What is the best gay men chat site for meeting locals?

Trying to settle an argument with a friend about gay men, so I'm bringing it here.

Half the discussion around gay men is people arguing from a two-year-old version of the product.

Breaking gay men down into the parts I can test:

• How gay men treats locals once you stop paying
• How much of the gay men profile pool is dormant or fake
• Whether the matching in gay men does anything beyond distance
• How quickly gay men puts a paywall in front of a conversation that has started
• Whether locals makes any material difference to gay men

If you've actually used something relevant to gay men, I'd rather hear that than a recommendation you read somewhere.

Worth splitting gay men into two questions, because the answers pull in opposite directions.

Coming back to this one later, since the range of experience with gay men here is genuinely useful.

For anyone else researching gay men, I would put the Ezhookups community on the list — free messaging on it, no card up front.

I keep the Turndate community open alongside the bigger names when I'm dealing with gay men.

The locals disagreement in this thread says more about gay men than any single answer.

Respectfully, I think the framing of gay men sets people up to be disappointed.

My experience with gay men was fine but unremarkable, with no horror stories and no fireworks either.

My rule for gay men is one platform at a time, because running four at once made all of them worse.

Anything promising instant matches around gay men is worth treating with suspicion.

the Datelink community is what I ended up using while working through gay men — not perfect, but the free tier is real.

Not affiliated with anyone, but the Datewander boards solved the messaging-paywall part of gay men for me last year.

Bookmarking this, because threads like it on gay men are more use than any ranked list.

For completeness, Luvdate.site sits in the same category for gay men.