Readit News1) 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.
Echoing some other comments here, I highly recommend (in strongest possible terms) that you sit down with a lawyer well versed in Internet law wherever you are based out of and lay all of this out on the table for them.
All it takes is a bored official finding this thread or your site directly and your sincere effort here will transform into some kind of nightmare. Particularly given some of the major political swings recently, you have a target on your back and no megacorp legal team to protect you.
It is crazy easy to end up hosting an image known to NCMEC as seriously bad news and have no idea. Or NCII and not have an adequate reporting/actioning mechanism. Or someone tosses your user DB and people get harassed, swatted, or worse.
Not to mention you yourself are a target. By working on your passion project you've definitely already crossed lines that put you at physical risk if your info gets out. And over time the chance that it will climbs toward certainty.
I don't mean to dissuade you or wrap subtext in plausible corpolegal BS. I do mean, one human being to another, that you aren't merely building a fun community for people, you've also entered a field where very real, very heavy consequences--legal or not--now need to be a core part of your daily risk calculus.
- [1] warpd - uses grid
- [2] Scoot - uses grid
- [3] Shortcat - uses accessibility ui
- [4] Superkey - uses text ocr
[1] https://github.com/rvaiya/warpd
For those of you who are just learning that name from this lawsuit, here's his wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster_Kahle
Kahle founded the Archive in the nineties, in the midst of the fairly determined attempts at that time to either delay or even re-engineer the early Internet to be more respectful of existing intellectual property and decency laws.
We inherit a searchable, saveable web, because of the work done then to establish the norm that the Internet itself should exist, and that open digital archives can exist, legally. Many many people worked on the first issue. But Kahle played a far far larger role in the second battle.
So these "noble aspects" of "real value to society", as you rightly describe them, came from fighting for them -- by rolling them into existence in the face of opposition and skepticism.
So I understand the concern that this court decision threatens the future of some forms of archiving, digital preservation and librarianship. But the existing norms and repositories this threatens exist because people established those norms and archiving projects before now, in living memory, even in the face of threats and lectures about precedent and worries about legal gray areas.
If you want to defend and protect "the many noble aspects of the archive", you have to remember that thirty years ago, those were imagined as impossible, impractical, and (whisper it) probably illegal. In both cases, it was Kahle's vision and approach that was -- apparently -- the only way it was going to get done.
So I profoundly disagree that this is somehow a wild chase out of the safe and respectable grounds of the Archive's core mission. The Archive's core mission got to be respectable because Kahle chased the wild idea, and established its right to exist.
That may sound like I'm overstating Kahle's role, and/or overstating the initially radical, now widely-respected nature of pretty much everything the Archive has done.
But if it's not the case -- why is there only one Internet Archive? Why didn't other people, other national archives, other commercial concerns or non-profits join in this work? Why did only Kahle do it, and why was it only Kahle coming up with CDL as an idea to prevent the death of first sale, of lending a book, of the idea of a free library in a digital future? There should be more ideas, more Internet Archives, of course, for safety's sake. But absolutely nothing about Kahle's mission to create a library of and on the Internet was ever "safe".
I'm very confused by this statement and I don't understand if it comes from you not working in library and information science, your definition of an archives or your opinion on what an acquisition policy should be, but lots of national archives have and continue to archive the Web.
The lack of adoption has, imho, two components.
1. bad luck: the Web got worse, a lot worse. There hasn't been a Wikipedia-like event for many decades. This was not pre-ordained. Bad stuff happens to societies when they don't pay attention. In a parallel universe where the good Web won, the semantic path would have been much more traveled and developed.
2. incompleteness of vision: if you dig to their nuclear core, semantic apps offer things like SPARQL queries and reasoners. Great, these functionalities are both unique and have definite utility but there is a reason (pun) that the excellent Protege project [1] is not the new spreadsheet. The calculus of cognitive cost versus tangible benefit to the average user is not favorable. One thing that is missing are abstractions that will help bridge that divide.
Still, if we aspire to a better Web, the semantic web direction (if not current state) is our friend. The original visionaries of the semantic web where not out of their mind, they just did not account for the complex socio-economics of digital technology adoption.
If you say "AI" in 2024, you are probably talking about an LLM. An LLM is a program that pretends to solve semantics by actually entirely avoiding semantics. You feed an LLM a semantically meaningful input, and it will generate a statistically meaningful output that just so happens to look like a semantically meaningful transformation. Just to really sell this facade, we go around calling this program a "transformer" and a "language model", even though it truthfully does nothing of the sort.
The entire goal of the semantic web was to dodge the exact same problem: ambiguous semantics. By asking everyone to rewrite their content as an ontology, you compel the writer to transform the semantics of their content into explicit unambiguous logic.
That's where the category error comes in: the writer can't do it. Interesting content can't just be trivially rewritten as a simple universally-compatible ontology that is actually rooted in meaningfully unambiguous axioms. That's precisely the hard problem we were trying to dodge in the first place!
So the writer does the next best thing: they write an ontology that isn't rooted. There are no really useful axioms at the root of this tree, but it's a tree, and that's good enough. Right?
What use is an ontology when it isn't rooted in useful axioms? Instead of dodging the problem of ambiguous semantics, the "semantic web" moves that problem right in front of the user. That's probably useful for something, just not what the user is expecting it to be useful for.
---
I have this big abstract idea I've been working on that might actually solve the problem of ambiguous semantics. The trouble is, I've been having a really hard time tying the idea itself down to reality. It's a deceptively challenging problem space.