Groups: a room for the people who are actually nearby

You know the pattern. Someone adds you to a WhatsApp group for the entire country. Nine hundred messages a day, four of which are for you. You mute it. Three weeks later you find out the thing you actually wanted — the badminton evening ten minutes from your flat — was announced in there and scrolled past by everyone.

Groups is our answer to that, and it is live in the app now. You will find it in the Hub tab — the middle one, with the brand mark on it — where Groups is the first thing you land on.

🧭 A group is a place before it is a topic

When you create one you choose two things that most apps never ask for: a meeting place and a radius around it — 20 km by default, anywhere from 1 to 100. That radius is not a filter on what members see inside. It is who the group is for.

Which means “Leuven Sunday Runners” is a group about Leuven on Sunday, and not a group that slowly fills up with people in Antwerp asking whether anyone runs in Antwerp. There are thirteen categories to file it under — Sports, Parenting, Faith, Food & Dining, Books, Language, Professional, Travel and the rest — but the place is the part that does the work.

💬 Inside the room

🕶️ You post as whoever you already are

Groups follow your account’s anonymity setting rather than having their own. If you post under a persistent pseudonym everywhere else in Namaste, you post under it here — same name, same face, one decision made once in My Account instead of per-surface. If you use your real name, that is what the room sees.

🚪 Finding one, starting one, running one

1. 1

   Find one near you

   Hub → Groups lists what is within reach, nearest first, with the distance on every card. Some let you in on the spot; others ask the owner first, and you will see which before you tap.
2. 2

   Or start your own

   Name, category, meeting place, radius, and whether joining needs your approval. Creating a group needs a verified phone number, and a human on our side reviews it before it becomes discoverable — a room with a real place attached is worth one look.
3. 3

   Run it without much ceremony

   Approve or decline the people waiting to join, promote a member to moderator, remove someone who does not belong, edit the description when the group grows into something slightly different. You can own up to three groups at once — enough to start something real, few enough that nobody farms them.

🛡️ Moderation, in layers you mostly never see

A filter runs before a message is ever stored, so the worst of it never lands in the room at all. Anyone can long-press a message to report it. Owners and moderators remove messages and ban members from their own room. And Namaste moderators sit on top of that, which is the layer we hope you never need to notice — when it does act, the room shows “Removed by Namaste moderators” rather than a silent gap, because a conversation that quietly rewrites itself is worse than one that says what happened.

What we would love you to do with it

Start the boring one. The school-gate group, the Tuesday five-a-side, the four people in your commune who also cannot find curry leaves. The groups that change someone’s month are almost never the ambitious ones.

And tell us what is missing — Groups is the largest thing we have built and the first few rooms will teach us more than we can guess from here. The feedback form and WhatsApp both reach a human.