September 11, 2026:

When someone asks my close friend Yukon how she and her partner met, she cheekily responds: “The old fashioned way—Tinder!” 

Long before Match.com or OKCupid hit the scene, and way before we all got tired of the excessive swiping on Tinder, or the notorious pay-to-play model of Hinge’s “rose jail,” which keeps you endlessly scrolling and seems to hold your best matches behind a paywall, people have met each other on the internet. Lonely hearts have gathered online to connect as early as the 1950s and ‘60s—some gamers and queer folks found themselves turning to computers to date.

The lure of meeting your perfect match from a massive candidate pool was enticing and, for a while there, a popular way to meet your next date. But even though people are more online than ever, our collective appetite for dating apps seems to be spoiling: Data shows fewer people are logging onto dating apps during their doom scrolls. 

So, what’s with the renewed romanticization of stumbling upon a drunk stranger at a bar or a party? Surely finding a sexual or romantic partner IRL can’t be deeper than the screen simply because the first contact was face-to-face. 

Has the proliferation of dating apps killed sex and romance, or have we just forgotten how to use the internet to truly connect with others? 

Inflation is killing the mood

Statistics show that young people are dating and fornicating less, and it’s not because all of us have suddenly abandoned love and romance to become jaded “volcels” (voluntary celibates). 

One reason people seem to be dating less is that everything is really freaking expensive right now. Forget supporting a second family on today’s salaries—even buying drinks for someone else on a date can feel like a real hit to the bank account. It’s no wonder 86 percent of U.S. adults in a recent survey reported putting off dating due to financial pressure.

Plus, going analog is the new, coolest trend. The invasion of artificial intelligence, overreach of surveillance, and the overall internet fatigue that has lingered since the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns have inspired Gen Z to abandon their phones and go offline. 

In a political and economic climate like this, it’s no wonder the dating apps have lost their luster. 

But when I asked my friend Yukon about her experience with what seems like an increasingly rare online dating success story, she said the internet is what brought her and her partner together. 

Today, she and her now-partner have dynamic social lives and regularly try to meet new people by joining adult soccer leagues, attending friendly social mixers, and volunteering with mutual aid groups—I know, because I watch them live this life together. But they previously ran in completely different circles. If it wasn’t for online dating, Yukon told me, they would have never met. 

(Queer) people have met online for decades 

Online dating isn’t as recent of a phenomenon as you might think. Researchers have found that even from the early years of the internet, marginalized people have used it as a space to explore and express themselves, and to find connection with each other.

Since the 1980s, internet chatrooms have been a tool to alleviate the restrictions of social isolation, whether it’s because of their sexuality, gender identity, or taboo interests in BDSM—or because of the ways geography and disability restricts them from finding community.

As writer David Auerbach wrote in a history of the gay internet for Slate, the first LGBTQ+ space online was created in 1983. It was a forum called net.motss—”motss” stands for members of the same sex. By the 1990s, the site had garnered an audience of around 83,000. 

“Online discussion became a necessary counter to AIDS hysteria and ignorance, where people could share their own stories and alternative news sources,” Auerbach wrote.

Gay men were quick to connect online, first in chat rooms and subsequently on an ever-expanding array of sites and apps, culminating in geolocation apps like Grindr.

With a radical and beautiful history like this, I find it hard to abandon the internet as a vector for meeting people and building community. I don’t want to give up and let corporations completely take over the internet so that every aspect of this space and tool for global interconnectivity is used to make money off of us. We can’t let them win.

Done with the apps? Here’s where to go.

If you’re sick of the same old apps, there are some places to meet people on the internet beyond Tinder or Hinge.

Feeld: At my Rewire News Group kinking booth in July, I advised many people to try out Feeld. It’s a great place for the burgeoning queer or kink-curious. The app has 20 different gender identity labels to choose from, so you can customize your experience to match however you’re moving and feeling in the world on any given day. Feeld is also a great place to find other people to play with. I’ve personally found everything from a multi-year relationship on the app, to friends with whom I can have kinky cyber sex.

Lex: If you’re a bit more romantic or simply don’t like the pressure of being perceived via a dating profile selfie, you might like online personal boards—the modern version of a newspaper personal ad. Lex—which I’ve often heard referred to as the “Lesbian Craigslist”—seems to be the most successful current iteration of this. It originated as a woman-centric personals board on Instagram, and now, it exists as a queer-owned and generally queer app. 

Lex’s main feed is made up completely of text posts rather than photos and profiles. Posts range from advertising community events and parties, to roommate searches, and, yes, hook ups. The app geo-locks you so you only see posts near your location, encouraging users to see the app as a springboard for IRL connections rather than long-distance text-uationships. Who needs a pen pal anyway?

Virtual reality: While Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse was an unsexy, corporate dystopic failure, there are still plenty of actually vibrant social worlds for you to tap into if that’s your vibe. Massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) like “Final Fantasy XIV” and “Runescape” have plenty of roleplay-centric servers where the focus is on chatting with other people, going to online raves, cafes, and, of course, hunting down monsters—together. 

Video games: Other games like “Red Dead Redemption II” and “Grand Theft Auto 5” have online roleplay servers that allow you to be creative and tell semi-improvisational stories with friends and strangers. I’m a fan of this format, as I’ve met several close friends in my youth while roleplaying in my favorite fandom places on the internet. I’ve maintained those friendships for more than a decade, and all of us have hung out in person, too. 

FetLife: If you feel like you’re already on the kinkier side of the spectrum, try FetLife. It caters itself to the kinksters of all gender identities and sexual orientations. It works more like a social network with feeds, message boards, and kink-centric groups to join and participate in. 

Sniffies: For the libidinous among us, Sniffies is a good bet. Its user interface definitely reflects that: a giant map with pictures of naked men geo-pinned to their location, a glorious buffet of opportunity if that’s your vibe. 

One caveat: Sniffies was acquired by MatchGroup in 2026, so I’m suspicious that venture capitalists will begin hollowing it out and maximizing profits soon. Still, for now, it definitely seems like the current go-to place for gay and bisexual men to organize hook ups, extreme kink play, or group sex.

Take back the internet

While I’m here to use the internet to forge connections and have exciting sex with exciting people, I will admit that the way that these apps seek to profit off our very human urge to connect is deeply disheartening. From apps like The League and Raya, which promise to create premium and exclusive pools of dating apps for a steep price, to Tinder limiting profile visibility unless you pay for visibility boosts, these companies are tempting users with finding their perfect match by paying to improve their odds of being seen. 

All of the exploitative pay-to-play models and user experiences that hijack our brains’ reward systems are reason enough to balk at signing up for an app. But, I’m a proponent of finding ways to protest and subvert the increasingly sex-negative culture and legislation that threaten to squeeze out the sexiest and most exciting parts of the internet—not to mention pushing out the queer and marginalized people who use it to connect with each other, make a living, and find community. 

I believe that we should fight for more spaces online where we can talk freely about sex and love. I also believe these places should not profit off of us, and that we should not completely abandon the virtual world in favor of physical spaces. 

Even if you want to meet someone IRL, consider the internet as a tool to build those physical spaces. As long as we have the ability to communicate with each other almost instantaneously across space and time, to find like-minded hearts to connect with, I will always believe in the power of sliding into someone’s DMs to spark something new.

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