScript library with the same name.
It looks unmaintained. Last commit is from 2 years ago and issues look inactive. (including one asking asking about the maintenance status)
Thanks!
Nice alt text, very concise!
Thanks!
Used to do that all the time but a certain someone got all my carefully labeled images nuked when they got banned.
My apologies to my differently sighted people out there. I hope I can be strong for you once more.
Does anyone have the list of extremely cool and sexy posters?
I think it’s the same list 😎
Idk, not the list I’d see myself on 😂
You’ll get there!
i feel disappointed in myself, what am i doing im not on the list…
It’s okay comrade, we’ll all get there eventually lol.
In honesty, I think Rimu just scans certain threads and adds up everyone that doesn’t support them. If Rimu actually spent time checking everyone’s account, way more people would be banned as even comrade @[email protected] is on the list despite being one of the least confrontational people I’ve seen on the fediverse.
im upping the ante to get there comrade -.-7
🧉I am having my morning mate right now
for real? you from latam or syria? there was a big syrian migration to argentina and when some returned to their country they took mate with them. i cannot live without mate.
I’m from Iran but I worked with an Argentinian for a few years in like 2010 and he refused to drink mate by himself so we used to leave the office and sit outside smoking and drinking mate during breaks and I got hooked. Mi favorito es el Rosamonte, pero voy probando otras cosas. Esta mañana estoy tomando Hierbas Silvestres.
lol, yeah, mate has to be shared! si podes proba estancia la merced, tienen distintas “cepas” de yerba que van de lo mas suave a lo mas amargo. my favourite is barbacuá which has a smoky bitter taste.
i’ve started getting into mate by accident recently because they were out of cold brewed coffee; something about it is dramatically more effective at making me productive and the thought of coupling it with a cigarette nicotine buzz feels like overkill to me.
but now that i know that’s a thing, i’ll probably end up doing it. lol
Lmao, that’s fantastic o7
https://piefed.social/u/[email protected]
This user does not exist.Edie getting caught up in the ban wave 😭
Classic humans projecting their behaviour on cats. There is nothing to worry about.
Omfg piefed. When you are logged in you can see banned people, when you are not you get a blank page with “not found.”
Amazing web design.
Doesn’t even have a proper 404 view, but yeah “Lemmy’s development is too slow”
It’s easy to go fast when you don’t care about anything but new features.
Piefed is developed like a startup trying to disrupt a market, which makes sense when you consider their motivations and the main admins constant talk about “growth” for the fediverse
Rimu’s secretly just a massive Orwell fan, that’s why they are implementing social credit scores, erasing people, etc. it’s all one big reference /s
For our next harassment campaign I propose the slogan “Rimu is a cat hater”. I have enough funds for cardboards we just need some marker to spread the message trough the streets of the fediverse.
I’m also deleted from piefed.social but not special enough for the list. I never coordinated with anyone, I just meme what comes naturally!
To be fair, there’s no evidence that any of us coordinated anything, it’s just what Rimu personally believes.
acts in an extremely hypocritical and provocative way that naturally raises lots of questions from many people
noo why are they’re coordinating attacks against me they need to be banned from everywhere 😭
Yea it’s all self-inflicted.
how dare people read the posts he makes and have opinions!
Yep, truly.
I wouldn’t assume he believes what he says.
I also wouldn’t assume that he doesn’t believe it, I could believe either outcome equally. Nevertheless, it’s how Rimu chose to present it, and how Rimu chose to present it is baseless.
Yeah I know what it is like to get targeted by people on lemmy like Sunshine but also I never tried to embrace, extend and extinguish lemmy while building tools to silence people. I just had opinions on an instance I paid for and ran.
Fair lol
Oh lordy, ever have one of those moments when you know you’re about to do something dumb, but do it anyway? Well, I would ask that you folks stop for a moment, and observe this situation from an outsider’s perspective. From where I sit, this very thread right here looks like a harassment campaign.
To an outsider’s perspective you read like someone with an agenda trying to muddy the waters. No one who has even the most passing understanding of what a harassment campaign is or looks like would see this thread and think that’s what’s going on here. People justifiably laughing at some bozo who put them on an undesirables list because they said things he didn’t like is not harassment. Wherever you’re “sitting,” it is definitely not from some neutral third party position like you’re implying, so stop making a fool out of yourself by pretending it’s the dozens of the rest of the commenters here who are saying things they’d look back on with regret and self-cringe, instead train that “outsider’s perspective” into a mirror.
What’s hilarious is that I knew that this kind of reply would be forthcoming. Thanks for not disappointing!
What does that even mean? “The counterargument to mine was so obvious that even I had already thought of it, thus making it invalid!”
“I’m not owned! In fact I’m laughing! I already knew how people would call out my hypocrisy but I posted cringe anyway. All you did was prove me right because I foretold it to myself.”
Gosh, so owned. So very, very owned. By such an intelligent and aesthetically pleasing being. What an honor!
-100 Piefed social credit
Not sure how you see that. This list came out, and people are reacting to it.
Look at the other replies I’ve received, and think about how people outside of your online community might feel being on the receiving end.
I’m outside this community. I mostly engage on different platforms but check in here sometimes to see what’s going on. I read this thread, and I looked at the replies you received and thought about how I might feel being on the receiving end.
I realized that everything everyone said to you was pretty accurate and fully understandable given the way you came in here and what you were saying. If I were on the receiving end, honestly I would feel ashamed for being such a public chucklefuck and nuisance to have gotten that well deserved excoriation, but then I’d do some self crit and resolve not to be such a twit in the future. Then I’d feel a bit better having learned from my foolishness.
Something tells me that’s not what you’re going to do though. You’re going to pretend you were the innocent victim of a bunch of meanies who were mean to you out of nowhere and nothing you said or did could have been good reason for how mean those meanies were. Am I correct? Or are you going to do the right thing and self crit?
Look at the way Rimu is treating people, and think about how people within that community might feel being on the receiving end.
Ah, so we judge actions not by their merit, but by who performs them? Or, put another way, if you wrestle a pig, you both get muddy.
When you comment on someone’s public actions in a public forum that’s a harassment campaign? Do words mean anything to you or are they solely weapons to be used against your enemies?
Yes, the reflexive “allies and enemies” framing of the situation does reinforce the image of a harassment campaign.
I don’t think you’ve understood the meaning of my comment. And I think anything anyone could possibly say to you would be reinterpreted / disinterpreted to fit the image of a “harassment campaign” since that’s what you’ve already determined the situation is about.
Also notice that they’re saying we’re the ones doing “reflexive allies and enemies framing.” Meanwhile the person this user is sticking up for literally maintains a list of people he considers enemies because they’ve been critical of the things he is publicly doing that harms the fediverse. This user doesn’t see that as “allies and enemies framing” though. Zero self awareness while coming here and concern trolling by saying people here aren’t being self-aware.
You know nothing about me, and very little of what I think, yet you conceptualized my motivations as attacking my enemies, and now you’re telling me what I think.
I just suggested some introspection.
Lmao, who is this guy? db0 is cool, and so is Quokka 🤣 What a cooker. (p.s. will this get me added to the list?)
The head Dev of Piefed, and maybe it will!
Piefed might be a unique online forum where the lead dev is also the lead troll.
Lmao, fair
aaayyyyyyyyy we’re in baby
(this is such fed activity btw, what are the chances this guy isn’t a fed lol)
A fed getting paid to do this wouldn’t exhaust themselves to the point of burnout.
yeah probably just an imperialist for the love of the game
Honestly, that’s probably even more cringe than being a fed.
deleted by creator
We made it to the cool club 😎
I don’t actually think that software is necessarily neutral, and that for this sort of thing to be successful in the current landscape it MUST be Marxists who make it. Take Bluesky, for example. Or OpenAI is perhaps a better example. Maybe this breaks some people out of the “Elon bad -> Dorsey good” cycle of analysis as to why lemmy exists and maybe leads them to question the use of the “tankie” perjorative in general.
I’m assuming “tankie” is what liberals call leftists?
And what leftists that support bourgeois ideologies call other leftists.
Personally I don’t see why the views of those that write software should really concern us, as long as the technical implementation is not biased. It’s open-source and people can take it and do with it what they please. No-one is forcing you to accept certain views or think about things critically (including assessing others viewpoints that may be different to yours). I feel like it’s a bit of a waste of time to worry about these things.
as long as the technical implementation is not biased.
Piefed has been baking in biases though, like adding a bunch of leftist/international sources in a huge blocklist labelled ‘qanon’, which if you then want to disable it’s got to be done manually.
Not to mention clear disregard for breaking activitypub interoperability.
Yeah, I’m not a huge fan of it myself and don’t see the need for it really. If that’s right about the baked-in blocklist, then this was the right choice. You should be able to craft your own blocklists, if you so choose to.
Hmm, you’re talking about the little red warning triangle? In theory this could be cool if it was something each instance could configure using custom url-lists (as you know we all don’t agree on which perspective is “right”) but if it’s coming packaged with PieFed, then I would call that inherent bias in the product. 🤨
It’s essentially the Media Bias Fact Checker Bot as an integrated feature in the platform.
there’s also a block component to that as well, his ‘qanon’ blocklist is something you toggle on and can manually edit it via ui; it pulls from a github he runs and contains leftist sites like grayzone as well as sites like wikileaks.org.
here’s how the interface works, you either click every button on the list or edit the database/use a different onequoting davel here:
domain blocklist, which is not mandatory on install—though most new instances choose it—and can be removed by an admin with either the patience or the database skill to remove it.
It is, in the instance chooser there is a “defederation score” that is “good” if you have defederated a sufficient amount of instances Rimu doesn’t like.
biases manifest in really strange and unexpected ways and you’ll fail even when you try to intentionally account for them; that’s why things like facial recognition success rate correlates to the darkness of your skin or why successful ai recognition of text/speech is related how different your language is to english or mandarin.
the only way to successfully gaurd against bias in software development is to have a teams comprised of people can naturally keep each other’s biases in check.
I think facial recognition technology is very different to threw diverse software. The fact that those technologies are trained on predominantly-white data is no surprise, both of your examples are data-based (ML models) where the data itself contains the bias.
I am talking more of the open-source projects, it’s important; as you rightfully call out, that we have a varied group of opinions within the developer group 👍
it’s not just ai or training data for it; it’s developers themselves too, including fediverse ones.
the biggest non-ai/training examples that i can think of came from times before ai was ever a thing like:
-
usps had difficulty validating addresses because the software they obtained assumed euro-centric naming schema
-
airlines, health care providers, hotels, and state motor vehicle departments rejected registration/reservations because trans people have to option to select their sex
-
health care providers misdosed patients because the software they used didn’t account for highly-athletic/bodybuilding people or people with chronic conditions
there are SO MANY examples out there where the bias clearly comes from the developer instead of the training data and there’s no way that any piefed developer is immune or can even effectively mitigate their biases.
-
I agree. “The medium is the message” also implies that the medium cannot be neutral.
According to Korean/German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, we live in a burnout society, so even if the person is peculiar, burnout is a serious issue in our society and everyone of us could suffer from it.
Checking in.
So glad I have two days off work next week… So I can do chores and home maintenance.
what happened?
lol, lmao even
Tankie checking in
Im happy everyone gets to use lemmy and to make it their own. Feuding between instances is cringe. This is all our fediverse comrades.
Perhaps the guy weaponizing the software for anticommunist censorship should take that to heart, not the vegan (btw) pointing it out
Dot emm ell user huh? The, heretic, the!
tesseract Huh? Wasn’t that just a frontend
