Taimi: An LGBTQ+ Dating and Chat App
Taimi became my go-to dating app, but it did not last.
Photo by
James A. Molnar on
UnsplashAll dating apps suck. All of them. Without exception. So, yes, Taimi sucks too. However, they donβt all suck to the same extent, and thus Taimi, for a brief period of time, became my preferred dating app, dethroning Feeld. Alas, this was not to last.
Letβs go over my demographics. They are relevant as they color my experience on the dating apps. Iβm nonbinary, pansexual, polyamorous, autistic. Iβm also into BDSM. Please do not make the mistake of thinking that any of these identities implies another. There are plenty of pansexual folks who are not also polyamorous, to take just one example.
In the Google Play Store, Taimi is labeled as a LGBTQ+ Dating and Chat app. True to this label, most of the people on the app are indeed queer. However, you can also find a few cishet folks on the app too. Contrarily to Feeld, Taimi is not specifically geared towards kinky folks. At the end of the day, the difference does not matter much. There are kinky people on Taimi, just not wall-to-wall like on Feeld.
Now, letβs get into the mess of an app that Taimi is.
How It Worksβ¦ Haha! As Ifβ¦
Iβd like to explain how it works, but any explanation on my part would be pointless. See, the Taimi developers like to use their users as lab rats. Every week, some old features disappear, and some new features appear. Or perhaps I should call these features anti-features, because a lot of them stink badly.
Hereβs an example of such an anti-feature. The app presents you with a set of potential connections. You decide which parameters the candidates for connection must have: gender, age, distance, etc. For months, when you ran out of new candidates in your set, the GUI would explicitly suggest that you alter your search parameters to get more matches.
Now, it βhelpfullyβ changes those parameters for you. You donβt do long-distance relationships? Screw that. Now you do. You donβt want to date anyone older than a certain age, or younger than a certain age? Screw that. Now you do.
At first, the app would tell you that it changed the parameters. I complained about this, and now the app changes these parameters without telling you. This is proof positive that Taimi listens to their clients. (This last line was said sarcastically.)
Another anti-feature is that the app now, from time to time, presents you with a slate of people to act on. You can pass on them, or you can all like them at once. However, you cannot look at their profile. Do they live nearby? Are they kinky? Are they compatible with you? Screw you! You cannot know.
There are more anti-features I could talk about, but I do not wish to talk about more of these. I think the anti-features I listed above give you a taste.
Annoyances and Bugs
The bio
Taimi restricts your biography to 500 characters. Thatβs rather pitiful. Feeld allows 1500 characters, and I find Feeldβs limit rather restrictive. I am of the opinion that such length restrictions smack of ageism. Young folks donβt have much of a life history, but us older folks do. These restrictions stink. If someone wants to infodump about their own life, let them. Maybe someone else will like it.
In addition to the restricted bio size, Taimi deleted my bio twice without warning. This is quite annoying. I regularly run into people who have no bio, but if the app is the one deleting it, I cannot blame them.
Travel
Taimi updates your location when you travel, and does not have the notion of a βhome base.β Therefore, it presents the same problem as Feeld. If someone is traveling, and there is no note in their profile about this, you can waste your time with them if one of you is not into long-distance relationships.
Iβve had this problem happen at least twice. One of the person with whom I had started an Instant Chat came back saying that they were just passing through. In another case, I had initiated an Instant Chat with someone. They looked at my message but did not reply, disconnect, or block me. I checked their profile back and found that they were now several states away from me.
Just like with the case of Feeld, from the perspective of the developer, there is no reason to fix this.
Admirers
Their βAdmirersβ tab is laughable. I found in there someone who had admired me four times, and yet had this in their profile:
Iβm fun easy going [β¦] No poly situation. No hookups. CIS gendered men and women only please. Straight men only.
Yeah, I bet that you are βfunβ and βeasy going.β This person is a good example of the problem with the βbisexualβ label. They identified as bisexual, which for them excludes trans folks. I donβt want to keep explaining that my definition does not exclude any gender, so I call myself pansexual.
So, this person, who had admired me four times, would, according to their own profile, not want to be with me because:
- Iβm polyamorous.
- I am trans because I transitioned from male to nonbinary.
- Iβm not straight.
Then there was this woman around my age who had admired me three times. I read her profile, only to find that sheβs not into kink or polyamory.
Similarly, a lesbian had looked at my profile four times, according to Taimi. Iβm a male-presenting enby and thus am generally incompatible with lesbians. Finally, I did start an Instant Chat with someone who I might have been compatible with, and which Taimi claimed hat look at my profile three times. They rejected me as soon as they saw my message.
In conclusion, the βAdmirersβ tab is mostly useless. Iβm not going to hazard a guess as to why exactly.
The Ability to Instant Chat
As I mentioned above, Taimi allows you to instantly chat with someone. They do not have to like you back to initiate the possibility of chatting. As soon as you send them a message with instant chat, they can reply.
Now, the ability to instant chat is a limited resource. When I started my trial, I did not pay for a while, but I still was getting once instant chat per week. Then I paid, and I was getting three instant chats per week, but I let my subscription lapse, and now I no longer have any instant chat.
As great as this ability would seem, Iβve had no response whatsoever to the instant chats Iβve sent. By this, I mean that my message was not even read. In one case, I got an instant block, but this is it. So the instant chat feature only seems to be designed to generate revenue for the dating app.
Conclusion
Taimi is a mess of a dating app. They keep changing the features of the app, no doubt in an attempt to maximize their revenue. However, I find this approach off-putting, and it does not make me want to spend any more money on the app.
#AutisticWriters #Dating #DatingApp #lgbtq #OnlineDating #queer #Taimi #YourAutisticLife
