Groups are open — and the Market now lends as well as sells

Two things people have asked us for since the first week: somewhere to talk with the people nearby, rather than post at everyone — and some way to borrow a thing instead of buying one. Both are in the app now.

👥 Groups

A group is a room for people in one place. “Brussels Morning Runners”, “Antwerp Book Club”, the parents at one school. You’ll find them in the Hub tab — the middle one, with the brand mark on it — where Groups is the first thing you land on.

Every group is anchored to a place and a radius its creator chooses: Brussels and 20 km around it, say. That radius isn’t a filter on what you see inside — it’s who the group is for. A group in Ghent isn’t a group you scroll past in Liège.

1. 1

   Find one near you

   Hub → Groups lists what’s within reach, nearest first, with the distance on each card. Some groups let you in on the spot; others ask the owner first.
2. 2

   Or start your own

   Give it a name, a category, a meeting place and a radius of up to 100 km. Starting a group needs a verified phone number, and we review it before it goes on the map — a room with a real place attached deserves one look from a human.
3. 3

   Run it

   Owners approve joiners, appoint moderators and edit the group’s description. You can run up to three groups at a time — enough to start something real, few enough that nobody farms them.

Moderation is layered, and mostly invisible. A filter runs before a message is ever stored, so the worst of it never lands. Anyone can long-press a message to report it. Owners and moderators remove messages and ban members from their own room — and Namaste moderators can step in on top of that, which is the layer we hope you never need.

🛠️ Rentals: the other half of the Market

Until this release, “Rentals” in the Market meant property and only property — the fields next to the price were bedrooms, furnished, property type. There was nowhere to list a camera. And lending a drill to someone three streets away is a far more common neighbourly transaction than letting a flat.

So it split in two. House rentals keeps the flats and the houses, exactly as it was. The new Rentals section is for things: a hammer drill, a camera, a gazebo, a roof box for the summer.

Rentals carry a stronger notice than sales do, on the cards and on the listing itself, and we mean it: we don’t verify listings, items or their owners. Agree the deposit and the return in writing before anything changes hands.

📸 All of your photos, and where the thing is

You’ve been able to attach up to eight photos to a listing for a while. Only the first one was ever shown — the other seven were uploaded, stored, and quietly ignored. Now the whole set is there: swipe through it, tap for fullscreen, pinch to zoom. Same on events and on business listings.

Market listings now also say where they are and how far that is from you, which the nearby feed — the one nearly everybody sees — couldn’t tell you before.

Getting it

All of the above is version 2.7.1, rolling out now on the App Store and Google Play. If your app hasn’t offered you the update yet, give it a day — store reviews and staged rollouts take their time.

Then tell us what’s broken, what’s missing and what reads oddly in French or Dutch. Groups especially: it’s the newest and largest thing we’ve built, and the first few rooms will teach us more than we can guess from here. The feedback form and WhatsApp both reach us, and we read all of it.