Nearly every major digital space where queer people meet is now owned by companies whose primary obligation is to their shareholders. Match Group took a $100 million stake in Sniffies with an option to acquire it outright. Grindr, majority-owned by two billionaire investors, reported $440 million in revenue in 2025, driven by degrading the free experience to squeeze users toward paid tiers. The pattern repeats: invest/acquire, monetize, extract.

I'm Calum Bowden, based in Berlin. I am a PhD candidate in the sociology of technology and organisation, and for close to a decade I have co-run Trust, a nonprofit network of over 1,000 "utopian conspirators" researching and prototyping community-centred alternatives to mainstream tech.

In April 2025 I posted a tweet dreaming of a decentralized gay sex app that redistributes value back to its users. It went viral. I am not a software engineer, but almost a year later, friends in the decentralized tech space, DWeb's own Arkadiy and Sarah, encouraged me to try vibe-coding a prototype. Three weeks of iterative building later, I posted a video expecting 300 people to test it. Within 24 hours, 15,000 had logged on. Over 60,000 followed in seven weeks. The response made clear there was real, urgent demand. I decided to try to crowdfund a full app. So far, over 600 founding members have contributed more than €80,000, with 19 days still to go.

The Meetmarket prototype uses end-to-end encryption, decentralized identity where users hold their own keys, and k-anonymity for location. The company is establishing steward ownership with a golden share held by a nonprofit, making it legally impossible to sell, go public, or betray its founding principles. There will never be advertising. Surplus revenue flows into a community fund reinvesting in queer IRL spaces.

This talk & discussion is about:

Building solidarity-based digital infrastructure. What does it actually take, legally, technically, and financially, to create a platform that cannot be captured? Steward ownership, the golden share, crowdfunding over VC, transparent accounting, community governance. How these mechanisms work in practice.

Using generative tools to work more closely with communities on digital platforms and economic models. Vibe-coding a prototype changed the relationship between design and community. Building fast enough to put working software in front of people within weeks meant the community could shape the platform from its earliest moments, before the architecture was locked in. This session explores what that opens up: how generative tools can compress the distance between an idea and something people can actually use, test, and push back on, and what that means for participatory design, for prototyping alternative economic models, and for building technology that answers to the people it serves.

We are now transitioning from prototype to a full app, and will use part of this session to hear from the DWeb community. The questions we are working through are exactly the questions this room has been thinking about for years: threat models for vulnerable populations, decentralized identity systems, how to combine privacy with public discovery, how to design grassroots moderation, I want to bring what we have learned so far and leave with perspectives that shape what we build next.