If you’ve used a dating app, you’ll know they’re full of dark patterns - selling your data, presenting unsuitable matches, and generally weaponising loneliness to sell you stuff.
Don’t you wish instead for something that’s built from the ground up to prevent it being ruined by the same three faceless organisations that run all the other dating services these days?
Yeah, me too bud
So, I started the ParaMeeter project. A federated, non-profit network that aims to put control back in the users’ hands and allow them to choose their own destiny when it comes to trying to meet people via the internet.
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ParaMeeter is designed to work for all kinds of people-meeting-people needs - making a friend for online chat, playing games, doing sport, forming a band, etc.
However any such service will of course immediately be used for dating, so it should be designed to handle that and also to allow users to avoid unwanted attention from others whose goals are different to theirs.
To that end, ParaMeeter is developing:
- Software to run websites that will allow you, a human, to find other humans in a way that suits you
- Communal data sets that users can use to describe themselves, and judge the quality of potential matches found over the network
- Contracts and licences that will allow independent, non-profit groups to run instances that will communicate with each other and maintain mutual trust by abiding by the network’s core principles
You have principles?!
- Don’t treat users like the product
- Don’t be bigots or support other bigots
- Be open-web-first and don’t push people into the ecosystems of tech billionaires
- Compensate our moderators, administrators, engineers, lawyers etc. fairly for their time so we’re not relying on volunteer labour
- No ads no “AI” no analytics no algorithm no cookie law banner with 873 partners
Sounds great, what do you need?
- People who have Opinions About Online Dating to take part in a closed “playable demo” of the service and give feedback
- Your professional expertise in founding nonprofits, developing contracts, meeting data security requirements and generally establishing the organisational structure that will help keep its users safe (or, the money to pay other professionals for this!)
- You to tell your friends (or podcast audience etc.) about this
If you are interested in getting involved in any of the above, please get in touch:
Not convinced yet? Want to know more about the ins and outs?
No problem fam, there’s plenty more to read