Reminds me of a project idea I had. You'd get a little Raspberry Pi style board with BTLE and battery power (ideally lasting for weeks at a time) and covertly stick it in some communal location, e.g. a cafe or library. Then you'd have it run some local-only forum software and disseminate instructions for connecting to it. The point would be to have a digital community accessible only by direct connection and bound to a physical location by design, kind of in the vein of Community Memory.
It's probably too impractical to work as described, but I think that having a digital space constrained by physical access would be meaningful in a way that internet communities are not. The people you chat with would necessarily be the people in your physical environment, which would make it feel more like a local hangout than the typically vapid social media exchange.
(On further reflection, it would probably be easier to make a mesh network app version of this. Hmm...)
I had a similar idea a few years ago and tried to set it up, but failed at making it easy to connect to.
I wanted the phone to prompt you like when connecting to wifi hotspots where you have to accept some T&Cs before you can connect to the internet, but to then just show you the local services instead of actually offering internet. Honestly, this can't be that difficult, but at the time, I could not get it to work reliably.
I had hoped that by now, people would be educated and tech savvy enough on computers that something like this could be a reality. But these fucking phones and tablets have made people so computer illiterate, there is no hope for something like this working.
Computers run every part of our lives, and it's fucking preposterous that learning the basics of how to operate a computer aren't part of elementary school education. Now it's just "tap app" and look how it's trapped everybody into a world of ignorance.
It's probably too impractical to work as described, but I think that having a digital space constrained by physical access would be meaningful in a way that internet communities are not. The people you chat with would necessarily be the people in your physical environment, which would make it feel more like a local hangout than the typically vapid social media exchange.
(On further reflection, it would probably be easier to make a mesh network app version of this. Hmm...)