Looking for a FetLife alternative? Here is what one can and can't be

Start with what FetLife is

FetLife is where most of the kink community in the English-speaking world keeps its groups, its event listings and its writing. It has been that for nearly twenty years. If you are new and want to know who runs the munch in your town, the answer is very often on there somewhere, and nothing described on this page replaces that.

So this is not a page about leaving. It is about the specific things people go looking for an alternative to, and what a different kind of site can do about each one.

What it can't do, in plain terms

• Search for people. There is no way to look for members by role or by city. The site's owners have said for years that this is deliberate, and their reasons are real: a searchable index of people by kink and location is exactly the file a stalker, a hostile ex or a subpoena would want.
• Show you anything before you join. Everything sits behind a login, so a search engine cannot see an event or a group, and neither can you until you have an account.
• Be found for anything but its own name. The only searches that lead to it are people typing the name. Someone typing "munch near me" or "rope class" does not arrive there.
• Take a card. It lost card processing in 2017 and has taken other payment methods since, which tells you how the payments industry sees the whole category.

What people say they want

Read enough public reviews and the same wishes come up over and over: a way to filter and search that actually works, fewer accounts that turn out to be inactive or not who they claim, and moderation that feels predictable. None of those is a complaint about the community. They are complaints about tools, and tools are what a smaller site can build.

The pattern underneath them is that a forum is being used as a classifieds board. Groups with tens of thousands of members exist so people can post what they are looking for, and those posts have no expiry, no vetting and no filter. That is the worst possible version of the thing people want, and it exists because the better version was refused.

What a local directory does instead

A directory starts from places and dates rather than from people. Every public munch, class, party and member space in a city, checked recently, with who runs it. That is visible to a search engine and to a stranger, which is the whole point: you can find your way in before you have told anyone anything.

It also gives you something to do this week. A profile is a static thing. A munch on Thursday is a reason to leave the house, and it is where reputations are made and checked in person.

And what we're building for finding people

We are not building a searchable member index, for the same reasons FetLife won't. What we are building is different in shape: a short statement of what you are looking for, in your city, that expires after two weeks, is screened before it is visible, and connects two people only when both say yes. Nothing accumulates into a file about you. We call them intents. Reading them is free with an account; saying you're interested is what membership is for; and the person who posted decides whether to reveal themselves, which costs them nothing.

Until then, an account here gets you a verified members area where people choose whether to be visible, and messaging once age is confirmed. It is small, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

Where we're worse

• Size. Most cities here have a few dozen listings, not a few thousand members.
• Coverage. United States only, and only cities with enough real listings get a public page.
• Conversation. There are no groups, no writing, no feed. If you want the discussion, that is still where it lives.

How to use both

Use the directory to find this month's munch and this month's class. Use the community site to read what the organizers have written and to follow the groups once you have met people. Go to the munch. Nearly everyone who has found their people did it in that order.