- Allow people to meet* without treating them like the product
- Allow users control of their visibility (and of sub-sections of their profile)
- Allow users control of how they discover people. No default algorithm, PYO!
- Provide rich systems for determining match quality for users prepared to put effort in. questions, interests, etc.
- Encourage all users (even the very “popular” ones!) to put the effort into finding people that they are interested in, rather than just swamping them with incoming messages from other users who think they’re of interest.
- Provide multiple ways of establishing trust (peer review, etc.)
- Provide good moderation by paying pro moderators a reasonable amount for their time
- Provide good tools to the moderators so they can do their job easily
- Prevent one moderator from working on multiple instances (or more than N)?
- Prevent commercial entities from doing embrace/extend/extinguish on the protocol or the platform
- Licencing model to allow only non-profits to run instances
- Licencing model to prevent use by nazis somehow?!
- Nearly all users should pay a sane amount to run the service. No ads!
- Some kind of free tier for a small % on each instance, funded by others gifting. No functionality limits, but rate limited to encourage payment. If no spare free tier slots available, new sign ups will have to wait (or pay).
- Don’t leak personal data
- Don’t gather analytics
- Works in normal web browser on desktop and mobile. Apps can be used to make things slicker, but are NEVER mandatory for the system’s core functionality.
- Lightweight on user device, as much done server-side as possible.
- Allow instances to specialise somewhat / set up profile defaults in a way that best suits their target community, but maintain full interop.
- Be popular! Can’t meet people if there are no users!
- Network should expand by adding more instances, not by trying to have some instances become huge. Choose a number that’s the max desirable size of an instance (say 20K users?), start spinning up and staffing up another suitable (e.g. geographically close or special-interest-adjacent) instance as soon as you hit 2/3 of that limit, so that when you hit the limit you can prevent new signups and redirect people to the new one.
- Allow users to move profiles between instances like Mastodon users can, and this should maintain messages / match/trust links etc. unless those rely on being within the same instance
- Instances should be cheap to run outside of human labour. No hosted videos or other high bandwidth stuff.
- Try to avoid instant-dopamine-fix type behaviour. Very few notifications? Maybe only do network updates daily so there’s less drive to keep refreshing?! Unsure on this, could be stressful in its own right.
* or chat online, play a game, see a sporp, form a band, etc.**
** it should be a good experience for any kind of interaction goal, but we must acknowledge that everyone will try to use it for dating so might as well make it good at that too (and good at filtering out people who are trying to use it for reasons that you don’t want)