cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/31747128

Instead of creating a platform to automatically match individual profiles, you create a platform aimed primarily at human matchmakers, but with a feature where they can send clients a form to fill out, and then they would have an easy to browse and maintain client database. The matchmakers would advertise their own profiles and meetup and vet clients locally, and if you wanted to make it really easy you could have a poster generator with the platform’s logo and their name and a qr code. Instances might start free to get themselves off the ground but eventually charge the matchmakers a small fee to maintain the server (and if they don’t like how much they’re being charged they could move instances; you could make them be able to export their database as a .csv or something that they could keep backed up and the smart ones would avoid instances that don’t offer that option).

So you could look up matchmakers in your area and see details about them like the size of their existing client base, the amount of successful matches they’ve made, and their typical approaches like whether they provide coaching and whether they’re specialized in a specific religious or cultural community. And if they’re allowed to list their own prices and you could sort by cost per size of their client base or price per number of successful matches which would create a cost gradient where you can go cheaper but for less experience. It would be a platform where individual matchmakers could self-host, but similar to other spaces in fedi a lot of people would probably feel more comfortable using matchmakers hosted on larger instances. So you would still have a problem with having to sort through a pile of shitty matchmakers, but it would also be easy enough to find a larger / more reputable instance that vets their matchmakers more and / or promotes the good ones better, and you’d have some really good full-time matchmakers that are highly recommended in their area who can do well self-hosting, but also benefit from sharing clients to other professionals they find respectable over the fedi network.

Then on the client profile they’d all be mostly only visible to the individual client and the matchmaker but they could send the profiles to the people they’re trying to match and if they have hard to match clients they could choose to share them with other local matchmakers. And they’d be able to sort their database based on percentages of profiles that match similar to how OKC used to have. You could also have them personalize questionnaires like maybe have boilerplate / template questionnaires of various lengths to get new matchmakers started but also help them be more transferable for those hard to make matches. But you’d also still have basic info for everybody like gender, age, what genders they’re looking for, and what type of relationships they’re seeking.

As for how this solves the fedi dating service problem: it solves the issue of having women be too scared to make their dating profiles too public and decentralized servers and individually paid human matchmakers would help prevent enshittification because there’s no one large company that’s profiting off making the service shittier.

If you do this, I’ll be your first matchmaker, I could use a side-gig ;)