I built a little social network for South African Expats and Travellers

Hello Everyone. :)

Story

I started a little side project with the goal to help South African expats and travellers learn more about where they are going to and make it easier to settle in by connecting with fellow South Africans who's already there or who's also getting ready to depart.

Features

Each registered user gets a personal profile page with a bio and passport stamps of where you have travelled to. Just go to a country page where you've been and click on the stamp passport button.

Countries with some data are constantly being added. At the moment there's over 30 countries. Each country page shows users who's been there and who's currently there. I'm still trying to find a free API so the exchange rates can be updated 24/7.

Stores & Restaurants. Almost every country with a reasonable South African expat community will have a South African restaurant or shop to buy the things you miss most. This data is completely crowdsourced and users can populate the database.

Chat Room. Every user registered automatically gets an email invitation to join the South Africans Online slack group. At first I thought of adding something like a forum, but I figured something more instant is what people want today. Imagine you arrive in London alone, don't know anyone. Simply open up the Slack and ask "Who's up for a beer?". It's 2018. Nothing weird about it. Please help us populate the chat. Every country / region have its own slack channel.

More features like events/meetups/jobs and visa requirements are coming soon.

Feedback is always needed. I cannot emphasize this enough. If you found a bug, have an idea or just wanna say something, use slack or the feedback button on the bottom left to give me a shout. I only started

FAQ: A few have asked why I only have Facebook / Google login. It makes signing up easier and gets your profile picture automatically, saving you time and keeping the server's performance optimal. Does it make it your account vulnerable? No, all the data gets hashed I don't see anything. I don't store passwords or sensitive data like that. Facebook / Google sends me an authentication token that looks something like 95395ytv0n183t901y031093v1853r2 and cannot be deciphered by anyone but them. Also I cannot and will not post anything to your facebook and google accounts.

And for anyone wondering - I keep the data as open as possible: https://southafricans.online/open

Thanks so much for reading.

Have a good week! :)