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First Open Source dating app
(alovoa.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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I've used it before. The bigger problem for me was the people to bot ratio was worse than 1:20
That's interesting why so many bots
I can only guess but I think it's a combination of a lack of effective anti-bot protections and it being a sort of dead platform (so the only users that remain are largely bots which never leave)
Hi everyone.
Then I guess isn't worthy trying to use it. It's sad cause sounded like an alternative for Tinder and the rest of meeting apps from the Play Store that have the Google infestation on them.
Unfortunately I think projects like this have extra challenges over even regular social media platforms. There's also retromeet which seems even more dead (it may have not even made it to a stable release).
The idea is great but for a dating app to work, it needs to quickly get past two network effects: the global network effect (there must be enough people globally, or in a larger region, to get other people interested in trying out the platform) and the local network effect (there must be enough people to match with in most users' local areas to keep enough people interested). With corporate backing that's easy enough to do with a dedicated team to market and develop, but FOSS rarely has that sort of manpower. Slow growth is hard too, since users tend to leave dating apps quite often.
There's also the funny problem if the dev gets a partner usually the partner doesn't appreciate them staying on dating apps. Developing a dating app could be even worse for the relationship... actually now that I think of it, maybe I should make start a similar project since I don't like dating...
Sounds like a job for Fedi-date! If you could somehow hook a dating app into the fediverse, then maybe it could survive long enough to get sufficient users. If it also offers more general IRL meet-ups (like meetup.com but without the corpo rent-seeking), then it could perhaps begin to get popular that way too.
That's exactly what Retromeet was trying to do :)
Though I do agree that having a broader scope than just the hot-or-not swipe thing would really help to attract enough people to join. Retromeet doesn't seem to do that, though I haven't used it so I could be wrong.
Yup, 1:20 seems like your average mainstream multimillionaire-backed dating app
The mainstream apps (at least the ones that have been around a while) have bot ratios which are much better. They also have active moderation teams which remove profiles that make it through the automated protections. I'd guess they have ratios closer to 20:1 than 1:20 (people:bots)
I think a lot of engineers underestimate the amount of non-technical effort that goes into running platforms with users.
It's a shame I think there are some really interesting problems that a less profit driven dating app but currently anything without a big marketing budget isn't going to have the userbase to support it.
This kinda app would need at least an attempt at a technical solution to the bot problem. An open source app can't just pay people to kick bots out. And even the paid apps that can are drowning in bots.
Something cryptographic maybe. Tor is kinda magical, makes anonymity possible while the each machine knows who they are talking to. Maybe something where you can show that you are "a verified user" without showing exactly which one.
Other apps do have some good anti-bot measures which could be adopted for a FOSS project. The problem with a lot of cryptographic solutions for this is that often cryptography is usually more about proving your identity more than proving something about your identity. Tor is also focused on privacy from middle-men, which doesn't really make sense for a dating app.
I think the challenge boils down to how to prove you're human without biometrics or other PII. And I think the sad reality is that you can't prove it. Though you may be able to prove you have unique PII with some sort of zero-knowledge proof...
I mean I just took the users word for summarizing the thing accurately, but doesn't seem too complicated to me https://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/112036
Either way, it's not about this specific idea. It's just that you need some technical way to combat bots, be it cryptography, web of trust, subjective moderation etc. If it's open source, there will not be enough volunteers to do moderation
LSAG is a good shout but I'm not sure it's sufficient. It enables anonymous verification of something against a set of known public keys. But you still need to make sure that set of public keys is coming from real humans. It's not proof that a user has a property (i.e. being human), it's just proof they are a user.
But yes this is sort of a digression from the actual main problem. The real anti-bot solution is a mix of methods imo.
Maybe it would need to draw on experiences of moderating chat rooms and forums - these are very often done by volunteers who put a lot of time and energy into it because they believe in it.
There is also the "Web Of Trust" concept, where, given that everyone can prove their identity, people can then vouch for each other.