How far is “near”? It’s the number the whole app is built around
Every other community app hands you a country and lets you dig. Namaste starts at your front door: one radius, applied to everything at once, and no worldwide feed to fall into.
Nobody needs a plumber in Belgium. They need one who will drive to their street on Thursday. Nobody wants a sofa that is technically for sale 190 km away — the van costs more than the sofa. And a Diwali party you hear about, in a city you will not travel to, is not an invitation. It is just noise with a nice photo.
Almost every app aimed at people who have just moved somewhere gets this wrong in the same way: it gives you a country. A national Facebook group, a national classifieds site, a national forum. Then it leaves you to work out, post by post, which of the thousand things in front of you is close enough to matter.
So we built the app the other way round. You are at the centre, and everything is measured outwards from you in kilometres. That single decision shapes every screen in it.
🎚️ One slider, every screen
There is a distance chip in the app bar. It offers four settings — 10, 50, 100 and 200 km — and moving it does not filter one list. It reshapes the whole app at once:
Yellow Pages
Businesses inside the circle, and a “nearest first” sort that means what it says.
Marketplace
Things you can actually go and collect, with the distance printed on the card.
Ask
Questions from people whose council, school district and doctor are plausibly yours.
Events
What is on this week, close enough that you would genuinely go.
Groups
Rooms built around a place — a group in Ghent is not something you scroll past in Liège.
Search
Same boundary. A search is not a licence to leave your area behind.
📏 The distance is on the card
Not a city name you have to decode, and not a region you have never heard of. A number: 3 km. 18 km. Because “Kampenhout” means nothing on your first month here, and “12 km away” means something on your first day.
There is no “Everywhere” button, and that is deliberate
⚙️ What is actually doing the work
Every locatable thing in the app — profiles, businesses, questions, listings, events, groups — carries the same set of columns: latitude, longitude, a human-readable place name and a country. The database turns those into a real geographic point and indexes it, so “everything within 25 km, nearest first” is one query rather than a page of results filtered afterwards in the app.
That matters more than it sounds. A client-side filter can only narrow what it has already downloaded, which is why so many apps show you six nearby things and swear that is all there is. Ours asks the question at the source.
Near you, without pinning your front door
🙃 The honest limitations
Two things worth saying out loud, because you will notice them.
- 1
The radius resets when you fully close the app
It starts each cold launch at 200 km. If you live at 10 km, you will be setting it again. It is on our list; it is also two taps. - 2
It is only as good as your location
The app knows where you are because you told it, in onboarding or in My Account. Move house and nothing updates itself — change it there and every tab moves with you.
Set the slider once and the app stops being a website about a country and starts being a map of your actual neighbourhood. That is the whole product, really. The rest is detail.
Two of those details are new this week: Groups, which are built on the same radius, and lending things out, which only works at all when the other person is nearby.
Found this useful? Pass it on.
Someone who’s just moved will thank you for it.
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