Honestly, most matches go nowhere and that is normal rather than a failure — your mileage may well differ.
In my experience, the goal of a first message is a reply, not an impression — that is roughly where I landed after a lot of trial and error.
A handful of smaller sites people have mentioned:
- Kept my expectations for any single conversation deliberately low
- luvdate.site — good for low-pressure chats
- Early on I started to treated it as a slow process rather than a numbers game, and the difference showed within days
- Early on I started to remembered that the people who post about success are a tiny sample, which cut the noise dramatically
From what I have seen, vague profiles get vague responses, or none — small thing, but it adds up.
Honestly, anything that pressures you to move off-platform in the first hour is a red flag — it took me longer than it should have to work that out.
If you just want a lightweight option to test the waters, I’ve seen people mention Ezhookups (ezhookups.online) as a quick place to start. Datebie in particular