I joined alt during its second month of inception, many years ago. It had some minor problems even back then, but when the current owners bought the site, they quickly destroyed its original intent... an alternative and bdsm website. Now, its nothing more than a cyber sex dating site. The worst part, is that while the site cannot control the quality of the members, they continually make changes that deviate from its purpose. You can no longer determine the sub/dom status of an individual, they removed activity listings so you will struggle trying to find a match to connect with (meaning you will have to sift through hundreds of attempts to find a like-minded individual), and they do not respond at all to problem emails (they state they respond first to gold members, which is laughable - I have been a gold member for many years and have yet to receive a response from any problem related email), the pages often do not load correctly, the links often result in a "page cannot be found", and all of this at a fairly expensive price to be a gold member (remember that you get basically nothing - almost a non-functioning website - as a standard member. All the larger problems occurred when the parent company of FF purchased alt.com, apparently without any knowledge base of the websites intended purpose.
Bottom line, if all you are looking for is to have cyber sex online, and not necessarily with the gender that is on the profile, then by all means join because alt.com does that well. If you are looking to meet new friends and learn more about the bdsm lifestyle, then this site is practically useless.