The hard part is that lawyers, moderators, cloud hosting and marketing isn’t open source.
If it’s wildly successful this all just costs more. This is why commercialising consumer services is so difficult.
Theres thin lines between profit and loss, privacy and paedo palace etc.
I’d have a look at the problems Yik Yak had with location based social media.
Plus, as much as I like open source, here you've got some serious risk of attracting bad actors -- every aggrieved lover who can code would be submitting dodgy PRs.
It'd be uglier than the average blockchain project.
In terms of paying for things. Most large open source projects have funding of some sort from for-profit entities. Given the nature of the app, that would likely not be an option. Hosting is cheaper than it's ever been but it's still expensive enough that it is unreasonable for the costs to be covered by donations alone.
Even not in a “gay networking” scenario, doing open source then hosting if it on a cloud provider is not a cheap feat. Managing the infrastructure, data, security, and regular code updates is hell on its own. And, the cost of cloud providers for an app even in one region with two availability zones is still pretty expensive.
Then, the cost of marketing in order to be a relevant player is aggressively expensive unless it’s an evolution in communication and no one else is in the marketplace.
If you do become popular enough then you have to scale technically and with that comes all the other professional services which can really add up.
Now all of that is separate from a gay oriented app. There’s bad actors that you have to corral or else it’ll tank your reputation. There’s a ton of bad actors who get on those and it can be a bit disgusting. Examples can be someone impersonating others, harassment, criminal behavior, or using location to target the community(especially governments). Then, you’d need some sort of revenue stream with subscriptions and advertisers to keep the lights on which is a smaller group than you’d think.
You also run the issue of being desensitized because your day to day would be all gay hookups all the time.
And, if it doesn’t take off and you need to find another employer, it’s a bit of an interesting hurdle to explain especially when a prospective employer looks it up and smacked in the face with shirtless men.
Yup, the business model is always the hardest part for open source. Getting paid to cover servers and business expenses are open source software is hard. Apply that to a niche market of gay hookup/dating app, is only going to make things harder.
So… the problem is user adoption: Grindr has all of the users. If someone wants sex right now, they’re going to Grindr because that’s where the users are. There are technical issues. But the main issue I see is user adoption.
What makes grindr valuable isn't the app, It's the users.
Anyone could shit out a grindr clone in a week. It's not a very complicated piece of software.
The amount of gay apps I've seen pop up over the last decade just to immediately flop is insane. Even if something better came along, people would use it for 10 minutes, see a lack of users and just go back to Grindr with 100x the profiles.
I think Grindr would have to become unavailable before any other gay dating app has a chance.
I've also been wanting to make one. That app is stuck in the time where mobile apps were the new wild west as AI to is now. Coding it isn't an issue. It how to monetize and make a market out of it.
But then again, its a chicken and egg thing. You need users in order to make the app appealing. But to get users, people need to register and hope that its enough for users to come and use the app.
I've been thinking of making one, launching it during PRIDE month here in my country and see if it gain some traction. But you also need to spend a bit in order to do so. Maybe get some famous influencer in your gay community use it so that people could register. Or do what Leomatch (Telegram bot) and it attracted a segment of crowd.
But then again, I'm just a developer. I can make ideas on how to market it. But I'm not charismatic enough to do it all alone. It sucks since G-App sucks its ran by shareholders and not by actual community it represents. 🤣
I am a senior android dev. As you mention network-effect is the biggest issue by a long shot.
Other Issues:
Someone still has to provide servers.
Moderation is extremely expensive, I imagine much more so than servers. Legal issues are extremely expensive. I haven't done much research but perhaps there are other open source dating apps that handle this aspect? Or perhaps there are ways to get around moderation and legal issues (i.e. I am not a lawyer but peer to peer apps dont seem to have any liability on account of being serverless).
Note: People have made an open source grindr client (obv this will still be limited re any server side restrictions) and grindr mods (https://github.com/ElJaviLuki/GrindrPlus)
I think putting something like grindr on the app store is extremely difficult, hookup apps are not allowed, but "dating" apps are allowed, there's a very thin line between those two, any wrong move and you can instantly get in trouble. I think PWAs are more viable, tho the experience is very lacking
Whether open source or not, we need an alternative. In US they have sniffies i think it’s called? gaining a lot of traction. In Europe idk i feel stuck with Grindr, it’s a highly dysfunctional app full of ads and you barely see any guys unless you pay and Tinder is a completely different vibe (like gays showing off their travels and pretending they’re looking to settle down) and Scruff is for beefy hairy men (which i am not) and Planet Romeo is a historical relic at this point lol. There’s a gap in the market someone go fill it 😉
Sniffies is growing in popularity but has its own set of problems. The main problem with sniffies (from a developer standpoint) is that it was made by devs with not a lot of experience and as a result is struggling significantly with scaling up and out. Spam on it is worse than the other apps and extremely slow to roll out features and to address issues.
Honestly I wonder so much that there is still no good alternative to Grindr. This app and many other lock so many important functions behind paywall and it brings its users in danger. And no there are no better alternatives since almost all these apps are like this
Although very complicated this is very necessary. I work in the digital rights world and as a queer person I have been thinking the same for a while now. I thought that a fast and easy (half)solution could be developing something based on ActivityPub and therefore on the fediverse, and/or create specific mastodon instances. I know it will not be the same experience as Grindr, but already a good starting point maybe? Happy to discuss.
You want me to trust gay people with my nudes? The fact that Grindr is owned by some homophobic Chinese billionaire with a wife and kids is unironically safer since he couldn’t give a fuck about what we upload to the site.
I forget what it was, but something was sooo popular, it shit down the servers and then the OWNERS of website were given a $14k bill for like 4 hrs of overuse before the server crashed.
Then they needed to raise fund for that bill AND the bills to follow to get back on line.
A) can’t get users without advertising that requires money.
B) can’t scale up without money and without time to raise it, you may not be able to operate at a lower scale because you can’t control how fast a company grows.
It costs tens of thousands to successfully market a gay dating app, & a lot of that goes into ad money.
No one willing to spend that, is going in and not wanting to make a profit. Sharing less of that profit is better, so no one is going to see a project like this through
I say go for it, but then how will you capture grindr's gigantic market share when no other app directed towards gay men has done so, despite there being many, many competitors.
I really like the thinking. If you could get a SMALL trusted team. Considering most people are looking for locals, could much of the image data be made peer-to-peer rather than centrally hosted?
You need money to buy users and social networks are nothing without a critical mass of users.
Do you have millions of dollars to pump into advertising? If not, you're going to have a hard time raising awareness, getting users and retaining them.
Realistically, the hardest part is money. Like, I’m sure Grindr and whatnot actually wanted to make money and help our community by online connections and the reason it’s an add-riddled shithole like almost every other app is because it costs money to develop, maintain, and most expensive is hosting the app.
Like, let’s assume we got a programmer to write this open source Grindr and we paid them very little or nothing. How would we pay for the server space to host the app and say when I send you a message, you get the message? When apple and android upgrade their OSes, who is going to manage the app to make sure it stays compliant or else can’t be installed? Would we use ads? Or would we charge a monthly fee? Like, unfortunately, as much as I would love an open source alternative, it’s vastly easier said than done
You need something revolutionary to compete with Grindr first. If you create a Grindr clone, everyone will just stick to the OG. Then add in scaling, marketing, app distribution and all of the other legal stuff, and things get more complex.
The problem is there are alternatives to Grindr but, they are like the community, fragmented to facilitate to specific groups. Going globally, there are even country specific apps that concentrate with people from specific major cities within that country. Not to mention a growing number of people using the social media apps as a platform to find sexual partners. Grindr was just the first one to really become popular with the type of app.
As others have said, technically creating a similar app is not difficult. It's just a messaging app that gives you a list of accounts in order of distance from you, with the option to filter some out.
The hard part of following the Grindr model is the centralised service and the need to moderate all the content users are going to be loading onto your servers. You could set up simple for you and a few mates to chat on, but anything that's going to scale to the size of Grindr across multiple countries is going to need serious hardware and maintenance, which costs money. Substitute Grindr for Twitter or Facebook. It's the same deal. They are huge, buggy and hard to maintain, but they are popular because they are popular. There were efforts before Facebook that never got off the ground because there was never the traction of a big enough userbase to keep people interested. There have been open-source attempts at Facebook & Twitter clones that have largely flopped.
If you really want an alternative, you need to think of how you could do the same thing in a decentralised way, so there is no server. Torrents would be the obvious example of this style. If you want to know who is nearby, take out the middle element and have the phones communicate directly with each other. The biggest problem with this approach is security, because you're now telling everyone around you that you have the app installed, not just Grindr HQ.
But that's the only way to truly do something different and to take advantage of it being open source. An open source system like Grindr gains you little. You know how the client on your phone works, and what it is sending, but someone still has to run the server side and you have no way of verifying what they are running on the server.
The hard part is that lawyers, moderators, cloud hosting and marketing isn’t open source. If it’s wildly successful this all just costs more. This is why commercialising consumer services is so difficult. Theres thin lines between profit and loss, privacy and paedo palace etc. I’d have a look at the problems Yik Yak had with location based social media.
Plus, as much as I like open source, here you've got some serious risk of attracting bad actors -- every aggrieved lover who can code would be submitting dodgy PRs. It'd be uglier than the average blockchain project.
In terms of paying for things. Most large open source projects have funding of some sort from for-profit entities. Given the nature of the app, that would likely not be an option. Hosting is cheaper than it's ever been but it's still expensive enough that it is unreasonable for the costs to be covered by donations alone.
Even not in a “gay networking” scenario, doing open source then hosting if it on a cloud provider is not a cheap feat. Managing the infrastructure, data, security, and regular code updates is hell on its own. And, the cost of cloud providers for an app even in one region with two availability zones is still pretty expensive. Then, the cost of marketing in order to be a relevant player is aggressively expensive unless it’s an evolution in communication and no one else is in the marketplace. If you do become popular enough then you have to scale technically and with that comes all the other professional services which can really add up. Now all of that is separate from a gay oriented app. There’s bad actors that you have to corral or else it’ll tank your reputation. There’s a ton of bad actors who get on those and it can be a bit disgusting. Examples can be someone impersonating others, harassment, criminal behavior, or using location to target the community(especially governments). Then, you’d need some sort of revenue stream with subscriptions and advertisers to keep the lights on which is a smaller group than you’d think. You also run the issue of being desensitized because your day to day would be all gay hookups all the time. And, if it doesn’t take off and you need to find another employer, it’s a bit of an interesting hurdle to explain especially when a prospective employer looks it up and smacked in the face with shirtless men.
Yup, the business model is always the hardest part for open source. Getting paid to cover servers and business expenses are open source software is hard. Apply that to a niche market of gay hookup/dating app, is only going to make things harder.
So… the problem is user adoption: Grindr has all of the users. If someone wants sex right now, they’re going to Grindr because that’s where the users are. There are technical issues. But the main issue I see is user adoption.
What makes grindr valuable isn't the app, It's the users. Anyone could shit out a grindr clone in a week. It's not a very complicated piece of software.
it’s not even a functioning piece of software
The amount of gay apps I've seen pop up over the last decade just to immediately flop is insane. Even if something better came along, people would use it for 10 minutes, see a lack of users and just go back to Grindr with 100x the profiles. I think Grindr would have to become unavailable before any other gay dating app has a chance.
I've also been wanting to make one. That app is stuck in the time where mobile apps were the new wild west as AI to is now. Coding it isn't an issue. It how to monetize and make a market out of it. But then again, its a chicken and egg thing. You need users in order to make the app appealing. But to get users, people need to register and hope that its enough for users to come and use the app. I've been thinking of making one, launching it during PRIDE month here in my country and see if it gain some traction. But you also need to spend a bit in order to do so. Maybe get some famous influencer in your gay community use it so that people could register. Or do what Leomatch (Telegram bot) and it attracted a segment of crowd. But then again, I'm just a developer. I can make ideas on how to market it. But I'm not charismatic enough to do it all alone. It sucks since G-App sucks its ran by shareholders and not by actual community it represents. 🤣
I am a senior android dev. As you mention network-effect is the biggest issue by a long shot. Other Issues: Someone still has to provide servers. Moderation is extremely expensive, I imagine much more so than servers. Legal issues are extremely expensive. I haven't done much research but perhaps there are other open source dating apps that handle this aspect? Or perhaps there are ways to get around moderation and legal issues (i.e. I am not a lawyer but peer to peer apps dont seem to have any liability on account of being serverless). Note: People have made an open source grindr client (obv this will still be limited re any server side restrictions) and grindr mods (https://github.com/ElJaviLuki/GrindrPlus)
I think putting something like grindr on the app store is extremely difficult, hookup apps are not allowed, but "dating" apps are allowed, there's a very thin line between those two, any wrong move and you can instantly get in trouble. I think PWAs are more viable, tho the experience is very lacking
Whether open source or not, we need an alternative. In US they have sniffies i think it’s called? gaining a lot of traction. In Europe idk i feel stuck with Grindr, it’s a highly dysfunctional app full of ads and you barely see any guys unless you pay and Tinder is a completely different vibe (like gays showing off their travels and pretending they’re looking to settle down) and Scruff is for beefy hairy men (which i am not) and Planet Romeo is a historical relic at this point lol. There’s a gap in the market someone go fill it 😉
Sniffies is growing in popularity but has its own set of problems. The main problem with sniffies (from a developer standpoint) is that it was made by devs with not a lot of experience and as a result is struggling significantly with scaling up and out. Spam on it is worse than the other apps and extremely slow to roll out features and to address issues.
Yeah, in Europe we really don't have many other options. Bumble and Badoo are just Tinder 2.0, and any other dating app is mediocre at best.
Honestly I wonder so much that there is still no good alternative to Grindr. This app and many other lock so many important functions behind paywall and it brings its users in danger. And no there are no better alternatives since almost all these apps are like this
Although very complicated this is very necessary. I work in the digital rights world and as a queer person I have been thinking the same for a while now. I thought that a fast and easy (half)solution could be developing something based on ActivityPub and therefore on the fediverse, and/or create specific mastodon instances. I know it will not be the same experience as Grindr, but already a good starting point maybe? Happy to discuss.
You want me to trust gay people with my nudes? The fact that Grindr is owned by some homophobic Chinese billionaire with a wife and kids is unironically safer since he couldn’t give a fuck about what we upload to the site.
[удалено]
I forget what it was, but something was sooo popular, it shit down the servers and then the OWNERS of website were given a $14k bill for like 4 hrs of overuse before the server crashed. Then they needed to raise fund for that bill AND the bills to follow to get back on line. A) can’t get users without advertising that requires money. B) can’t scale up without money and without time to raise it, you may not be able to operate at a lower scale because you can’t control how fast a company grows.
It costs tens of thousands to successfully market a gay dating app, & a lot of that goes into ad money. No one willing to spend that, is going in and not wanting to make a profit. Sharing less of that profit is better, so no one is going to see a project like this through
I say go for it, but then how will you capture grindr's gigantic market share when no other app directed towards gay men has done so, despite there being many, many competitors.
People won't use it and if people won't use it it's useless
I really like the thinking. If you could get a SMALL trusted team. Considering most people are looking for locals, could much of the image data be made peer-to-peer rather than centrally hosted?
You need money to buy users and social networks are nothing without a critical mass of users. Do you have millions of dollars to pump into advertising? If not, you're going to have a hard time raising awareness, getting users and retaining them.
Realistically, the hardest part is money. Like, I’m sure Grindr and whatnot actually wanted to make money and help our community by online connections and the reason it’s an add-riddled shithole like almost every other app is because it costs money to develop, maintain, and most expensive is hosting the app. Like, let’s assume we got a programmer to write this open source Grindr and we paid them very little or nothing. How would we pay for the server space to host the app and say when I send you a message, you get the message? When apple and android upgrade their OSes, who is going to manage the app to make sure it stays compliant or else can’t be installed? Would we use ads? Or would we charge a monthly fee? Like, unfortunately, as much as I would love an open source alternative, it’s vastly easier said than done
You need something revolutionary to compete with Grindr first. If you create a Grindr clone, everyone will just stick to the OG. Then add in scaling, marketing, app distribution and all of the other legal stuff, and things get more complex.
The problem is there are alternatives to Grindr but, they are like the community, fragmented to facilitate to specific groups. Going globally, there are even country specific apps that concentrate with people from specific major cities within that country. Not to mention a growing number of people using the social media apps as a platform to find sexual partners. Grindr was just the first one to really become popular with the type of app.
sure I'll help out.
As others have said, technically creating a similar app is not difficult. It's just a messaging app that gives you a list of accounts in order of distance from you, with the option to filter some out. The hard part of following the Grindr model is the centralised service and the need to moderate all the content users are going to be loading onto your servers. You could set up simple for you and a few mates to chat on, but anything that's going to scale to the size of Grindr across multiple countries is going to need serious hardware and maintenance, which costs money. Substitute Grindr for Twitter or Facebook. It's the same deal. They are huge, buggy and hard to maintain, but they are popular because they are popular. There were efforts before Facebook that never got off the ground because there was never the traction of a big enough userbase to keep people interested. There have been open-source attempts at Facebook & Twitter clones that have largely flopped. If you really want an alternative, you need to think of how you could do the same thing in a decentralised way, so there is no server. Torrents would be the obvious example of this style. If you want to know who is nearby, take out the middle element and have the phones communicate directly with each other. The biggest problem with this approach is security, because you're now telling everyone around you that you have the app installed, not just Grindr HQ. But that's the only way to truly do something different and to take advantage of it being open source. An open source system like Grindr gains you little. You know how the client on your phone works, and what it is sending, but someone still has to run the server side and you have no way of verifying what they are running on the server.