this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2026
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Sounds like they are incentivizing people to make external search sites from scraped data, which means the users wouldn't be able to opt out. From your description I'd be pretty surprised if that doesn't already exist
About 10 years ago there was an ASL search greasemonkey script as a browser extention.
Funny thing about that is, it was made by a gay guy who disabled the ability to search for women. And when people asked him about it, he said some things that I will not repeat here, but just know it was like if toxic masculenity also took on the form of abusive and hateful commentary.
Within a week somebody released an alternate version of that script with modified code that let you search for anyone. And as Fetlife is a very all inclusive site, the revised script also had options for numerous variations of trans. Basically every gender identity you can think of was included in the updated script.
Fetlife couldn't control use of the script, but they could detect it. Which they then banned users for using it. Since that time the script no longer works. Fetlife did something behind the scenes to disable it.
There did exist some scrapers but they are fighting to keep those off the site. The first hurdle is that you need an account with a phone number to see anything on there. Makes it easier to ban anyone caught scraping or trying to do other shady shit.
Ah, that does make sense