We built the community tab as a small add-on to the main app — a place to swap destination tips. What we didn't fully expect was how many people would use it to find actual friends. Here are five stories from users who did exactly that.
"We bonded over both being terrified of the same visa office"
Ngozi and Farida matched in the Lagos-to-London community thread three weeks before their respective flights, initially just trading notes on visa document checklists. "We ended up messaging every day leading up to the move," Ngozi says. "By the time we both landed, we already felt like we knew each other. We had brunch our first weekend in London. We're still close a year later."
"He answered a question nobody else could"
Tunde posted a fairly niche question — where to find Nigerian groceries in a mid-sized German city — expecting silence. Instead, a fellow user who'd been there two years replied within the hour, then offered to meet up and show him around in person. "That one reply saved me probably a month of trial and error. And honestly, having someone to call when things got hard mattered more than the groceries."
"We turned a thread into a monthly dinner"
A handful of Remse users who'd all relocated to Nairobi within the same few months started a group chat that was originally just for logistics — recommending landlords, sharing warnings about scams. Eight months later, it's a standing monthly dinner. "None of us would have met otherwise," one member says. "We're scattered across completely different industries. The only thing we had in common was landing in the same city around the same time."
Why it works
- Shared timing creates instant common ground — everyone in a thread is figuring out the same city at roughly the same stage
- Low-stakes first contact — asking a practical question is a much easier opener than "let's be friends"
- Verified context — knowing everyone in the community is a genuine, verified relocator (not a random stranger) lowers the guard people naturally have online
Don't wait until you're settled to post. The users who got the most out of the community tab started asking questions and sharing their plans before they'd even landed.
Relocation is often framed as something you do alone — pack the bags, book the flight, figure it out. But almost everyone we spoke to said the same thing in different words: the move got real the moment they stopped doing it solo.