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fe09da52 | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 @7d199f28 
This has been on my mind a LOT since I read it:
"The essence of capitalist “private” property is *sabotage.* Block access to something useful and then charge for that access."
src: https://kolektiva.social/@HeavenlyPossum/110999967883256578

It's sad to see that all my cynical thoughts/predictions have or are becoming true.
I had already actively avoided using Netflix, Spotify and Hue because it was soo predictable what was coming.

It boils down that I only use FOSS (based) things as all companies will fsck you over.
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Fabio Manganiello | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 @7a8ca6ec the problem is that it's hard to be FOSS all the way down even when hardware is involved - like in IoT.

Look no further than #HomeAssistant: it's an amazing FOSS platform, but 90% of the integrations that it provides are for closed gardens. Whenever something changes in one of the closed gardens, they can rely on a large community of volunteers that just adapts the integration.

This is the reason why I kept working on #Platypush. I realized that you don't need 1000 integrations (often the result of reverse engineering efforts) with closed products developed by companies that are unlikely to keep those APIs running in 2-3 years time (or companies that probably won't even be around in the next 2-3 years).

You don't need 20 different integrations for 20 different Zigbee bridges when you can run your bridge with zigbee2mqtt and get them all for free.

(That's also another thing: even though the products developed by most of these companies act like their own beasts in their own closed environments, the protocols they are based on, mostly Zigbee and Z-Wave, are actually open, and anybody with a USB dongle can create a bridge; and that's also why some of these companies have been pushing for years for Matter, so they can also have full control over the protocol too and lock people out even of the physical hardware with a simple firmware upgrade, no intermediate bridge required; and that's the reason why Platypush hasn't embraced Matter yet, while HomeAssistant has).

The thing is: how many people are willing to go completely pure also on the hardware side - which usually means flashing a Zigbee dongle with custom firmware, or debugging Platypush/OpenHAB logs, or building your own devices based on ESP/Arduino? If the entries barriers for alternative FOSS software products and services are already high, those for hardware products are even higher.

Even in my case, even though I've tried to be as pure as I could, Hue was still my Achille's heel.

I invested ~$1000 a decade ago to buy tens of Hue lights, switches and sensors in my house. Even though I could pair them to my zigbee2mqtt bridge, I have never actually done so - I have some other cheap Zigbee appliances connected to my RPi bridge, but those 50+ Hue lights, tens of switches and sensors and their hundreds of configured scenes and rules have always been living on my Hue bridge for the past 10 years.

Sure, I should have expected that at some point Hue would enshittify as well (Signify B.V. has given plenty of signals in that direction in the past few years), but I didn't expect them to do that so fast and so drastically. It's literally been like "hey, tomorrow y'all will get a new firmware upgrade for your bridge, it'll instantly kill any integration that doesn't support the new (undocumented) login flow, and who f*** cares about the hundreds of apps, integrations and all that hundreds of developers have built against our ecosystem in the past nearly 20 years".