A new Australian- and South African-built platform, Gather Online, hopes to help users meet other people who share their interests and passions.

Led by South African-born David Price, who now lives in Australia, the company wants to improve the odds of online encounters leading to meaningful relationships both online and offline.

Gather Online aims to “connect like-minded people across the world, through meaningful conversation”, explained South African head of operations Mark Bryson. It wants to become “the leading platform that allows people to meet others with shared interests, focuses and passions”.

Bryson said social networks tend to be good at connecting people to their existing networks, not introducing them to new ones. LinkedIn does a “fair job at it, but it’s very business focused”, while Tinder is “purely focused on romance”.

“We are creating a social network that cuts across business, social and romance. It’s bringing back the old chat rooms of the 1990s,” Bryson said.

Users can start a “gathering” on anything they choose. These gatherings can be open to anyone or closed to only an invited group of people.

They also have a limited life — typically seven days. “It times down to zero, a little like Snapchat. We’ll even have flash gatherings of an hour or a day.”

The idea is that people will forge friendships — and sometimes more — through the platform. “If you’re new to Johannesburg and enjoy mountain biking, you could join a Johannesburg group on mountain biking to meet new people.”

If there’s romantic interest between two people on the platform, they can create a gathering, which expires after seven days, to determine if there’s chemistry. “Tinder is very superficial. Here you can break in [to a relationship] via a topic you both have an interest in,” Bryson said.

All content on the network is regulated by the users themselves. “You can click to alert us to certain behaviour, and we’ll check it out,” he said. Pornography is banned. “We don’t want bad behaviour, but we’re agnostic on subjects such as religion and politics.”

The site has been in development for almost three years and is now in a “soft launch” phase. Smartphone apps for iOS and Android are “coming soon”.

“We are seeing lots of traffic from places like the US, even though we haven’t really pushed it just yet,” Bryson said, adding that although Gather Online is available worldwide, the focus for now will be on South Africa and Australia.

The start-up will only monetise the platform later. Revenue will come mainly from advertising, and later from premium value-added services.

“We also want to get to a position where we can use Gather Online as an informal communication tool for companies, universities and other institutions.”