When Aaron* logged on to the kinky, nonmonogamy-focused dating app Feeld on Thursday to finalize plans with a match, the interface wouldn’t load. As a middle-aged man in an ethically nonmonogamous relationship, Aaron considers Feeld a great way to meet other like-minded people in his area—and that’s exactly what he was hoping to do this past Friday. Someone he had a connection with was in town for one night only, and he wanted to take advantage.
He tried logging in again and changing his Wi-Fi connection, but nothing seemed to do the trick. Flummoxed, he took to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, to see if there was any explanation.
That’s when he saw a post from Feeld announcing that the app was down and would be for the next day too. Aaron’s heart sank—the person he’d been talking to was leaving the following day, and they could communicate only through the app.
Aaron is one of many frustrated users whose weekend plans were upended by the unexpected, weirdly long, and controversial Feeld update, which went into effect on Friday. Many of them took to X to complain, their gripes becoming increasingly thirsty, forlorn, and desperate as the day went on.
“Need stats on how many pregnancies didn’t occur due to a day of Feeld downtime,” one person wrote. “You guys messed up with threesome for me I’m still waiting for her to log back in and realize the app is working again 😒,” wrote another. Other “disgusted” users decried the lost opportunities to meet people, and many threatened to cancel their memberships altogether.
Thomas, a bisexual man in Kansas, has been on Feeld for a little over two years. He pays $24.99 a month for a Majestic Membership—which gives users bonus features like unlimited likes, the ability to see who has liked their profile, and a privacy feature that allows them to hide from their Facebook friends—but he hasn’t connected with anyone for a while. That is, until this past week, when he finally matched with someone he liked. He was ready to move the conversation off the app—something users often do, given the platform’s notoriously bad interface and functionality—but then it crashed. Ordinarily, it wouldn’t have fazed him, except that he’d just paid an arm and a leg for membership.
Other users expressed frustration with the payment aspect. “It’s a business transaction. If I don’t get what I’m paying for, I should get a refund or extend my membership,” said Michael, a 40-year-old Feeld user in New York. Another user put it more succinctly: “GIVE ME BACK MY MONEY YOU SCAMMERS I DIDN’T PAY FOR THIS TRASH.” (Feeld noted to me in an email that they’re working on compensation plans in real time.)
Katherine, who is in her 40s and lives in Nassau County, is also a paying user and has been for the past two years. But while she had five dates planned for the weekend and the outage meant that those dates were canceled, she’s more upset about another feature of the update. Now the app shows the actual name of the town and borough a user is in, which she sees as a major privacy concern.
“This means if I want to check the app from my bedroom at night, it’s essentially going to reveal my small town name,” she wrote in an email to Slate. “Only a few thousand people live there and from a privacy standpoint, this is soooo much different than revealing an entire borough name.” As a result, Katherine has left the app entirely.
Others have similar privacy concerns. One user, who wished to remain anonymous, also emphasized the safety concerns of location sharing, criticizing the CEO’s suggestion to just turn off the app’s Discover feature, an action that removes the user from the pool of profiles in a given location and makes them visible only to their existing connections.
“Seriously that is your solution? Just not use the app if you don’t feel safe with us doxing you? Please change this Feeld! This is not ok,” they wrote. “I can deal with all the other bugs, but this is not a bug this is a serious safety issue for women and LGBTQ+ community and I will not pay for nor use this app if this is not changed.”
(When asked about the bugs and the privacy concerns with the new location setting, Feeld directed me to their official statement on X, where they say they have turned off the location feature completely while they figure out how to implement it safely.)
Many Feeld users I spoke to are frustrated with the app, but they feel stuck with it due to its unique position in the dating scene. Advertised as “the dating app for open-minded individuals,” it tends to cater to those interested in ethical nonmonogamy, polyamory, kink, casual sex, and other less conventional sexual and relationship preferences. And though it is not exclusively a queer app, it does give people with more diverse gender expressions and sexual orientations a safe and often fruitful place to connect.
“There are no alternatives,” Thomas said. “Whether people are dating for kink or queer inclusivity—which is out of the realm of Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble—there’s no other app that tried to do it first.”
And in the age of instant gratification, we can be a bit … spoiled. “Even when a website takes longer than a second to load, it’s like, ‘Oh my God, what’s happening?’ ” said Eloise, a newer Feeld user whose plans were affected by the outage. To her, the update rollout is atrocious by 2023 standards, but it’s not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. “It seems like an eternity when it’s truly not that long.”
The app is now somewhat back online (though many users are still experiencing problems), and Feeld is well aware of the inconvenience and some of the issues with the update. After seeing my callout for stories, the app’s PR team reached out to me to emphasize that it’s working hard to figure out all the kinks. But unfortunately for Aaron’s weekend plans, this was too late.
“Both of us are people who do our due diligence and are very careful with who we’re meeting online or how we’re communicating with someone in terms of privacy,” he said of him and his almost-date. “We decided to keep that on the app until a certain point.” And by the time the app was back up—and somewhat usable—she was hundreds of miles away.
* All names have been changed to protect identities.
