About IA
Introductions Australia (feel free to call it IntroAU or even just IA) was conceived because someone with the ability to build and run it became lonely...
...and couldn't find a single, (even half-)decent "dating" site in Australia.
I'm Mattt - the guy mentioned above. You can find me here on the site, as I'm (arguably primarily) a user / member :-)
I've used "dating" sites a few times over a couple of decades, and I've *never* seen a decent one. I'm convinced I can not be the only person with such a requirement in AU, so I guess I'm putting my proverbial money where my equally proverbial mouth is :-)
Some key points / thoughts / goals / whatever:
- Accessible. So free. I don't for a moment buy into that "folk prefer to trust paid profiles" bullshit. It's no more than a greedy cop-out. Perhaps the site can make a little $$$ back by (quality) paid advertising - mostly confined to a specific section (ie: not ads everywhere). I'm sure there are other ideas, and I'm sure happy to entertain any idea about revenue streams, but money's not the motivation for this at any rate.
- Pragmatic. This platform really only exists / needs to do a few things. Do those few things well, instead of adding all all sorts of crap and probably failing at continuing to do it all as well. This isn't FB (thank $deity).
- Community driven. I mean, it *is* a community, right? The project itself is managed on our GitLab instance, so anyone can be as involved in the "back end" as they would like. I'm also strongly leaning toward a forum on the site itself (GitLab's more about managing the code-related side... sorta...), with sections for discussions about the platform itself.
- Secure, private, safe. These things should go without saying - although I'll make a point of noting that *all* of our personal data ("metadata", if you like the same words the media, etc, like to throw around) is just that here - personal. It will not be leaked, sold, traded, given away, etc. I'm almost a tool about my own privacy and security (as well as that of the many folk and businesses whose data I (and my software) regularly handle), and every user of this platform will share the exact same level of protection I demand and engineer for myself, my kin and my clients.