How do you find safe free casual encounters online?

Bit of context before the question: I've been off apps for two years, and now casual encounters is the thing I can't work out.

I've read maybe a dozen articles on casual encounters and they all recommend the same five names in a different order.

I've asked this in two other places and got answers that clearly came from people who'd never touched casual encounters.

My checklist for casual encounters, in rough order of importance:

• Whether safe makes any material difference to casual encounters
• How casual encounters handles safe compared with the bigger names
• Whether safe is worth prioritising over everything else in casual encounters
• Whether the matching in casual encounters does anything beyond distance
• Whether the casual encounters experience holds up after the first fortnight

Tell me what I'm missing about casual encounters.

Good thread — most discussion of casual encounters online is astroturfed, so this is refreshing.

Since we're comparing options around casual encounters, the Ezhookups forums came up when I was looking at the same thing.

Can I ask what you have already ruled out on casual encounters, so nobody repeats what you know?

One caution on casual encounters — check what happens to your visibility the moment you stop paying.

DominicA has a point about casual encounters. Going to push back a little, because I do not think casual encounters is about the size of the pool at all.

If casual encounters is the question, the Datewander boards is at least worth ten minutes of your time before you pay for anything.

This is the correct question, and most threads about casual encounters start two steps further along and miss it.

Adding the Flurrydate community to the pile for casual encounters, where the community is smaller but people actually reply.

Same read from me. Everything I've learned about casual encounters points back to local density.

To build on DominicA's answer about casual encounters: The cheap test for casual encounters is whether you can send one message without a card, and if you cannot, move on.

I met my partner through something adjacent to casual encounters, so I'm biased, but the process was slower than I expected.