Bondage Blog

People often ask me for advice on the best places to make online connections with other kinky people. I’m not precisely the best person to ask, because long ago I got into a stable relationship with BDSM elements, so I’m not part of any of the online connections scenes. But I do hear things.

For many years, the paid-membership dating sites seemed to be by far the best option. Which ones? That varied a lot, especially for kinky people. The tools for hoisting your kink flag and sorting for other compatible perverts varied from site to site, as did the percentage of their dating pools that actually had BDSM interests. And from year to year, this would change. It could be hard to keep up with.

And then with the rise of the smartphone and app-based hookup culture, the dating sites started to… I won’t say “decline” precisely, but they consolidated. Quick hookups in the broader culture moved to Tinder and Grindr and a bunch of lesser-known apps. The dating sites took on social media features, which made them better for finding relationships. At about this same time, the decline of the ad-supported web put pressure on “free” personals sites, and many of them went away. Craiglist Personals was just about the “last site standing” in that category, and as all the freeloader dating traffic consolidated on one site, it became more popular and useful. So you had a vibrant app culture for quick hookups, a diminished ecology of paid dating sites with rich social media features good for finding and forming solid relationships, and a set of free nationwide personals listings at Craigslist.

And then, along came FOSTA to smash things up. Without getting too deep into the weeds on a very complicated subject, FOSTA is a badly-written US law enacted in April 2018. Supposedly aimed at stopping sex trafficking, instead it had a chilling effect on the entire adult internet. The unintended equation works like this: because the people who wrote the law refused to recognize or acknowledge that there’s a difference between trafficking victims and voluntary sex workers, sites that a sex worker could even theoretically use to make connections with clients have had to close, or they’ve been forced to take dramatic and expensive steps to revise their business practices. Sites with serious money in their business models (paid dating sites, really successful social media sites with lots of advertising) can survive post-FOSTA by paying moderation teams to weed out sex workers, but every other small, niche, not-for-profit, or casually-operated social media and personals site has had to close, because if they’re not getting paid, why take a serious legal risk that one of their users might turn out to be a sex worker? Craiglist Personals was the largest and most visible of the casualties, but the list is long. The social connection internet crumpled and died in a week. It was a bloodbath.

So where does that leave kinky people looking for other compatible kinky people? There never have been good specialized kinky dating apps that I know of, and with Craiglist and a whole host of tiny specialized personal and social media sites gone overnight, the paid dating sites like BDSM Dating Only are naturally once more coming back into prominence. By tapping into large pools of like-minded folks, using the social-media features these sites have evolved over the years, and relying on the paid staff to keep the site online where so many more-casual alternatives have suddenly vanished, users have the best chance of finding the kinky relationships so many crave.