We're trying to make sure that love between people isn't just based in like a sexual interaction but it's more intimate.
It's based in friendship. It's based in love between not just one person but all people in a space or in a group.
We're trying to have people acknowledge the wholeness, the fullness, the humanity of each person.
Hi my name is Morgen Bromell. My pronouns are they and them and I'm the founder of ‘Thurst.’
So the main goal was to make [Thurst] more inclusive of all genders because at the time when I was just thinking about dating apps and how frustrating they were,
the main one was gender selection. It seemed to always prefer straight men on any platform regardless of which one you choose or men who fit a certain archetype of masculinity.
So that was really frustrating for everyone I knew. We were saying this doesn't seem to include a lot of people.
How can we include folks especially who are trans, gender nonconforming and nonbinary who are just being cut out of every single platform, who aren't being seen online.
It was exciting for maybe like two minutes and then I realized one, apart from just like bugs and technical issues that come up with any launch,
we didn't plan for safety and security at all. Just the idea of having a safe community and saying ‘please be safe, please respect other people’ is not going to work.
I had a user send me a few emails, like in one night, saying 'Hey like I'm being targeted by, I think, a group of people’
and we didn't realize but there are a lot of folks who love to just harass other folks online or try to dox people online, expose their identity.
And this one person was saying, you know, 'I don't feel safe I think they're screenshotting my information. They're very much targeting me.
I'm getting rapid messages. I don't know how to block them I don't feel comfortable. Can you ban them?’
And so this is a scary moment where we realize we didn't have the protocol, we didn't have the policy set up
to really figure out how to ban multiple users who might be one person or multiple users who were different people but choosing to harass one person
It’s just a scary scenario where this one person was saying ‘I'm feeling very attacked. Can you help me?’
I feel like we do have platforms that are incredibly secure, like ‘Paypal’ for instance. All our financial platforms are incredibly secure.
We don't have that same level of rigor when it comes to an identity on a dating platform.
We really wanted people to acknowledge that we're so much more than just one type, one label.
And so for a lot of folks that are saying 'Having so much hardship in my life just experiencing and navigating dating and love and life,
as a person who maybe isn't straight, I want something more. I want to be seen as whole for the first time.'
So we really try to give people freedom to self-designate and then change that and kind of have a flexible space where people are interacting not based on gender alone
but proximity and location obviously but other factors that really play into how we're developing that criteria for selection.
So our first consideration was data how are we best managing our data and on the backend, where's it going, what needs to be stored, what questions are we asking. And then how do we handle user deletion?
Or how do we handle a user choosing to erase their data? Or they want a copy? How do we handle potential data breaches because those things happen.
When the first app launched, I realized our data is not secure. So we really thought first about the user's information, their name, their picture, like who they are, their age, and their location, especially, because [Thurst] is geo-location based and how to manage that.
There are so few spaces where you can go and meet other people around your age who are also queer and out and expressing themselves
or just talking about topics or sharing tips, like this is where I go for healthcare, this is where I get my drag makeup,
this is where I go to like just hang out and see other people and feel like the cops aren’t going to come.
So for me finding community was essential I feel like that's been the journey for most queer youth, especially in this region for decades.
From the history of the pier to Stonewall and things like that, it’s just youth finding each other.
We have a lot of people were saying “I'm 17 and a half, I can’t wait to turn 18 and use this platform when you launch it.
Things like that based on their location and saying ‘I don’t know any queer youth in my school or maybe I’m the only person in the neighborhood but I'm hoping maybe in the next neighborhood over
or I don't drive and I can't figure out how to connect with my community.’ We're hoping that we can bridge those gaps through this online space.