You asked for a middle ground on distance. Here it is.
Someone posted this on our feedback board: “It’s quite a jump from 500 miles to anywhere. There should be an option for those within the country, or at least a max of 4,000 miles.” They were right, and the fix was small enough that we shipped it the same week. Discover now has three new distance rungs between 500 miles and Anywhere.
What changed
Three new rungs
The ladder now runs 10, 25, 50, 100, 250, 500, 1,000, 2,000, 4,000 miles and Anywhere. In kilometres: 15, 40, 80, 160, 400, 800, 1,500, 3,000, 6,000 and Anywhere.
4,000 miles is the useful one
It covers the whole of North America and most of Europe from anywhere inside it, without opening your feed to every continent at once.
Nothing changed under you
Your saved distance is untouched. If you were on Anywhere, you’re still on Anywhere. The new rungs only appear when you tap one.
Why the gap mattered
Most dating apps can get away with a short distance ladder because most of their users live in dense cities and everybody is looking locally. An Orthodox app can’t. The Orthodox population in the English-speaking world is thin and unevenly spread: one metro can hold sixty parishes and the next state can hold four. For a lot of members, the honest answer to “how far would you go?” is “further than 500 miles, but not to the other side of the planet”.
Before this change there was no way to say that. You either stayed inside 500 miles, which in a lot of regions means a handful of people, or you chose Anywhere and got a feed that stopped being about your life. Neither setting matched what people actually meant.
We checked the complaint against the real numbers before touching anything, because “feels too far” and “is too far” are different problems. Measured from Chicago, 500 miles and Anywhere really were the only two meaningful settings — everything in between was unreachable. The three new rungs each open a genuinely different set of people.
How we picked 4,000 miles
The request asked for a “within the country” filter, and we thought hard about building exactly that. We didn’t, and it’s worth saying why.
A country filter sounds simple and isn’t. It needs a new field on every profile, a rewrite of the ranking query that decides who you see, and a migration on live data — a lot of moving parts for a setting that would still be wrong for anyone in a small country who is happy to look next door. Ireland to England is 300 miles. Adelaide to Perth is 1,300 miles inside one country.
Distance is the honest version of the same idea. 4,000 miles is roughly 6,400 kilometres, which reaches coast to coast across North America and comfortably across Europe, but stops well short of the intercontinental hop. It’s the “my part of the world” rung, and it does the job the request was really asking for.
- 1,000 miles: your region and the neighbouring ones. Chicago reaches New York, Atlanta and Denver.
- 2,000 miles: most of a continent. Enough for a long weekend flight, not a relocation.
- 4,000 miles: your part of the world. Coast to coast, or across an ocean if you mean it.
- Anywhere: unchanged, and still there for people who genuinely mean anywhere.
What you need to do
Nothing, unless you want to. We deliberately didn’t rewrite anybody’s saved setting. Silently moving people to a wider radius would have changed who they see without asking, and that’s not ours to decide.
If you’ve been sitting on Anywhere because 500 miles was too narrow, this is worth two taps. Open Discover, go to your preferences, and pick the rung that matches how far you would really travel to meet someone. Your daily batch will follow the next morning.
While you’re in there, the measurement system lives on the same screen. Miles and kilometres show the same underlying distance, so switching between them never changes who you match with — only how the number reads.
The wider point about distance
Widening your radius is not the same as being willing to move, and it’s worth being honest with yourself about which one you’re doing. A 2,000 mile match means flights, time zones, and a conversation about who relocates that arrives much earlier than either of you expects.
It can absolutely work. Plenty of Orthodox couples met across a continent, and in a church this spread out it’s often the realistic path. But it works best when both people name the geography early instead of discovering it in month four.
Try it