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Research exploring digital intimate publics tends to consider social media platforms and dating/hook-up apps separately, implying distance between social and sexual communication practices. This paper troubles that delineation by drawing on LGBTQ+ young people’s accounts of negotiating safety and risk in dating/hook-up apps, in which friendship practices are significant. We explore four key themes of friendship that arose in our analysis of interviews and workshop discussions: sharing mutuals (or friends-in-common) with potential dates/hook-ups; making friends through apps; friends supporting app negotiations; and friends’ involvement in safety strategies. Through analysis of these data, we firstly argue that friendship is often both an outcome and an organising force of LGBTQ+ young people’s uses of dating/hook-up apps, and secondly, that media sites commonly defined as social (e.g. Instagram) or sexual (e.g. Tinder) are imbricated, with friendship contouring queer sex and dating practices.

Digital media has played a historical role in orienting LGBTQ+ young people’s notions of ‘community’ around performances of identity and selfhood. In our research with LGBTQ+ dating app users aged 18–35, ‘queer community’ materialised in relation to participants’ expectations of ethical alignment with others, with an emphasis on performing a reflexive self who was clear and consistent in what they sought on apps. Participants described apps as providing access to community, or enhancing existing connections forged via other social media or in-person contexts. In ways that both cohered with and diverged from historical framings of ‘queer community’, the concept emerged as a shared understanding of ethical conduct, where emotional safety and connecting with ‘nice people’ were prioritised. App users acknowledged the challenges of navigating the constraints and possibilities of dating app cultures and infrastructures, alongside negotiating one’s political responsibilities to ‘queer community’.

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Digital media research commonly explores the use of social media platforms and dating/hook-up apps separately, implying distance between social and sexual communication practices. By exploring how friendships enfold into LGBTQ+ young people’s use of dating/hook-up apps, this paper troubles that delineation. In 2018, we ran four workshops with LGBTQ+ young people (18-35 years) about negotiating safety in dating/hook-up apps. Discussion of friendship featured in all workshops, mostly related to four key themes: the safety of having mutual friends with prospective dates/hook-ups; friend-making through apps; friend-involvement in safety strategies; and friendship advice on app use. Through analysis of these data, we highlight how friendship is an organising force in LGBTQ+ young people’s dating/hook-up app practices, and argue for greater attention to the porousness of media sites commonly defined as social (e.g. Instagram) or sexual (e.g. Tinder). Participants demonstrate that trust in friendship is far greater that their trust in apps, and so this is called upon, at many levels, to negotiate app use. Notably mutual friends (‘mutuals’) offer greater feelings of safety. An overlap between friendship and sexual connections is also apparent in these data, as per discussion of 'sliding into DMs'. Participants who were not cisgender men had greater concern for safety, and thus more knowledge on how to negotiate apps (and dating) safely, particularly through friendship support networks.

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Dating and hook-up apps constitute spaces of intense negotiation around issues of sex, identity and intimacy, in which norms are tested and reinforced. This paper examines discussions of ‘ideal app use’ which emerged in qualitative workshops conducted in 2018 with 23 LGBTQ+ app-users aged 18-35 in urban and regional New South Wales. We explore how a reading of in-app practices - such as messaging, picture-sharing and blocking - through a lens of queer ethics can inform LGBTQ+ young people’s ‘rules’ for app use. Participants were invited to create 'how-tos' for ideal app use, and describe the ways they distinguished ‘good’ (or trustworthy) profiles from ‘bad’ (untrustworthy) profiles via creative design activities. In their discussions, participants articulated their ‘rules’ for filtering matches in relation to particular design features of apps which enabled (sexed and gendered) cultures of accountability to others. As in Duguay’s (2017) research on queer women’s deployment of in-app affordances as ‘identity modulation’, participants interacted with other users and interpreted their profiles in relation not only to sexual desires, but also queer politics and identity. In many instances, this was expressed through a heightened sense of responsibility for self-knowledge and self-disclosure, and a need to connect with ‘good people’ with a shared political sensibility. At other times, participants acknowledged the challenges of negotiating politicised responsibility to others while simultaneously pursuing the kinds of pleasurable connections they sought on apps, and limiting their own self-disclosure as a means of guarding their physical and emotional safety.