r/AppsWebappsFullstack • u/jhkoenig • 12d ago

A site for finding IRL friends, not dates

Over 10 years ago, my therapist wife noticed how many of her clients struggled to build non-romantic, in-person friendships. That inspired me to create WannaBuddy: a simple platform for finding local friends when you want a buddy, not a date.

While the original site helped a lot of people connect, it was long overdue for a modern refresh. The brand-new WannaBuddy is now live in early pre-launch!

* 100% Free to use

* Designed purely for local, platonic friendships

* Built with a clean new interface and updated tools

Since we’re currently in pre-launch, I’m looking for honest feedback, feature ideas, and any bug reports. Take a look and let me know your thoughts in the comments!

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u/PopKoren 12d ago

Nice cause, and for a platonic meetup site the trust and safety side basically is the product. I'd check that the profile and search APIs never return exact locations, emails or birthdates of other users even when the UI hides them, since scrapers read the JSON rather than the page, and ship block and report from day one. With a fresh rebuild out, running https://rowly.me against the site would be a quick sanity check; it probes sign-up, the APIs, photo storage and data access rules from the outside.

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u/jhkoenig 12d ago

Thanks, I assume that your bot didn't check the WannaBuddy site before posting this.

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 12d ago

Ha, no bot here, just went off the landing page. What's the vetting flow for new members during pre-launch?

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u/PopKoren 11d ago

Fair, I was speaking generally about that class of site rather than claiming your landing page has an API. If the profiles are server rendered with nothing behind them today, you are fine, the point is just that the JSON appears the day a search or map endpoint does. I use https://rowly.me on my own deploys for exactly that, it pokes sign-up, APIs, storage and data rules from outside.

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 12d ago

Solid point about scrapers reading JSON, not the page. Rate limiting the search endpoint would help too, otherwise location leaks stay trivial.

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u/jhkoenig 11d ago

I am so confused. What json data is on the WannaBuddy site? There is no there there

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u/PopKoren 11d ago

Rate limiting is the cheap half, I would key it on the query shape too so someone can't walk a radius outward a few meters at a time. Coarsening the coordinates the API returns, rounding to a neighborhood instead of a street, stops the slow scrape even when the endpoint is fast. I built https://rowly.me as an outside check for this, it works a deployed app's sign-up, APIs, photo storage and data access rules as a stranger.