You can check the review history on either app, the project has existed for a full year. The timing is a coincidence, but I do understand the paranoia.
I am taking security very seriously. All sensitive rows are protected by RLS, and I have gone even further by adding random noise to all location data. Locations are locked down, but in the unfortunate event of a hack what would be leaked is location within a 5 or so mile range, not exact location.
If it is possible on Supabase I would like to eventually obscure emails and oauth info.
A decent percent of people are voluntarily paying for it right now, enough that it is already profitable at about a 10:1 ratio of profit vs cost of operation. The platform can grow quite a lot without expenses going up since my main expense is just server power, and I am not using much of that at all right now.
I think I have engineered it all to scale well, and I don't anticipate costs increasing. The plan right now is to not run ads, and to make almost all features free for all users in perpetuity.
Thank you for the feedback. As a design decision I did want to completely forego landing pages and upsells, both the sites and the app just "drop you in". I could probably make it a bit more clear without losing the minimalism of the page though that the real experience is in the app, not on the site.
The site serves mostly to allow people to share public posts and profiles from the app.
I think the main complaints overall with apps like Grindr, Lex et al comes in a few parts:
1) Mainstream dating apps are full of very profit driven patterns, and feel manipulative and corporate. A fair followup would be why would t4t not eventually become like this? I think probably the main differentiator is that t4t is written to run extremely cheap, and my goals for it are mostly just for it to support me financially. I have gotten quite far as a single person team, and currently I am using something like 2% of the processing power within my payment tier on Supabase. There is huge growth potential with little cost increase.
2) Probably the bigger issue is that there is a generational divide between "old queers" and "young queers", and the divide does seem to fall largely on trans comfort. Many older gays feel like their space is invaded, and many younger ones feel discriminated against. I think this pattern plays out regardless of gender. It is helpful to set intentions from the start, and so the intentions of this app from the start are to be most friendly to the "new school" way of seeing things.
3) Finally, these apps are all pretty explicitly sexualized. I know that might sound funny given how sexual the app I created can get, but I am not really pushing that. This is just a free and open community space nothing more. You can use it for whatever you like. You can date on it but you can also just share hot takes and thoughts.
The biggest piece of feedback I think I have gotten from posting here is that the nsfw content is a bit shocking which I get. Sorry about that.
My guess is that if you just scrolled twitter or whatever by new exclusively unfiltered you wouldn’t have that different an experience.
On the one hand I do think there is something interesting about the rawness of this network but also some sort of smart nsfw filtering is clearly needed, and I've been in the bubble of making this long enough to have become a bit desensitized.
Okay posting this is really reminding me to prioritize a smart nsfw toggle. My guess is that if you just scrolled twitter or whatever by new exclusively unfiltered you wouldn’t have that different an experience.
I don’t think the thirst posts are trolls, but I do know what you mean. One of my top priorities this next month is adding NSFW filtering to the app to allow people to toggle that sort of content on and off.