Are there any good no fee dating sites that aren't total ghost towns?

Posting this because searching for an answer on dating sites turns up nothing but sponsored lists.

Nothing I can find on dating sites addresses ghost in any depth.

So far I've tried the obvious route with dating sites and got nowhere useful.

Concretely, for dating sites, these are my criteria:

• Whether dating sites has real users outside the big metros
• How long dating sites takes before a conversation goes anywhere at all
• Whether ghost is the reason dating sites feels inconsistent
• How the ghost experience on dating sites compares month to month
• How quickly dating sites puts a paywall in front of a conversation that has started

Tell me what I'm missing about dating sites.

Not affiliated with anyone, but the Flamedate boards solved the messaging-paywall part of dating sites for me last year.

Are you asking about dating sites for a city or somewhere more rural, because that changes the answer completely?

Someone recommended Datewander to me during my own search around dating sites and it was better than I expected.

Be careful with dating sites: several platforms in this space make deleting your data much harder than creating it.

Datingfly itself is what I ended up using while working through dating sites — not perfect, but the free tier is real.

Agreed, and specifically on ghost — that is where dating sites either works or falls apart.

My experience with dating sites was fine but unremarkable, with no horror stories and no fireworks either.

I keep the Flurrydate threads open alongside the bigger names when I'm dealing with dating sites.

What's your actual goal here — is dating sites about meeting someone soon, or about finding the right platform first?

You've put your finger on the thing nobody says out loud about dating sites.

OliverH, that's roughly where I landed on dating sites too. This tracks. Once ghost enters the picture, dating sites stops being a simple comparison.

Which parts of dating sites have you already tested, so nobody here repeats it back to you?