Naybar
A location-based social network and news feed that organises everything around where you are, not who you follow.
What it is
Naybar is a location-based social network and news feed built on geographic proximity. Posts, conversations, businesses, and people surface based on the radius you set around yourself, not based on a global feed or a friend graph. If something is happening where you are right now, Naybar shows it. If it is happening outside your radius, it does not. Want to follow a place you're not at? Drop a pin anywhere on the map and Naybar's feed switches to that location.
Naybar was built for South Africa's urban and informal economy first, where the most relevant information is almost always local: who is selling what, what is happening on the street, who needs help, what events are nearby. The platform extends naturally to any community anywhere.
What it does
Drop posts and carry posts let you share content tied to a specific spot or a persistent location that follows you. Geonotes leave private or public notes pinned to coordinates that other users discover when they walk into range. Local chat groups everyone within the same radius into a single conversation. Private messages, voice notes, and calls work as expected. Saved locations let you bookmark places that matter to you.
Promotion lets businesses or individuals boost a post to a broader radius for a fee proportional to the area they want to cover. The result is a marketplace that scales with intent rather than reach.
How it works
Naybar runs on a geospatial database with proximity calculations performed at the database layer. The web app is a progressive web app that works on any browser and installs to home screens. Real-time features like local chat and calls run on a Node.js signalling server with WebRTC for media. Location is detected via the browser's geolocation API and refined when needed via reverse geocoding.
No external social graph is imported. No tracking pixels are loaded. Naybar does not exist to harvest attention for advertisers.
Who it is for
Anyone who wants to know what is actually happening near them. Small business owners, vendors, organisers, neighbours, and people who have given up on platforms that show them content from strangers across the world while ignoring the corner shop two blocks away.