Can you use BLE for presense detection such that your phone is beaconing and when you enter an area an ESP32 (or something like it) picks it up? Or is this really only useful the other way where there’s a beacon and some s/w on the phone picks it up?

That’s pretty slick, it looks like there’s a hassos addon container for NodeRed which will make this super easy to set up. Thanks!

How does nodered integrate with HA? MQTT or tighter?

Its funny: in my case a few weeks before the current reddit enshittification drive I started feeling like /r/all was turning into facebook or twitter from a ‘create engagement by pissing people off’ perspective and started checking in on mastodon more regularly and reddit less. I do participate in a bunch of subreddits too, but it seems like the writing is on the wall with reddit.

I don’t love the twitter model where you’re searching for a hashtag of the day or following some entity yelling stuff. I grew up on usenet news, forums, and bbs’es before Facebook came along and really like threaded discussions, with self/auto moderation for interest and community ‘adults’ moderating for big stuff.

Today is my first day on a Lemmy instance and so far it seems to be exactly the right model for me: distributed, forum moderated and user moderated, and threaded discussion based. Its awesome the underlying protocols fit many models (this one and the Mastodon one) so you can choose your style.