You could argue, and people have, that the top gay dating apps are now optimized for monetization and juicing engagement loops. Increasingly overrun with bots, they are at times even devoid of actual connection.
Grindr, with its 15 million monthly active users, is drowning in ads while pushing expensive upsells on users. (In February, as part of its “gAI” overhaul, the company announced a new premium monthly subscription tier for $500.) Sniffies was beloved by cruisers until the seismic reaction in April to Match Group’s $100 million investment sparked concerns that another queer space could get absorbed into a larger dating conglomerate.
As public backlash against popular queer apps continues to mount, a batch of tech entrepreneurs are scrambling to meet the demand by doubling down on privacy-conscious, community-driven alternatives.
Calum Bowden, who posts under the internet persona @donjackoghue, launched MeetMarket in March. Currently only available as a web app, MeetMarket includes all the core features of your typical hookup app—a customizable profile, a grid of nearby users—with one major difference. It was built on a decentralized identity system, meaning MeetMarket doesn’t store users’ emails, passwords, or personal information. Users store everything on their device, giving them full control and ownership over their data and how it’s shared. Messages on the platform are end-to-end encrypted, and Bowden says it will always be ad-free, even for nonpaying members. (A monthly membership costs €12, or $13.99.)
“Decentralization and data privacy make a lot of sense for queer people in general, and especially in hostile legal environments or in the US right now, where you don’t really know what digital platforms actually have your best interest in mind,” says the 34-year-old PhD student in Berlin who studies the sociology of technology and organization.
Within the first 48 hours of MeetMarket’s launch on March 24, over 12,000 people had signed up, and some 60,000 people have used it since. The app averages 5,000 weekly visitors, according to Bowden, though there is not a lot of concurrent activity in the same cities. “It’s become more social than necessarily driving an immediate hookup.” But casual encounters do still happen, he says. “The Midwest bottom jockeys are eating meet market up,” one user noted on X.
Bowden didn’t anticipate public sentiment would sour on Sniffies just a few weeks after his launch. Still, the timing of it couldn’t have been more serendipitous. “When Sniffies announced their investment from Match Group, I was like, how are they fueling my fire?” he asks. “This is exactly the model that venture capital leads to. This is exactly why these economic models for technology are so bad, because they basically force the gentrification of a digital platform.” Sniffies did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A self-described “utopian conspirator,” Bowden is the cofounder of Trust, a nonprofit that operates as a kind of incubator to prototype ideas “as a critique of technology and the status quo,” he says. With MeetMarket, he wanted to create an app that gave users more agency over their experience without cheapening it.
It can sometimes seem like Big Dating wants people to believe that it is the only answer to cure their romantic woes—Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd recently told Axios that there isn’t much longevity in niche apps—but the opposite is proving just as true, as people seek out more specificity and intention in their online dating experience.
“Gay men have tribes, subcultures, aesthetics, and different ways they want to be seen,” says Justin Finnegan, a 35-year-old software engineer in Toronto who last year created Chunkr, a gay hookup app that has resonated with bears, chubs, cubs, and their admirers despite originally being for all gay men.
