Can technology help create in-person communities?

[Learning to undeny]

I mean, in a more effective way than talking to individual people and hoping to find someone who lives close to you.

My idea is that the apps for contact-tracing that were deployed during the last pandemic achieved the following:

• If you were close to someone with the virus, an alert would arrive days later at your phone.
• It uses bluetooth, so no central server will know which people you interacted with.
• You don't know which of the people you were close to had the virus.

If, additionally to the alert, you could also get a nickname (or some similarly small piece of information) of the "infected" person that was close to you, without revealing their real identity, then you will be able to communicate with them and perhaps a community would emerge from there.

So the issue is that I don't have knowledge about the implementation, so I don't know if this is actually possible. The idea would be to have an app whose intent were to help people with shared interests meet safely, but it would have to be used for a multitude of interests, not a single one, as otherwise you'd know why someone is using the app, thus defeating the purpose. If you were close to someone with a shared interest, you'd receive a notification a few days later. Ideally, the available interests would not be controlled by a central server, thus making the app censorship-resistant.

So I am not sure, does anyone who know about technology and privacy have any feedback? Is this possible? Would privacy be compromised? Has it been tried? Would there be problems with people using it for shady purposes?

[RoosterDance]

Sounds a lot like the Nintendo 3DS's Street Pass feature.

[Learning to undeny]

Sounds a lot like the Nintendo 3DS's Street Pass feature.

Interesting. I didn't know about it. I wonder why the feature was not added to the Switch. And how private it was.