Talking about your experiences with people who understand and relate to them can be therapeutic and beneficial to your mental health as it can alleviate your sense of isolation and encourage a feeling of belonging. However, it can be difficult to find people with shared identities both in the real world or on social media apps due to stigma or a lack of visibility. We wanted to create a platform for people to share their experiences to gain a greater sense of commonality with others.
Intersection is a social network with the sole purpose of connecting people to identity-based forums in which they can speak freely in a safe environment, share their story, engage in discussions, come across different points of view, and meet new people with intersecting identities.
Welcome to Intersection - now let’s get started. When you first join Intersection, you will land on the profile page which gives you the option to add a bio, create a post, and have the opportunity to add tags that correspond to your identities and experiences. The profile page also has a list of hotlines and resources for those who may need them. After you add your tags, you'll be able to connect with others with similar experiences through a customized forum that displays posts that relate to your tags. If you see a post you resonate with, you can comment on the post to show your support or further the discussion. Intersection also has built-in comment suggestions that can help you start a conversation.
In addition to strengthening your connection with those of shared identities, Intersection also encourages you to learn more about the experiences of those who are different than you. The discover page shows popular posts based on the number of comments across all tags for you to explore. You can also chat in a general chat room with other Intersection users.
Intersection will also give you friend suggestions based on the tags you listed under your profile.
After wireframing our website using Figma, we used HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to develop our website. Repl.it was used to collaboratively generate the website. We used mongoDB to store user information, including usernames, hashed passwords, stories, tags, and friends. Socket.io was used to create the chat. We also wanted to make sure that the user experience on mobile was just as great as on a computer, which meant a few long hours of rearranging different aspects of the webapp to make it accessible.
• HTML/CSS
• JavaScript
• Flask
• Socket.io
• MongoDB