Teadate

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  Teadate Transgender Date App

Inspiration

Teadate is transgender dating app. Our focus is the transgender vertical because as members of this community we were acutely aware of how underserved this group is. Existing apps banned our people based on our gender so we were forced to find each other on seedy hookup apps. But we wanted to find compatibility just like everyone else. So we set out to build a dating app that fostered relationships.

Our broader social mission is to foster acceptance of relationships with transgender people. The stigma we face results overwhelmingly in violence. When we speak of violence we’re talking not only about direct physical violence but also about what Norwegian sociologist and mathematician Johan Galtung calls “structural violence”. We suffer structural violence when society prevents us from meeting our basic needs by subjecting us to stress, shame, discrimination, and denigration. Teadate’s warm brand and relationship-oriented service will reduce this violence as it helps transgender people achieve what we all seek: love.

What it does

Transgender people tend to care more about personal data than the average person on the dating scene. Teadate is a dating app that protects their sensitive identity information by relying on Verida. Also, through our marketing efforts, we create a welcome atmopsphere for transgender people and cisgender people who are open to dating a transgender person.

Verida is a particularly good choice for authentication since a transgender person may wish to use different gender profiles on different services. For example, while in-transition, a male-to-female transwoman may choose to present as male on social media but as female on Teadate. Thus, users need to be able to have one profile on Verida that encapsulates both their male and female pronouns, images, and possibly even completely separate social networks--one set of friends/family who know about the transgender person's future gender expression and another set of people whom the transgender person is not ready to "come out of the closet" to.

Features which rely on Verida

1. Single Sign-On
2. Vault profiles for pronoun privacy
3. Secure messaging

How we built it

By following the Verida starter kit (https://github.com/verida/vue-starter-kit/), we built login and then rapidly prototyped some of the basic features needed for a dating app.

Challenges we ran into

1. Needed a bit of support on Discord to understand the API semantics
2. Took a bit of thinking to understand the flow for Vault profiles
3. No experience with Vue

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Managed to implement a lot more features than seemed possible in the short amount of time.

What we learned

The login experience is quite straightforward with Verida. We're starting to wonder how many users will have Verida already on their phone to make the on-boarding experience as seamless as possible.

What's next for Teadate

Let the transgender community know that we're building a dating app that addresses their unique privacy needs. Then form an advisory council of a few early adopters to steer the product roadmap and begin building the first features they rate the highest!

In particular, we need a proper object model and need to bring back the great look and feel of our original app. But with our relaunch we are probably going to address a lot of privacy concerns that were not previously possible without Verida.

Built With

• verida
• vue