Sex Worker Search

Thank you very much for doing the AMA! Could you please add some more search filters? Someone who’s on Tryst to scam for deposits or pretending to be an escort to direct traffic to their Onlyfans is likely to have a very low effort tryst profile with no personal website, no socials, only one contact method etc. If clients could filter search so they only see results for providers who do have a website, have socials and have multiple contact methods, that would make for a much better user experience on Tryst, make using tryst more profitable for real providers, make life very difficult for scammers and encourage more sex workers to make more effort with their web presence. ps. Will you be age gating Tryst for people accessing the site from UK IP addresses? I think the deadline Ofcom has given is 25th July? If so, what age verification method(s) will you use.

We have quite the list of filters we would love to introduce, including around contact options. We also want to encourage clients to use more filters overall because we know that more relevant search results are good for both the person searching and the folks showing up in those results.

I’ll be sure to add your vote to the filters request! If you have other ideas please feel free to send them to me at [email protected]!

For your ps, I will need to run that past legal and come back to you!

I have heard from legal 😀

Short version: we’re actively working on it!

Long version: We always aim to stay in compliance with new laws. While we may not agree with them, harm reduction means keeping us online so we can keep all of you online.

We’re working on a pathway that keep us compliant while reducing friction for people using our platform. We have and will continue to approach our compliance efforts with user needs in mind. Provider and client privacy and safety are always what we prioritise when we make these decisions.

Has there been any discussion around updating the art on the Tryst homepage?

Yes, absolutely! Right now, we’re focused on accessibility before we tackle aesthetics. We’re working on a smoother signup and verification process. Improving the overall usability and look of the site is definitely on our list, and the art is part of that!

I also think it would be cool if we could post videos on Tryst as well with pictures.

Thanks for the suggestion — we agree, it would be amazing to support videos alongside photos on Tryst!

That said, hosting adult-oriented video content is extremely challenging, especially for a small, independent platform like ours. In recent years, the legal and regulatory landscape has changed dramatically. Stricter requirements around age verification, content moderation, and payment processor compliance have made things far more complex and resource-intensive.

We currently don’t have the legal or technical capacity to support video hosting in a safe, responsible, and compliant way.

We’re always thinking ahead and exploring what might be possible in the future. While video support isn’t off the table forever, we want to be honest that it’s not something we can offer in the near term.
We really appreciate your input — feedback like this helps shape our priorities, so please keep it coming!

Is there a reason y’all haven’t hired more people to help with the ongoing issues, which you seem aware of? I know it isn’t the only answer, but it really seems like more human moderation would help with wait times, scammers, and online only miscategorisation.

Very fair question! We have been hiring, and we’re starting to see some improvements. We’ve worked to bring in people with cultural experience and who share our values, and make sure they’re fully trained.

We’ve increased the size of our support team by almost 60% in the last 12 months! Part of the challenge is that we grew really, really quickly in a very short time. That rapid growth outstripped our ability to hire at a pace that matched the increase of users. We’re in a place to catch up now and we are doing it!

We take care with our hiring processes to make sure we’re growing sustainably and effectively. We want to make sure that everyone has the expertise, training, and supervision needed to handle your needs, requests and your information, accurately and safely.

You’re also right that it’s not the only answer! We also have engineers and other specialists looking into ways to allow our existing staff to work more efficiently.

As I was actually interesting in applying I did check a few times and never saw anything listed on the site when I looked ( I may have over looked) and I would like to know how you’re hiring people and is it limited to only people who live in Australia? Would you hire outside of Australia if only there at this time? I feel having people also in different countries will be super beneficial in many ways! Like more personal information about local markets as well as people active for longer periods of time, maybe who are also not subjected to your legal holidays.

Right now, hiring is limited to states in Australia and New Zealand where sex work is decriminalised or legalised, for a few reasons. We need to be able to keep our staff (and your data) safe.

We’d love to expand this eventually, and absolutely see the value in doing it! Running an international company is complicated, and even making sure that our New Zealand staff are supported and treated fairly has taken some work.

(Side thoughts from me personally, not as Tryst: I previously worked for a US company based around the world, and the contracts they used to do that were… not legal in most of the countries my colleagues and I were based in. Tryst wants to do it correctly, and in my experience that’s often such an intense and expensive legal process that we’re not anywhere near big enough to make it feasible.)

What is your plan moving forward with approving new photos, it literally has almost been a month since I uploaded new photos and haven’t been approved yet. I have premium plus, this drastically Hinders business especially when they are themed/seasonal photoshoots.

It sounds like you might have run into a bug or obstacle, that’s unusually long given what you’ve described. Do you mind DMing the email you signed up with to u/Tryst_Support so Macy can have a look?

To answer your question more broadly, I’ve mentioned elsewhere that we’ve increased hiring into our support team significantly. While our first focus is getting new users onboarded and able to start earning more quickly, we also expect this hiring to improve photo processing times across the board in the coming months.

We’ve put up a dashboard today that shows our current wait times for new users at https://tryststatus.link/. I’m hopeful that we’ll get enough information to add our photos wait times in the next few months, and that you’ll be able to see that improving quickly as well.

The recent update to the “available now” feature has been controversial. I do understand and agree with the team’s position that many people misuse the feature for a purpose it was not intended for. However, it appears to me that most people are frustrated with the change because it was the only way to improve their ad ranking on the site. Additionally, many advertisers also feel that the paid subscription plans do not provide much value in terms of visibility and search priority. These considerations in mind – has the team given any consideration to increasing current subscription costs or adding a new subscription tier? Or even the opportunity to purchase ad bumps, guaranteed premium ad placements, etc.?

This is a really good one, thank you! We haven’t increased the prices of any of our plans since we introduced the Premium+ plan in March 2023, because we wanted to keep the platform as accessible as possible. We also haven’t made any significant changes to the plans since 2020, and the industry is definitely a different place now.

I agree that we need to look into how effective our plans are, and whether they are actually working for you, our users.

Our focus right now is on reducing wait times, but we are so keen to revisit this and work together to build something new. We know visibility is increasingly becoming a problem, particularly as more and more workers join our platform, and we’re in early conversations about redesigning plans that we hope to continue next year.

Here’s a screenshot list of promised features from 2020:

Are any of them in development/coming? I know I was super excited about them at the time and they’d still be such a huge help for so many of us! To not click through, the list of “coming soon” features was: FMTY label/section, live photos, duo/trio partners, videos, community forum. Also, I’m wondering about two additional features: is a pinned/paid bump section ever coming? I know so many of us would really love that and would be happy to pay a large upcharge for it! Will you ever offer analytics going further back than 30 days? 90 days, 6 months and a year or even further back would be super helpful!

I love that you have this screenshot, sincerely! Unfortunately, some of these things will likely never happen because the changing regulatory environment has made offering them extremely hard for a small company like us. It was a different (simpler) time in 2020! Other things, like FMTY, are regularly brought up internally, and we definitely have ideas about that 🙂

What are you going to do to get more traffic and make your site worth paying for? When I had premium +, it brought me ONE single client for the entire 30 day period. I didn’t renew and I won’t again. Are there currently any plans to add reviews?

To answer the traffic question: Tryst gets a huge amount of traffic. The key challenge is making sure that that traffic translates to traffic for everyone on the platform in a way that is equitable. That’s a huge challenge, and everyone we’ve talked to has a different vision for what that might look like, especially around locations with very different populations or demand.

If that traffic isn’t reaching you at the moment, we fully support your decision not to use or upgrade your Tryst account. Our dream is a world where there are plenty of trustworthy, successful platforms run by and for sex workers, where sex workers can choose the one that best suits their business! We hope to be one of many options in that world 🙂

As for reviews: we’re pretty wary of them. Personally, as an intersex Asian sex worker, I’ve been burnt pretty hard by bad johns who’ve left transphobic/ or racist reviews. The last thing we want is to turn into a platform where sex workers have to be as fearful as gig economy workers often are about getting anything less than five stars if they set any kind of boundary.

To make a profile in the bdsm category is it necessary to provide bdsm services in person? Or do i qualify for the BDSM category if I do BDSM virtually? Because I do bdsm sessions on videocall.

We’re still refining how we handle online-only offerings, but here’s how it currently stands:

To offer any kind of online service, including virtual BDSM sessions (like via video call), you need to have an Online profile.

We currently have four profile types:

BDSM

Escort

Massage

Online

The Online profile is specifically for those offering services virtually. So if you’re offering BDSM sessions online, you’ll need to create an Online profile rather than a BDSM one.

This has actually sparked a very good conversation about how we further enhance our online only offerings, thank you for the prompt. We will continue to review how we categorise services to make things clearer moving forward.

Could you please allow providers to have profiles in multiple categories without the necessity of creating entirely separate accounts and going through the verification process twice? Seems to me if you’ve already verified my age and identity once, it’s redundant to do it again. Makes no sense. Costs precious time, which to professionals, is money. For example, I’m a FBSM massage therapist who also offers some Fetish/BDSM services. It ought to be as simple for me to advertise my services in both categories on Tryst as clicking a box or switching profiles (like we do here on Reddit, easily switching between profiles). I think I probably speak for a lot of providers here who would really appreciate that convenience! So many of us are multi-talented and shouldn’t be limited in ad reach to only one category in our local city. Thanks for reading and listening to us!

This is 100% on the list! It’s going to be quite complicated to implement, so there’s no timeline or promises I can make here. We’re aware it’s a big issue, and we’re thinking longer-term about how we can design something better.

My question is, genuinely, what is the hold up? I want to understand why approval for anything moves at a glacial pace and why it isn’t improving despite community complaints. Even paying members wait 3-5 days for a photo, whereas Loyalfans reviews every photo individually within an hour. It’s my one deepest grievance with an otherwise wonderful app and company mission.

This is a big one. Thank you so much for waiting!

I’ll answer your actual question (why there’s a delay), but first I want to talk for a moment about what we’re doing about it. I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this AMA that we’ve increased the size of our support team by about 60%, and we’re starting to see wait times come down.

I’ve just launched a dashboard at https://tryststatus.link which tracks the average wait time for new signups, and hopefully we’ll have enough data to add photo approval in the next few months! That dashboard also records outages with various parts of the site, and we’ll update it weekly with our progress on getting wait times down.

Back to the why.

Most of it has to do with how quickly we’ve grown. The other part is how our operating model has meant a delay between that growth and us responding to it.

First, about our growth. Tryst offers one of the most competitive free plans on the market, and we ensure that every user on our platform is verified. This means there is a decent amount of labour associated with getting providers onto our platform and I don’t think any of us expected us to grow as fast as we did.

Second, we’ve often chosen stability and security over speed. We don’t use exploitative labour practices, we pay a liveable wage, we hire from within the community, and we don’t outsource our moderation. This means that the human labour associated with maintaining Tryst is relatively high.

Finally, we’re entirely bootstrapped. We don’t have the backing of billionaires or venture capital firms, and we certainly didn’t have access to a big bucket of angel investor money that allowed us to scale before we saw revenue. We’ve all seen companies go sharply downhill because they have to extract profits for their investors, and we never want to be bound by that. Our growth is funded by reinvesting our revenue back into the platform.

All this has meant that until recently, our ability to hire hasn’t kept up with the number of new users hitting the platform.

I think we’re on the right track to catch up now. I’m really glad that we’ve managed to do that without selling any part of the company to people who don’t have our communities’ best interests at heart. It’s definitely been challenging to hold on to our mission and values, but nobody here would have it any other way.

Have you considered some kind of shuffle feature for listed profiles? So many providers pay for premium placement that they do not in practice receive due to market saturation. What if instead of visibility being dictated by how much we can pay for ads, visibility was randomized and all workers were given the same opportunity to be seen?

Hi! Our algorithm considers a number of different things, and we do have a shuffle built in! We add a randomising factor that changes for each visitor to the platform, so everyone has a chance to be seen. In general, this means that everyone on Premium+ who shows up in a certain search should get some time on that search’s first page, even if that’s not where you show up when you check.

At the moment, my understanding is that Tryst only allows each advertiser to have one type of profile: Escort, BDSM, Massage, and Online. Tryst also seems to understand that the terms of service of some online platforms do not allow for in-person work and in-person advertisers may not be in compliance if they provide links on their ads (I base this assumption of understanding on the disclaimer provided on the site which says “terms of service may vary between platforms, and you are responsible for complying with any external platforms policies and requirements.”) Understanding that there are many advertisers who do multiple types of in-person work and/or online work, could you explain why the platform does not allow advertisers to have multiple advertisement types? Are there any plans to allow multiple ad types in the future? It seems to me this would resolve the issue of online-only advertisers misusing the in-person advertisement categories and would also provide an additional revenue stream for the site (by allowing advertisers to purchase multiple ad types).

You are allowed to have one profile per category, however this means you need one account per category too. We are very aware of how much this sucks and it is something we want to improve for this and many other reasons! But because this is how the site has worked for so long, the process of un-jenga-ing the process to make this change is going to take us a little while to do and do well.

I verified my profile awhile back, and I have absolutely no idea if one day my profile will be suspended without warning. I’m afraid to submit new photos for my ad. Should I be proactive and re-send a verification photo? What are we to do on our end to keep our profile active? This is frightening for those of us who depend on Tryst for our livelihood. We have bills to pay and mouths to feed while we wait weeks for Tryst to approve/re-approve. And are you going to reimburse paid members for the time their profiles are suspended? As it is now, you’re blindsiding us and taking our money without providing the service we paid for.

This concern is exactly what we want to address – ensuring your account is in good verification standing shouldn’t cause you stress and make you anxious about interacting with the platform, or see you stuck in limbo for days or weeks as it is processed.

We are actively working on this specific issue, and we will be share more on this topic as soon as we can.

Is Tryst, or Assembly4, currently profitable? If not, has it ever been? If so, roughly how long has the company been profitable?

We’ve been profitable as long as we’ve been growing. We’ve never accepted investments, and we don’t have any external funding sources.

Sneaking in a cheeky answer to a question you didn’t ask: the profit we make is reinvested in our growing team, our platform, and the peer organisations who service our community 🙂

Despite my complaints, thank you for everything you do!! You’re still the best of them all and I want you to succeed. I know you’ve always tried to not be as non-dependant on search engines as possible, but I record data obsessively and it seems like y’all are losing the SEO fight to other ad sites. Inside Tryst search things are great but that still feels like you’re losing out. Managing a relationship with American tech companies as a SW company sounds awful, but is there anything more you can do on that end? Oh lord the pictures. Please. Like when it’s a Halloween themed photoshoot, if Mariah Carey has returned but the pictures still aren’t approved, that makes paying for premium+ feel not good. Y’all have been much better recently but still. Have you considered just straight up not letting people use their login email as their contact email? (With a popup explanation why when they try). Also not making authenticator optional? Apparently you did this years ago, belated thank you. Can you relax the watermark rules/update your watermarking process for AI? I’ve had issues with watermarks being removed from my content already, and AI makes it much easier. I haven’t seen that happen with Tryst scrapers yet but I’m sure it will. There are tools I’ve heard of that modify images to make it much harder for AI to mess with them, maybe look into that?

Hello! Super quick answers to your first two points, within what I can say.

Search traffic varies wildly for different users and across different regions as Google continues to change their algorithms. There’s a few reasons not to discuss SEO publicly in more detail, but we’re very happy with our SEO performance.

We’re working on improving how quickly we process photos! Our recent expansion of our support team by about 60% should be having even more impact on this soon. I’m glad you’ve noticed it improving already 🙂

Thanks for taking a moment to answer questions! I often see reports about people experiencing significant wait times for verification with their ID and/or rejections due to their material not meeting the stated verification requirements. I haven’t updated my photos on the site in a while, but I also seem to recall that Tryst requires all photos to be reviewed by the team before they go live on the site. Additionally, IIRC the site does not allow advertisers to watermark their images. However, in spite of these ID verification and photo approval processes, I have been a victim of impersonation where someone on the site was able to use my photos on their advertisement. I have also seen reports of others who have experienced the same impersonation issues. Could you speak to the review process for advertisers and advertisement material? What is that process like currently and what are some improvements you all will implement in the near future to reduce the wait time for verification while also ensuring advertiser legitimacy?

You recall correctly! All advertisers on Tryst go through ID verification, and every photo is manually reviewed by our moderation team before it goes live. Also yes, we now allow small, non-intrusive watermarks like your name or working alias. That’s a change from how things were a while ago, so it makes sense if you remember it differently.

That said, even with those steps in place, impersonation can still happen. We’ve seen cases where someone managed to upload photos that weren’t theirs, usually ones that had been posted elsewhere publicly. They were able to get through verification by gaming the system. It’s unacceptable, and we’re actively working on closing those gaps.

Here’s how the current process works:

• All advertisers must complete ID and selfie verification.
• Every image is manually reviewed and must follow our photo guidelines. We don’t allow AI-generated content, explicit acts, text overlays, or watermarks from third parties like photographers or agencies.
• You can include your own watermark, as long as it’s simple, small, and relates to your name or branding.
• We also add a small automatic Tryst watermark to the bottom corner of each image.

What we’re improving:

• We’re streamlining our internal systems to reduce verification and moderation wait times.
• We’re building better tools to detect stolen or reused images, including image-matching checks and internal flagging.
• We’re improving how we cross-check ID materials with uploaded photos to catch impersonators sooner.
• We’re also making it easier and quicker to report impersonation. When those reports come in, we prioritise them and take swift action.

These changes will take some time to become visible. As always, we need to make sure they are well-implemented and won’t cause more harm than they solve, but that work is ongoing and more is being planned.

We know this isn’t just about policy, it’s about keeping people safe. If you find your photos being used without permission, please do report it right away, even with the current system and its flaws. Every report does help us make Tryst a safer and more trustworthy platform.

Since I’m answering this late, the AMA will be closed again soon! As always, you can email Chris (at tryst.link) if you have specific thoughts on how the reporting system can be improved, or DM me if you’d like me to clarify anything.

How long does the resubmission review last?

It depends on what the resubmission is for. With the way we’ve grown our support team recently, most resubmissions are reviewed within 1–2 business days. At the moment, there are almost no pending resubmissions, and most of what’s left is complex cases that need some review.

If you’re waiting on a resubmission right now, please DM u/Tryst_Support with the email you’ve signed up with so Macy can check it out!

Hi! First off, I really wanted to say thank you for the work you guys have put in the past couple years. I hope you take this ama to heart & realize how many thousands of sw around the world depend on your platform. As for my question – Currently there are only roughly 20 profiles when I filter to Milan, Italy and only around 30 under Madrid, Spain – both of which are very major European metros. Meanwhile in comparison, even a mid-sized US metropolitan area like Denver, Colorado lists 600+ profiles. Do you plan on putting in more effort to expand into the European market & what steps do you plan on taking to do so?

Bring it on, Europe!

We’re definitely thinking about it! We know that sex workers in Europe will have different needs from sex workers in other parts of the world where Tryst has become more popular, so the first step is research.

We plan to speak to more sex workers in Europe to learn about your specific needs, then make sure that Tryst is actually going to be useful. We’re also aware we have a few things we need to sort out before we can encourage new signups at a larger scale (like improving our signup experience!)

We’d love to hear from you, if you’d like to help us figure out what could make Tryst better in Europe! If you want to be part of our research, you can reach me at [email protected].

How long on average does it take for you to verify our profiles to allow them to go live on the site? X

At the moment, the average time it takes is 34 days, which is much too long. The good news is that this is a huge drop from two weeks ago, when it was 47 days! We’ve recently hired and trained some specialists to tackle this exact delay, and our projections suggest this wait time will continue to decrease. I hope we’ll get that all the way down soon.

I have two passports and split my time between 2 countries, with different legality levels. I have worked in both countries but now am fully expanding my brand. I am looking at having two completely different websites and profiles so that I can tailor my advertising accordingly. Can I sign up for two different Tryst accounts – one with one passport, the other with the other passport? This would help so much with the separation between the two.

We allow each person to have multiple profiles for different categories, but we don’t currently allow multiple profiles for different personas in the same category. Creating a second account does not require you to provide different ID.

There’s a good chance we will consider this in the future, especially as it relates to different geographical areas! The situation you’re describing makes perfect sense. It isn’t on the list of immediate things we’re likely to look at soon, though.

Is there any possibility of introducing publishing standards? Seeing Hustler style content right next to your ad because of another advertiser is… A bit disturbing. Also, could you all do something about pricing being impression based rather than a monthly? Something is profoundly wrong when I’m only getting 100k impressions per month while someone advertising in NYC, LA, and Chicago could get 1M impressions per month, but we’re both paying the same amount. Last one: the three cities feature is a detriment to many advertisers in cases of abuse – but you all don’t have an option for those of us who might want to work on a FMTY basis. With other ad platforms – Eros, Backpage, etc. – you can just pop up ads wherever you want them. Tryst limiting to three… Makes that business model much harder.

Thanks so much for your thoughtful feedback.

We completely understand how frustrating it can be to come across content that doesn’t align with your brand or preferences.

Our advertising policy outlines what is and isn’t allowed on the platform, and while we encourage everyone to review it here, it’s also important to us that providers can advertise in ways that feel authentic to them as long as they remain within our guidelines. This means you’ll see a range of styles and approaches across the platform.

We want to be absolutely clear: we do not support or tolerate whorephobia. Tryst was built for the sex work community, and that includes respecting the many different ways people choose to present themselves.

We also hear your concerns around pricing and impressions.

Please note: our memberships are not based on impressions.

That said, our team is currently reviewing how we can better reflect market differences and create a more equitable system across regions. It’s a balancing act between keeping things simple and being fair, and we’re actively working on ways to improve that model.

Regarding multiple home bases and FMTY, these are things our team are thinking about! But these aren’t our current priorities, so I don’t have any concrete news for you there.

We truly value feedback like yours—it helps us make Tryst safer, more inclusive, and more effective for everyone in the community.

What countries are you guys not servicing currently?

Good question, and one I know there’s a lot of curiosity and frustration around.

Right now, there are several countries we can’t service due to a mix of legal restrictions, international sanctions, and the limits of what our small team can safely support. Here’s a starting list of places we currently do not service:

• Belarus
• Central African Republic
• Democratic Republic of Congo
• Iran
• Libya
• Mali
• North Korea
• Russia
• Syria
• Zimbabwe

An important note: this list isn’t exhaustive. There are other regions we may not be able to support, depending on the legal context or patterns of unsafe activity we’ve encountered. Basically, if it’s a place where sex work is heavily criminalised, or where we’d be putting providers or ourselves at legal risk, we have to be extra cautious.

That said, this isn’t a forever thing. We would love to one day be able to support more countries, and we know that means doing the work to better understand how. If you’re part of (or know of) peer orgs, advocacy groups, or on-the-ground collectives working on decrim or digital safety for sex workers in currently unsupported regions, please reach out. Connecting with local expertise is how we make smart, safe, and meaningful decisions about expansion.

Does the online-only issue mean us in-person workers can’t have onlyfans/loyalfans/fansly links on our pages?

You can definitely have links to your online profiles on your in-person ad! We’ve added validation to links like OnlyFans links to make sure they’re correctly formatted, which also allows us to keep track of them.

We want in-person sex workers who do online work to be able to advertise both on our platform, and that will not change unless we have absolutely no alternative.

Do you have any suggestions for providers who would like to contribute to the blog but don’t know where to start?

Absolutely! If you’re keen and don’t know where to start, our Write for Us page is a starting point if you haven’t seen it yet.

Is there anything we could do to make this more approachable or barriers you’re running into specifically? Our blog team are watching this AMA and would love to hear.

And no worries if you need a minute to mull it over, you are always welcome to reach out the blog team and ask us any clarifying questions. We want to publish you, so please do hit us up!

Why do some locations show up in the provider search, but not as an option when selecting a city under tours? I’ve been wondering if this is a technical glitch because places I used to be able to select for tours are no longer available and have no providers touring there (so assuming it has disappeared for them as well between last year and this year). Thank you for fielding these questions!

Currently, the locations we show in the member area (for your profile, home base and tours) are separate from the location list we use for search.

We did this early on to ensure a good experience for both clients and providers.

Clients expect to be able to search for any location, so that’s what we allow.

However, a good provider experience is one that has a controlled list of locations, which makes sure you’re listed on a page with enough results for decent SEO.

We have been looking at how we could unify these two systems. It isn’t a small project though, so I can’t give you a proper estimate on when that might happen!

Thank you Tryst for the wonderful platform that has been created for us. My only wish is that you will properly consider it in other locations such as India and South Africa. I know of so many independent sex workers who have requested Tryst in India, but all the requests to have Tryst in India have been rejected by Tryst. There are many business traveller clients that we know of who use Tryst abroad e.g. London & USA who would love to use it when they return back to India, so there is a huge demand. I do not understand the reason why it has been rejected, it can’t be due to legislation, as Tryst operates in the USA for example. Surely it can’t be due to human trafficking risks, as this can happen anywhere in the world, especially in Mexico for example (where Tryst also is allowed). Can you please reconsider this. Thanks!

Thank you for this, it’s a huge question that deserved a careful answer.

The short version is: we don’t have the capacity to reconsider this right now.

The long version, passed on from the leaders who make these decisions, is:

Honestly, we’d love to, but we also know this isn’t something that can be done quickly or carelessly.

The legislative and cultural landscapes around sex work vary significantly between countries, and navigating them responsibly is complex. In many regions, criminalisation (whether direct or partial) makes it incredibly difficult to ensure the safety and legal protection of sex workers, and by extension, any digital platform that supports them. Engaging with these realities requires deep, ongoing research, legal consultation, and collaboration with trusted local organisations that already have relationships within these communities.

Equally important is ensuring that sex workers can access and use the platform safely. That’s not just about tech and translation. It’s about privacy, trust, localised support, and a clear understanding of risk, which differs widely depending on the legal context.

But we can’t only focus on one side of the marketplace. Building a client base that respects and aligns with the values of the platform, and meets the cultural and behavioural expectations of the regions we operate in, is just as essential and equally nuanced.

All of this takes real time, resources, and care. As a bootstrapped team, we’re taking a careful, sustainable approach. That means working slowly and intentionally: listening, building peer partnerships on the ground, ensuring our support systems are relevant in each context, and evolving the platform in a way that meets local needs without creating new forms of harm or exploitation. We’re committed to growth, but it has to be thoughtful, and always in service of the communities we’re here to support.

Is it possible to only work with a Username & Password or is Google Authenticator mandatory?

You don’t have to use Google Authenticator, but you do need to have some way of using two-step login.

Two-step login is incredibly important for protecting your account and, more importantly, your personal brand. You might have heard about or seen some of the emails from scammers impersonating us.

If you log in on a site that’s pretending to be Tryst and give them your email and password, or if you use the same email and password on another site which is then hacked, people who want to use your account (and your photos and brand/persona) to scam potential clients will be able to log in as you. They won’t be able to get past that second step unless you also give the verification code or backup code to them.

There are other options for two-step login. You can use another app (Maya uses Authy), a physical second step (like a Yubikey), or your mobile device (FaceID and similar). All of these options live on a physical device that most malicious actors won’t have access to.

Side note: please try to only log into Tryst by typing tryst.link into your browser! It’s always safer to avoid clicking links, and double-check the site address before putting any personal information in.

Hiiii, what’s the best way to get in contact with the team ?

Hi! You can contact our support team by using the link in the bottom right menu on our website. When you’ve clicked the menu, scroll down until you find ‘Contact Tryst Support’, and fill out the form.

For ease, you can find our support form here: https://app.tryst.link/support/new

We also have a Knowledge Base that answers a whole bunch of questions that are frequently asked over our support channels. The speediest way to get your questions answered is to check our Knowledge Base first. If the answer’s not there, we’ll be here to help!

You can find our knowledge base here: https://help.tryst.link/en-gb