vinegarFor the past decade or so, Brits looking to meet their soul mate online have relied on two main methods: trying their luck on dating apps, or trying to find the one by friending as many mutual acquaintances as possible on social media.

However, some people have found a third way by using services such as: Goodreads and Strava. They’re using apps to meet the partners they want to spend the rest of their lives with. These couples are turning out to be trendsetters: So-called hobby apps built around activities like running, reading, or watching movies are becoming popular, and not just for romance.

This is all part of a broader movement as people grow tired of the “digital town squares” offered by Twitter/X and other social media platforms. With many abandoning Elon Musk’s social network due to his stance on “free speech” (which some believe “amplifies hate”), competing apps like Bluesky and Threads are seeing a resurgence in user numbers.

While some users have turned to Twitter imitators, others have sought refuge in apps that promise to connect people with common interests. Running app Strava has seen its user base grow by 1.2 trillion users. Growing 20% in a year According to the digital market intelligence company: Sensor Tower. This success led them to add messaging tools to let users keep in touch as well as record their workouts. Ravelry is accessed through a number of third-party apps and has over 9 million users. Goodreads has over 150 million members.

Letterbox is a movie fan’s dream app, where you can check out the latest movies you’ve seen, review and rate them together with other movie fans and famous actors and directors. In March 2020, it had 1.8 million users worldwide, but now Over 14 million users. This summer, Sensor Tower reported that the app had grown its monthly active user base by 55% in a year.

“We think seriously about the tone and tone of everything we do, from community policy to editorial to social media. We want people to experience how we want their experience on Letterboxd to be,” says Gemma Gracewood, the app’s editor-in-chief. “We’re about movies.”

That’s refreshing in a world where politics and culture wars are imposed through algorithms. “Social media users have long turned to niche apps and spaces,” says Jess Maddox, an assistant professor of digital media at the University of Alabama. “Paradoxically, as major platforms like Twitter/X, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram push more algorithmically curated feeds, users may be less exposed to the content they want to see.”

The cozy feel of hobby apps, set up to share passions and pastimes, makes them a calmer place overall than the brusque racism you might encounter if you accidentally tap on X. “It’s a way for people to connect over shared interests,” said social media researcher Dr. Carolina Are at the Digital Citizen Center at Northumbria University. This means that apps can spend less time, effort and money on content moderation and instead focus on improving the overall experience, provided civility remains the number one priority.

“What’s unique about Letterboxd is that it doesn’t have the ‘town square’ that X has. It’s very much a single-channel conversation,” Gracewood says. Comments happen inline. Guardian and observer. This means that performatively reposting content to the main feed and encouraging mass posting is less possible. A similar situation exists on platforms like Goodreads or Strava, where you can communicate and message other users, but you can’t easily publicly denounce them.

Hobby apps are a welcoming place, so people spend a lot of time on them, and they may eventually turn into more of a service than advertised, including finding like-minded people who want to spend some romantic time together.

One reason people are starting to find love on apps that weren’t explicitly designed for that purpose could be that expectations are lowered, making them less sexual. “Dating apps are like dating supermarkets, something you have to do if you want to have any kind of connection,” Are says.

She points out that while dating apps are trying to shake off their reputation as shallow hookup sites, giant photos of users are still front and center to gauge compatibility. “A lot of people are becoming quite disillusioned with the fact that they’re being judged on their appearance,” she says. “In general, there’s a bit of disillusionment with the dating culture that the platforms foster, because it seems very impersonal. It’s all driven by algorithms, and that doesn’t seem to be serving people very well.”

Recent financial data from Match Group, which operates some of the best-known dating services, including Tinder and Hinge, shows that hobby apps are profiting from dating apps. Match’s stock is now trading at nearly $36 per share, down from a peak of more than $175 per share in October 2021. The company said in a statement. 6% reduction in staff . It was discontinued in July due to a decrease in paying users.

But the decline isn’t limited to the gaming giants: A report by Deutsche Bank analyzing the top 200 dating and social connection apps, “Dating: The Dating Debate – Has Saturation Level Been Reached?”, suggests that downloads worldwide are plateauing.

It also helps that hobby apps feel like a more cohesive, friendly community, and not just because the people are nice. Letterboxd has: A “zero tolerance” approach. Explicit or implicit hate speech, racism, homophobia, white supremacy, transphobia, or any other alienating attitudes.

Gracewood says Letterboxd has fewer than 10 staff members who moderate content and typically doesn’t need to step in often: “I don’t know if we’ve benefited from the shifts in culture and mission of other social media platforms, but from day one, we’ve always cared very much about what it means to build an online community and how to keep that community feeling free and welcoming and nice.”

Whether that’s a lighter approach compared to social media apps, TikTok employs 40,000 content moderators worldwide, compared to Meta is 15,000. Whether that will continue remains to be seen. “It seems like every app starts out unmoderated, and then something bad happens and they get heavily moderated,” Allais said. “So, [hobby apps] It’s going to be a similar trajectory.”

• Chris Stokel Walker: The TikTok boom: China’s dynamite app and the race for social media superpowers (Camberley Press, £9.99). Guardian and observerOrder here The Guardian BookshopShipping charges may apply