Interests have a lot of variants for how you can do them. For example, there’s oral sex, and there’s knotting, and then there’s oral knotting - and some people see these and think the oral knotting interest is great, others see this and think “why isn’t this just a context on knotting or something?”. Both kinda have a point, I think. Then there’s things like how we have Casual Sex, but a lot of people are interested specifically in the idea of a Casual Sex World. People into Breath play might be specifically into choking, drowning, other stuff like that - and in the past we deliberately didn’t add those specifics, and just went with a single interest plus “use your context”.
Contexts are great but not searchable. So I want to suggest a way to make these variants searchable, which I’ll call interest variants.
Are you into breath play with choking? Okay, add that interest, then anywhere in its context, write #choking. Yes, that’s basically just a hashtag. Now people can find profiles into breath play #choking or maybe even just find profiles into #choking.
For those from F-List, this is a little like Custom Kinks, except it’s a Custom More Specific Version Of This Interest.
People can (I suggest) freely add variants just by typing them in. Once someone's using a variant, it counts and will be searchable. It might be in order to have a way to merge or alias these, because people might find two different ways to write what is unequivocally the same thing, which was an inconvenient part of Custom Kinks from F-List.
I also suggest that when someone starts typing a variant into an interest's context (perhaps as soon as they enter the #) they should see a dropdown autocomplete suggestion of the variants already used in that same interest. If I start typing in #c within Breathplay, I'll see a little autocomplete suggestion for #choking.
(This isn’t a suggestion to do anything about the existing interests, some of which could be variants of another - like sex -> casual sex, or oral sex -> fellatio and cunnilingus.)