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.

I will get that shipped within the week!

Several US states now require age verification for adult content (I don't know how that is defined). A case challenging such laws is being considered by the US Supreme Court, but most experts believe the court will allow the age verification.

That may mean users identifying themselves, which seems dangerous. (It should not at all be dangerous, but it is.) All you need is some phobic government official to sue or investigate you, for any reason they can come up with, and demand all your records as part of their lawsuit/investigation.

Perhaps there's a way to do age verification while minimizing privacy risks? For example, verify their age, give them their credentials, then delete the PII? I don't know if that would suffice if your age verification practices were challenged.

(Talk to an expert.)

You can use cryptography to perform parts of verification. Specifically, you can use anonymous credentials to prove to a specific website that you have a credential. But that credential must then be issued by some authority that actually examines your physical "proof of age" (driver's license etc.) and issues it to your device.

The problem is that, at least at the moment, simply obtaining a credential like this has a huge chilling effect. You need to mail stuff into some crummy company chosen by the government, which then processes it and takes time. That company might be breached, which identifies you as "a person who is specifically interested in accessing adult content." Many of these problems can theoretically be fixed, but fixing them would have to be the goal of the authorities -- and I suspect it is not.

> "a person who is specifically interested in accessing adult content."

Or at more risk, a person interested in trans content.

And in the very near future, perhaps someone who is interested in accessing non-adult content that simply covers topics that are considered "unwholesome."

> Perhaps there's a way to do age verification while minimizing privacy risks? For example, verify their age, give them their credentials, then delete the PII?

I wonder why trusted third parties haven't sprung up around this very concept to the degree of OIDC (it's almost everywhere), you could have companies that allow uniquely identifying people, without having to manage or even get their PII directly.

Service wants to check age or whether user is banned --> they are redirected to some-identity-platform.com where they can deal with any ID documents and other PII --> some-identity-platform.com gives back a token and a UUID, so all the service really needs is a JSON object with the UUID and whether user is of age (if that was in scope).

That service can also let the user granularly choose what information to return: just the UUID, whether they're of age, or specific data like where they're located, actual PII if needed (e.g. auth with govt. site) etc., the UUIDs could also be service specific, so they cannot be cross referenced across different sites in case of leaks.

Things a bit like that exist, for example here's a few random ones:

  https://www.jumio.com/
  https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/identity-verification/
  https://www.veriff.com/
  https://www.yoti.com/
  https://ondato.com/

It does feel like the privacy problem could be solved in exactly these services, without passing too much information to the service itself. Because currently there are crazy amounts of hate and content out there that I might not want from a certain person on a site I operate, so I could just ban 914582c9-289a-4f8c-9e1c-f4193066e210 and the same person (at least with the same legal identity) could never get another account on my platform. I wouldn't even know that it's John Doe from country X and region Y that's uploading problematic content. Vice versa, I might just sell stuff to 5b9ee810-605b-40ce-9ead-85102e92df74 without ever risking compromising their identity.

Because verification requirements are merely indirect means to suppress contents. It really doesn't matter if the actor is 14 or 40 and it's never about making sure it's the latter.

> the UUIDs could also be service specific, so they cannot be cross referenced across different sites in case of leaks.

Assuming services play nice. What if they start sharing UUIDs amongst each other, for example for advertising purposes?

Worse what is stopping companies from creating both service and verifier? Nothing, as Amazon already has both. I do not trust them not to abuse this.

And even if in theory all companies do the respect my privacy. I am one government away, from seeing a law passed, that makes it mandatory to report all UUIDs to the government. The potential for tracking is off the charts.

Right now it takes forever to trace everything. You can realistically only do it for a select targets. If you implement this UUID system, suddenly it becomes much easier to trace everyone's actions.

I am not an expert either, but I have read that it requires at least 33% of content being "adult". Not sure how much content this page have, and OP should get in contact with an expert (maybe a trans lawyer or sth would be more willing to help such a project?) but i assume that the most important would be to ensure that NSFW content is below 1/3, like twitter (twitter has a huge lot of porn but even more non-porn content)

If you don't do age verification then your need to comply with COPPA etc as you have to assume underage users.

My previous employer used twohat to monitor for content dangerous to underage users, but I don't know if they were any good as it's not my area. It looks like they got bought by Microsoft as twohat.com redirects to a Microsoft product page now

Age verification could be possible without giving out PII e.g. via Zero Knowledge proofs. This would of course need a central authority that is trusted to give out per person digital IDs. Usually that would be the government.

All the porn companies have handled this by simply blocking the sites in the states in question, just forcing people to use VPNs. If you ask for ID verification to see NSFW content they know hardly anyone would provide it, and at the same time it opens you up to a lot of liability in handling extremely sensitive PII.

The whole thing is just moralistic BS anyway. I'm sure most kids can figure out how to use a VPN better than adults.

> just forcing people to use VPNs

Does this really even work? The law isn't "if the user's ip address appears to be from this state, then you must require id".

Properly enforcing georestrictions like this costs money and destroys businesses, but that is kinda the point.

It provides plausible deniability. "We did our best, judge"

It's not even plausible deniability, it's literally "how are we supposed to know what location people are in other than ISP?" That's the de facto determinate of location online. The government hasn't taken the position that a bar checking driver's licenses to confirm someone's age provides "plausible deniability", but rather that they're doing their part to comply with the law, even if some users are going to use fake IDs to cheat the system.

1/ block data center connections / require users to connect via a residential IP, not cell phone.

2/ request GPS location from the device.

3/ request WiFi location from the device.

4/ require billing address to be out of state. (States collect sales tax based on billing address, not where the service or product is bought. So I think this is fair.)

No, but they have deniability. “We checked, and they weren't in your state as far as we can tall”.

Slightly aside, if you filter like this for any reason it is safer to check that the request is NOT coming from some other location – that way your main failure mode is accidentally screening someone in a state you don't need to, not accidentally letting someone in that you could face legal action for, though this is a harder check to make.

The blocked people that use VPNs may well appear to be coming from a non-US location too which probably makes the denial slightly safer.

I’m sorry but business success aside, how else do you propose to do it? Require them to go outside and take a panoramic video including their face that somehow also captures third-party information about the date and time and then feed it into geoguessr?

Couple thoughts:

1/ if the company can’t meet the regulations, it can’t exist.

2/ if there is wiggle room of “as long as you tried your best, then it’s ok”, then requesting gps location, nearby wifi nodes, and banning traffic from data centers, then that would be better.

I think the problem is that laws that are trying to force morality on people.

The general problem is that web site X doesn't know if user Y lives in state Z. And most of the realistic ways to allow them to know this are huge PII disasters waiting to happen. This has nothing to do with morality. If states wanted to ban HN, it would be just as ridiculous. Using IP address is about as pointless as using your mobile phone's area code.

No, the problem is unchecked moral panicking. IP geoblocking is mitigation.

All laws force morality on people.

> If you ask for ID verification to see NSFW content they know hardly anyone would provide it, and at the same time it opens you up to a lot of liability in handling extremely sensitive PII.

Yes, and that is exactly why Morality in Media (the right-wing, evangelical group behind these laws) has been proposing them. Their goal is to outlaw pornography (and other "immoral" content) on the internet by making it so difficult to access or provide legally that nobody will bother.

> I'm sure most kids can figure out how to use a VPN better than adults.

You're making the mistake of assuming their goal is to prevent kids from being able to access pornography. It is not. Their goal is to make it so financially impractical to run any service that publishes (or allows people to publish) pornography, LGBTQ content, or anything that they deem "immoral" that nobody even tries. And it's working: many services which used to allow that content before 2017 no longer do, and it is much, much more expensive (and difficult) for the remaining folks to find platforms or hosting providers to continue to do so.

I was curious about the origin. It may not be what you expect.

> These bills didn’t originate from some evangelical PAC or conservative think tank. Their actual origin was, ironically, The Howard Stern Show. [0]

While it seems like everyone has overwhelmingly sided against free speech advocates (ACLU) and porn sites, there are some interesting points about access/addiction. I'm less impressed if it's purely evangelical driven (at least now), but I'm sympathetic to arguments about access for minors (or their ability to post under-age content). I don't have the answer.

[0] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/08/08/age-law-on...

> I was curious about the origin. It may not be what you expect.

As someone who's been following this for over a decade, I can assure you it is, in fact, what I expect.

That article is absolute nonsense, which you can tell by the fact that it claims the clock starts in 2021, when these bills have actually been introduced multiple times before then.

Furthermore, the article contradicts its own narrative, first claiming that a Howard Stern spot "started" it, then admitting two paragraphs later that the legislator was inspired by that radio show to contact... an anti-porn lobbyist that she had already known about for years. That's a really... interesting definition of "origin" that they're using.

Sure, but LA was the first to pass age verification for adult sites (and it wasn't until 2022-23). I don't know what the line is between that and other age verification (13+) or blanket anti-porn bills you're referring to. [0]

I don't follow your point about contradiction.

How is contacting a single-issue ally (who's on the opposite end of the political spectrum at that -- and not a "GOP Think Tank" or "evangelical") changing the origin? The person she reached out to is a pro-abortion, radical feminist. That is strengthening the article's key conclusion by a lot. It's a surprising turn for an origin story.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_verification_system#United...

This seems a little baffling to me because these evangelical groups are uniquely American. There would still exist a huge pornography industry globally, particularly within the EU, that would serve the US even if these groups achieved every goal. It's deluded to think it could be stopped.

No they're not; their roots are in the YMCA and the British society for the suppression of vice and earlier societies dating back to the 1700s. They originated when the church courts were shut down and are a feature of British evangelicalism that Americans turbocharged.

> This seems a little baffling to me because these evangelical groups are uniquely American.

I'm referring to one of several groups that is behind a specific campaign in the US. That doesn't mean that there aren't other efforts to curtail this in other countries or globally.

As mentioned elsewhere, there's a law that's about to go into effect in the UK which is actually way broader and draconian than any that has been passed anywhere in the US. There are more in other countries too.

> There would still exist a huge pornography industry globally, particularly within the EU, that would serve the US even if these groups achieved every goal.

And yet, when Tumblr and Imgur and Reddit[0] banned pornography, no EU-based competitor emerged to take their place.

[0] Reddit's ban wasn't a total ban, but it was enough to effectively shut down many groups (which was the goal).

EU guys are the same. Organizations like German state police are doing "crackdowns" of Internet contents in total disregard of jurisdiction. Targeting criteria is neither consumers nor producers but specific subjective quality of content itself: they never care who makes it or at what cost, but that it exists.

VPNs? Or children?

Are there many and do they have any influence? I haven't heard anything from such groups. Have they gotten any laws passed, like the age verification laws the other groups have succeeded in passing in several states?

“ We believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone," Steve Jobs declared in an email to a customer. "Folks who want porn can buy an Android."

There are, but they're disorganised and poorly funded, and opposed by other feminists. (It's practically a law - for almost every feminist moral POV there is an equal and opposite feminist moral POV.)

Meanwhile the organised and well-funded evangelicals and right-wingers ignore the constant stream of SA and CP convictions among youth pastors and other supposed moral authorities.

The stats don't necessarily prove that religious states consume more porn, but porn is an existential problem for evangelicals in a way that it isn't for most progressives.

Unfiltered twitter is significantly less NSFW, just as a point of feedback. Good luck with you project tho

You probably shouldn’t show NSFW to non-logged in users.

Otherwise you could run afoul of various laws, since technically minors can access it

I will add a tagging system and hide nsfw posts from non-logged-in non-opted-in users this weekend.

Serious question: Is my browser blocking image content or something?

Or is there general consensus that plain body-font sized text is also an NSFW concern?

I didn’t see any non-text content, but I didn’t spend that much time looking.

NSFW text is a thing, there are porn sites that house explicit text for zoophilia, pedophilia, incest, rape, etc. I’m not saying this site has anything extreme or out there, but there are likely laws governing what text can be shown, it’s simpler to just require login, since that will also help protect you against COPPA and other restrictions for minors that are non NSFW related.

I’m all for free speech, but there are laws governing how certain text is handled

> there are laws governing how certain text is handled

Is that true?? In the US?

My instinctive metric[0] for NSFW is: Could a casual passerby see something that falls into a class of designated offensivenesses (e.g. sex of any kind, but not violence unless it's also sexual)?

Text in a giant font could certainly qualify. But I would not think that ordinary-sized body text would be problematic -- if the passerby has to pause and snoop, they are breaking other equally-important protocols to ascertain SFW or lack thereof.

0: I have not run this by an HR department, and I've worked from a home office for more than twenty years, so I may know nothing of which I speak!

A better metric might be “could a casual network filtering program pick up something that would be forbidden at work”.

Wouldn't such a network filter also trigger on random (in the sense of unpredictable to the reader) pages here on HN though? Or Reddit, etc?

I've never lived under such a regime, but all of the trigger words I can imagine at OP's site are also present in generally-SFW discussion forums.

Yeah but the IT bod looking into it would see the rest of the site as context

If they check on a site and it's heavy on the NSFW maybe things get looked into with a bit more of a "... is this person browsing porn at work?" attitude

Good point. I have never suffered such indignity, but I forget my privilege.

This is 100% the correct answer. It’s unfortunate nsfw was framed as a political question.

It's probably hard to reach a consensus when every workplace is different. However, sexually explicit text would be inappropriate at most places I've worked.

There are image links to NSFW content

All you need to sidestep those laws is a little prompt that asks you if you're 18, you don't need to require a login. Unless you're talking about recent US laws.

I am very concerned about this being a target for malicious actors. I'd offer to help you with security but I've never even heard of some of your stack so I'm probably not in a position to help.

Is there anyone here who is familiar with OP's stack and has security experience?

This is exactly what I thought about when I first read the post. This is not a good idea in my opinion.

I disagree -- this is a good idea, because trans people need a community especially in times like this.

It just needs some attention paid to security.

How is it a bad idea? A community for trans people that's actively used by them because it works for their needs should be considered a bad idea because certain assholes can attack it? The bad there is in the assholes and effort is due in stopping them, not the existence for a specific type of useful community itself.

It's a bad idea when countries like mine are actively passing legislation toward banning trans people from existing. Having a hackable dox-ready list of where to find them and who they are would be quite convenient for any regime or its fervent supporters that have the resources and skill to weaponize such a service against them.

I get what you're saying, the assholes are the bad thing here...but they are also a clear and present danger that now has the power to do what they said they would do these people. This isn't just some malicious hate group from 4chan or whatever, these are government-backed actors interested in actually harming these individuals.

You're talking as if these threats are new to us. They're not. America is not the world, and treatment of trans people wasn't great in America prior to the current administration, either. I don't see a reason to disband our communities because the trans hate is slightly more front-and-center than it was a few years ago. They are needed now more than ever.

This can work if the platform instills a culture of pseudonymity and takes privacy seriously. There exist platforms on the darkweb where far more sensitive data is exchanged.

I believe that you are fully right, but your concerns can be mitigated.

It's bad if the attack involves, say, doxing the users (who may not desire this or be in a place where it is safe fort this to happen).

If you've created a service with that many users, that could be a target for malicious actors, and also hosts NSFW content, you may want to look over this article and protect yourself by forming an LLC.

https://denise.dreamwidth.org/91757.html

LLCs won't protect you completely. That's a myth.

Parent didn't say anything about complete protection? An LLC does offer some level of protection, albeit mostly liability protection (as implied by the name, Limited Liability Company), and in this case I would be more worried about the need to defend against overzealous law enforcement requests. I'm not sure an LLC really helps much in that context. It's more about being able to afford a good legal team.

For what they're referring to, there is no personal protection. You can be personally liable for neglecting to protect against illegal sexual content even through an LLC.

This is what keeps most people from hosting user content. It's very easy to do, but it opens you to massive personal liabilities.

Thanks!

If you have time for a web interface, that would probably give some folks a better sense of security.

Saw a post that says they found the website via the "terrible orange site"?! Grumble grumble. /jk

In all seriousness though, this is great! And good timing too, such a community is needed now more than ever before. Does this website cater to otherkins too, or is that a separate concern (which is completely ok too)?

About the funding: are you basically just using lightweight services to keep the cost down, while paying for it out of pocket or with donations? Is there a contingency plan if -- touch wood -- you go rogue or shut down the app?

As someone who isn't familiar with the norms of this community, the first few posts were somewhat surprising. I mean to say, they were overtly sexual and public. I have many trans friends and gay friends so I'm not saying I've never heard terminology like that, but it was usually in a closed conversation. I wonder if those are spam comments? It would be interesting to hear how you plan to guard against people who will probably see this as a good place to hunt for vulnerable people. I'm interested because I thought this might be a good place to help find ways to support my friends in an awful time. But I am not sure I would want to participate in the community just given the first few posts I saw.

As a little bit of context, a lot of trans people (rightfully) view HN as a (white)-male dominated place, and feel misunderstood and misheard by the people here. A common defense tactic is to become _more_ sexually overt and grotesque than they actually are in reality.

A lot of the other thirstposting is, from my experience, very much genuine and heartfelt.

The trans community is often quite open.

I'm personally transgender, monogamous and mostly lesbian, so I'm a bit of a "boring" outlier when it comes to the poly & kink communities. But I spend a LOT of time in trans spaces. Online and offline. Professionally and casually. Younger and older. Political and friendly.

Etc

I just love this, thanks. A good reminder.

Nothing wrong with NSFW content per se, but you cannot justify potentially exposing children to pornographic content as a "coping mechanism", it wouldn't be accepted by any court for sure.

I completely agree.

Idt it's defensive, at least not for my trans friends. I'm a gay dude and I think it's just that the queer community is a lot more open about that stuff in general, which contrasts greatly with straight people, especially Americans.

There’s a fine line between ‘open’ and ‘perverted’.

Perverted is just some other person being judgmental.

That line is shared with the one of "none of your business"

Yep. That's why I'm openly talking about moderation and why I'm very much in favor of an NSFW filter.

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.

I'm glad that you're making it a toggle and not banning it outright. This is my biggest gripe with BlueSky at the moment.

Isn't BlueSky doing the exact thing you want: making it a toggle?

By the way this isn't a snarky rhetorical question. I wonder whether people do experience censorship more than the built-in preference filters on BlueSky.

For one thing, BlueSky blocks NSFW images from being embedded in RSS feeds, so I have to use third-party services like https://bluestream.deno.dev/ to generate RSS feeds which embed images in my RSS reader.

I'm not sure what you mean?

On Bluesky they just apply a label and users are free to toggle it as show/warn/hide. At least, this is what I've personally experienced using the site.

Most communities act differently when it's just themselves in a space they own, as compared to when they're in a space that is less homogenous. The queer scene is a lot more open with sexuality than the cishet one.

Even (cis) men have "locker room talk," things you wouldn't say when around most women.

well... some cis men do. certainly not all.

> I just disagree that cis men say stuff amongst themselves they wouldn't around women, while homosexual or bisexual men would never do that.

Nothing they said implied the 2nd part even slightly. And not because most homosexual and bisexual men are cis.

Same difference. What makes non-cis men special that they required specific exclusion from that sentence?

Sorry for any confusion - the parenthetical (cis) was meant to narrow my statement according to my specific first-hand experiences, not to imply that trans men don't do it. I can see how my wording implied that, though.

The trans community doesn't want to admit it but they very much identify themselves by their sexuality/orientation which is very weird to outsiders

I think many people in “out groups” identify with that aspect. Like I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about me being human - but if I was abducted by aliens into their society I probably would identify as human a lot more.

About as weird as identifying yourself by which variant of sport you watch, I guess.

I like the minimalist design! And it’s fast to load too. Good job

Thank you!

As a super straight CIS guy who worships Wendy Carlos and Selofan, I wish I could join too. I am sure ya'll talk about the coolest things.

It just makes me sad how before the internet there really were not these barriers. The "freaks" of society all got together around art, music, fashion in an apolitical way.

This ultimately is the opposite of "inclusive" but I get why. It still makes me sad.

Last year I managed to connect with 10 other trans people in my Lancashire home town. This is a place with zero 'alternative' spaces, let alone dedicated queer spaces. I made a poster using the trans pride flag as the background, and wrote a bit of blurb on it and put an email address on. Then I stuck it up on community notice boards in supermarkets and in a pub window. My idea was that if you put these things in high footfall areas, someone is bound to walk past and get in touch. And they did! Plus, more pride flags being visible, especially if they are coming from the grassroots and not a giant company, shows that we are here and not alone, and makes us feel safer. So if you want to connect with people near you, maybe go analog and put up some posters ^__^

This would be too risky IMHO ie in eastern Europe (I don't mean sh*thole of russia where this is even much worse, just eastern EU).

The general attitude is less tolerant. Most people in general population of course have 'live and let live' attitude, but small part of each country does actively attack such people, ie skinheads or other far right groups.

This is exactly why it's important to find each other, so we can keep each other safe. There is strength in numbers. If you put up your posters on community notice board and use a non-personal email (I just made a new Gmail account for it) then nobody can be identified, the worst case is someone pulls the poster down.

Seems fishy to require an app. BigCorp normally does this so they can skim off more user data and prevent ad blocking.

As a trans woman I gave it a go. I find the interface a little confusing and unappealing but the featureset for profiles is actually what I'd be looking for.

non content related feedback

I like how minimalist the UI is, but I might want a little bit of padding on the sides? I feel like HN does that part pretty well even though it's a little more decorated than this.

Also it wasn't obvious to me that the website is sort of a "preview" of the front page and the app is the main platform, i'll have to check that part out too.

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.

> A year ago I surveyed the internet and noticed there was only one popular space for trans and gender-non-conforming people to meet

How is that possible? On the infinite Internet, where there is online space for much smaller communities, how can there not be far more - on Reddit, Discords, FB, IG, other platforms, phpBB, etc etc.

I should have been more specific - I meant a popular platform

people are criticizing the minimal text interface, but i really appreciate it.

it's very nice in w3m, a tui browser. but spacing between each post (none), and among posts and their metadata (one line) needs some tuning, because it clusters each timestamp footer with the user header for the next post. i would suggest avoiding `<li>` for feed items and use more general-purpose elements.

is there a reason you're not simply hosting a mastodon instance?

Mastodon isn’t particularly good for monetization.

Beware if you have UK users, you should read the new law in the UK called the online safety act.

Your site has young trans people, sexual content, and would also be a target for grooming from chasers. The risks, for you, are very high.

> The risks, for you, are very high.

Is the creator in the UK? Or do they visit regularly? It wasn't mentioned in the original post.

The law has ridiculous overreach, that's true. And we haven't seen what international enforcement of it looks like yet. But to deal with the facts as they are now, the law states that it applies if you have UK users, and that the personal liability for officers of the company can be up to £18M... The overreach continues because it also covers "harmful but not illegal" content.

The app publishing didn't exclude the UK, it probably should.

No, the law cannot possibly apply "if you have UK users".

The law applies if you're in the UK or in a country the UK can persuade to extradite you.

I don't agree with the law, there's no point in using emphasis to labour the point, the UK Govt advice on who it applies to is here https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act... and feel free to read it. As to enforcement, it's a new law so there has been none, hence no-one can speak to that, but you're right that extradition is the path and on that front if a similar law exists and agreements are in place, then for example most European countries would extradite. We don't know where the author is, but they posted on here in the morning of European time zones, and all I suggested is that they do their diligence on their personal risk as a result of laws that do claim to apply their service. No-one should dismiss the risk, the person should speak to a lawyer.

Not a huge fan of lack of control over location in profile. I understand wanting location to show local posts much like lex, but right now all I can disable on my profile is "showing neighbourhood".

The app grabs three locales of differing specificity, which I guess you think is Neighbourhood -> City -> Country. However what it has fetched as my Neighbourhood is my "Ward" which is a suburb subdivision in Australia that is never used for anything except for voting in local council elections. This is a truly overly specific location, 80% of people will have no idea what their ward is until they look at their voting paper for the council elections. The next most specific locale "City" is my suburb, which is also a relatively small location which I'm not comfortable sharing online. If it grabbed my metro city (i.e. Melbourne) I'd be happy to display that. Overall though, I think this should be an editable field so that people can share as comfortable. I'm fine that the app needs my location but why does that need to be displayed to other users?

What’s wrong with Grindr, the biggest app for queer and trans people to meet?

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.

OP, I love your passion, but as someone who's been in these trenches for a long time as a visibily queer person, you are a Titanic heading for an iceberg of legal issues in the US, UK,and a few other places. You are putting yourself and your users at an extremely high risk of outing, doxing, and potential legal issues. The fact that you haven't addressed these issues scares me and it should scare you.

You are going to need content moderation, and you are going to need it quick as you scale.

This is the one thing that doesn’t scale. There’s a bunch of T&S advice and best practices out there.

Get a press kit ready. Be clear on what is and isn’t allowed.

In the EU, you would need to be able to provide access to appeals if you cross a certain size (VLOPs).

I mention this because you are a 1 person team.

My personal experience as a trans woman? The space is full of men who want to have sex with trans women, while most of these trans women are interested only in people similar to themselves. IE, queer, non binary, trans.

And you get spammed dickpicks by the hundreds. Even if you explicitly say "I DON'T WANT DICKPICKS AND I WILL REPORT YOU IF YOU SEND ME A DICKPICK" and then you receive a dickpick? And point to the report thing?

You get sent another dickpick by the same person at a different angle.

Happens to me almost daily.

Almost nothing I do works. No moderation settings, no report features, no profile texts.

Grindr is best for gay men and bi men. Trans women, trans men and non binary people are not treated as first-class citizens by the values they care for the most.

> most of these trans women are interested only in people similar to themselves. IE, queer, non binary, trans

That sounds kind of odd to me. I don’t have any experience or insight to people’s experiences here but I would assume that most trans people are trans because they want to be the opposite sex, not because they want to be trans specifically. This statement here suggests they’re identifying as trans more so than the gender they’re transitioning to.

Where am I mistaken?

This is talking about sexuality, not gender identity. Who you want to have sex with is not determined by your sex or gender. It is correlated, but not determined (as in more cis men are bi and straight than gay, thus a random man is more likely to be bi or straight than gay).

In this case, she's talking about her preferences which can be any identity, sex etc.

For example, a trans person may prefer to date other trans people because they will have more common experiences and there will be less explaining if how things work on their body etc. Others might have preferences based on primary or secondary sex characteristics. Others may only date people who like a specific type of cheese.

An individual person can do whatever they want.

It sounds surprising to me that trans people broadly prefer trans people is all.

As a queer person who hasn't used Grindr but has heard about it from others, my understanding is that it has a reputation for being more for hookups than actual dating. Heard a story about a gay male friend-of-a-friend setting up an account on it and getting 4 unsolicited dick pics within a very short period of time.

Obviously this is just secondhand anecdotal evidence—I'm sure someone who has personally used the app could chime in and correct me if I am wrong.

Extremely correct.

can unfortunatenly confirm

I... am not sure if this is a joke or not. Grindr is not a community or posting tool. It's a hookup app.

That used to be true but Grindr has pivoted and now advertises itself as a 2SLGBTQIA+ community app

"Grindr advertises itself as community app" is about as meaningful as "Fast Food advertises itself as healthy" :)

(Also, for those who were confused by 2S - "Two-spirit". That one's new to me in terms of adding it to the acronym list)

Is this a joke (I'm asking in seriousness)? Don't matter how they "advertise themselves", it's a hookup app. There aren't even any features (like forums or public postings) that would be necessary to call themselves a "community app".

In a sense it is almost an anti-community tool, I've heard it being partly to blame for the decline in business at some bars.

Grindr got bought by str8 tech Bros and is now heavily profit driven.

Plus as a gay dude I don't even really use it bc it's just a vain wall of abs and conversations about the most inane meaningless things on there.

There aren't even really that many actual geeks in the "geek" tribe. Just pretty dudes who think they're a geek bc they play fifa on their xbox.

The app seems to be marked 17+ on the App Store, which means it may have “Infrequent/mild sexual content”.

The very first entry on the recent posts list is:

“tell us about your cum!”

I think you need to make a choice between being strictly adults-only and strictly SFW-only. If you allow under 18s and show them that kind of content, there will be headlines.

Reddit seems to do fine with mixed content. Just need to have good controls for it in app imo.

Reddit has absolutely massive amounts of free moderation being done every day, and users are constantly being split into smaller groups to handle scale and nuance.

The admin team sits on top of that. And they have access to NCMEC along with full fledged data science teams.

Reddit is VC funded.

Reddit changes behavior depending on signup path, and is also aggressive with admin deletions, but hides acts well. It's in perception only that Reddit still has everything dirty in the open.

Reddit gets very thorough scrutiny from the App Store review team. They have policies on it.

The icon is not religious-parent-safe. Why not offer other icons?

Warning for those who visit the site at work, there is a lot of NSFW content.

(I work in social media content moderation.)

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.

Yes, huge +1 to this OP, especially if you're American bc you are heading for a big collision with FOSTA-SESTA and other legal issues that could put you and your users at risk of harm.

Someone should set up a website with nothing but LLM generated content, to troll these officials.

GP mentioned NCMEC, those guys don't care if it's generated or not. Anything aligns their preference gets labeled as "nonconsensual child pornography" and they come after your hosting, DNS, payment, visas, so on. Consensus or IRL children aren't their concerns.

Well LLMs don't generate their precious blackmail material so there's no legal reason to hand anything over.

Ultimately they'll flashbang you on a Sunday morning, put you on a no-fly list, and circulate warrants, at least until you add heavy geoblocking and start framing them right so they'll be the socially awkward side. They won't ask you for a list of clientele, they can look that up, they're after contents.

this administration in particular has made it a priority to make examples of trans people and use them for political points. make sure you have ALL your legal ducks in a row if you're going to run something like this.

I've been disappointed to not encounter the hot trans girl content the comments are complaining about.

How do you handle iOS testing? Do you have VPN blocking? What are some guerilla marketing tactics did you use? I am trying to grow a community in an unrelated topic and want to see what I could potentially do.

Cool project by the way!

There are also a number of high-user trans-specific and 2SLGBTQI+ Discord servers with varying degrees of activity (although the more fun ones tend to be private and you need to get an invite from a public server)

You can find some on Disboard or in Discord's recent server search facility.

Anecdotally I never found Disboard servers to be of quality (as of 2 yrs ago). The low user count servers were more engaging but there were not a lot of good ones on Disboard.

I tried making a web crawler that found invite links in common crawl data to find more authentic low user count servers. There was something off about servers that self-selected by taking the time and effort in adding the Disboard bot. The crawler actually worked well. I had about 10k online servers before I stopped and a handful of low user count servers in my niches. Made a few friends in these but none of them stuck long-term.

So far I'm back to just a few private servers I'm active in. 50% from IRL connections, 50% from online friend connections. I struggle so much to find new spaces or to make my current ones work better for me

The low contrast in the app makes it distractingly uncomfortable to read.

> NSFW should be opt-in, not default.

> How do people report offensive, doxing and unsafe content? Do you have moderators, and can they scale if it comes lot more popular?

> Why not also people to browse the web version? It can be a lot easier for accessibility. I sometimes need a bigger font than what the default is. Adjusting it on the mobile is ok but the screen is tiny so there is all manner of scrolling in all directions to read the content.

Cool app, I'll give it a try. Thanks for sharing, and I definitely appreciate feeling the need for an alternative to Lex (which is sad! they took VC money then had to hypergrowth or die, my prediction is that it will be the latter tbh).

If they would've kept super lean and focused on a sustainable business model, they could've been a pretty big success

it looks really slick but the timeline scrolling is a little heavy.

also fwiw no way to filter location for posts without sharing your own...

I am curious if you mean heavy in terms of the physics of the swipe, or heavy in terms of something like the layout?

Either HN suddenly became far more constructive and considerate, and on an inflammatory topic, or dang is doing an incredible job moderating this discussion. I'll just hazard a guess and say - thank you dang!

But dang - please don't let this off-topic comment sit at the top of the page and distract from t4t's post.

If you turn on "show dead", there's an unusually large and alarming number of dead replies on this ranging from fairly banal flame baiting to outright bigotry and slurs. That alone probably shows the value in having these kinds of dedicated niche community sites.

> unusually large and alarming number of dead replies

If you search previous discussions on this site that in any way touch on lgbt/trans topic in the slightest, you will find it is not unusual at all. The only surprising thing about this post is that it somehow wasn't immediately flagged/removed from front page.

Such an interesting and so minimal! Gonna check it out after work. Nice job!

> It has grown in the last year to about 4,000 monthly active users. I think it could grow way beyond that this year.

Is it really a good idea to paint a bullseye on this group in the US right now?

How is creating or operating a community “painting a bullseye” ?

And tbh now more than ever I think it’s important for communities like this to exist.

Interpreting Animats' question as concern for the user population, I think it's a valid one.

The new administration in the US is openly hostile, and a lot of damage could be done to peoples' lives if, say, the community was hacked and private email addresses (or other PII) was leaked.

And I also agree with you -- now's the time for those of us who can afford it, to fly our ally flags as loudly and proudly as possible.

OP: Please make sure your secure coding and operational security practices are excellent and meet the challenge here.

> if, say, the community was hacked and private email addresses (or other PII) was leaked.

Or just basic ISP, or other provider, logging domains visited per user.

Threat model this shit.

I would dead man switch the storage's Azure instance. Mayybe the whole thing. Mayybe shouldn't be on azure.

Nm assumed RLS as a MS TLA. PGsql has it as well. Comment stands, watch data residency.

5 mile range is pretty serious, it narrows someones locations down to a single town in the entire world. Just dont store it at all and you're all good.

You'd need just a little more data to find the individual.

Why even keep location data at all?

One of the main selling points of the app is that you can filter posts by distance, to facilitate people meeting and talking with their community.

So list a city?

I'm wondering if it's more or less safe (from doxxers attacking individual users, or the entire service being compromised) to share location with this app vs. Lex. In any case I chose not to share location yet, and don't know if Lex is any safer (they require location).