Already done: https://hackaday.com/2024/11/15/bypassing-airpods-hearing-ai...

For anyone else trying to find the Telegram feature:

> Telegram Announces Removal of "People Nearby" Feature

Back in the day when Direct Connect[1] was a thing, and we all had insane speeds in the metropolitan area (but not so great outside of that), I used to run a DC hub. Which due to said speeds had mostly people that were close by, geographically speaking, and the interactions felt so much more relevant, probably because of the "third thing" you mention, the common interest/background.

So I've also been thinking for a while now: how can that style of community be recreated? There's of course the chicken-and-egg problem until you have traction, but also things like: how big should the community be, geographically? The same size in the US vs EU likely encompasses quite different amounts of people. Should it be anonymous or real identities? Should history be viewable by new members or should it be ephemeral? And so on.

Anyway, interesting prototype, I hope you get some traction!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Connect_(protocol)

+1 here, with the latest Chrome v3 manifest shenanigans, the Pushbullet extension stopped working and the devs said they have no interest in pursuing that (understandable).

I always wanted a dedicated binary anyway, so 1 hour later I got: https://github.com/emilburzo/pushbulleter (10 minutes vibe coding with Claude, 50 minutes reviewing code/small changes, adding CI and so on). And that's just one where I put in the effort of making it open source, as others might benefit, nevermind the many small scripts/tools that I needed just for myself.

So I share the author's sentiments, before I would have considered the "startup cost" too high in an ever busy day to even attempt it. Now after 80% of what I wanted was done for me, the fine tuning didn't feel like much effort.

If you have another machine with a SSD or at least a fast-ish HDD and want to give it another go, you could try running k3s with an external datastore (e.g. postgres).

That's the setup I've been using on 3 x rPi since 2021 and I'm super happy with it as I can host all my own personal projects, some OSS ones (changedetection, n8n, etc), even longhorn for distributed storage and still have capacity left -- and this with just microSDs (to be fair, A1s, but still).