[plagiarist]

I have zero idea how the demographic of people excited about Home Assistant and automation are not also, to a person, savvy enough to reject cloud services for controlling their homes. Not only for the partition hardiness, but also to avoid contract changes, being banned over ToS violations, or the company just deciding to close up shop.

There was an article on HN a bit ago where Amazon dumped a customer, which deactivated a good chunk of their house. The author wrote something like, "I may consider removing Amazon from the equation over this." Fucking "consider"??? It's perplexing trying to figure out that perspective.

[kevstev]

A few factors come into play:

Ten or so years ago, when Google was still mostly a darling, I never thought they would ever try to pull anything like that. Yet here we are, and my dropcam is just going to brick itself in April. No update for RTSP/Onvif, just FU you are out of luck.

Similarly, at least one device I bought didn't require an account when I first got it, but then all of a sudden there was a new app update and you didn't think twice about it, but now this requires a cloud connection. It sneaks up on you, and a few years ago I wasn't thinking about this stuff.

But yeah, now I have zero tolerance for this stuff. I have had Google/Nest brick my stuff and nag me to get a subscription, Sonos has tried to strong arm me into upgrading my equipment at a cost of over $1k, etc. I am more than willing to pay tons extra for devices I actually own and control, and whose data I own and never leaves my network. Problem is, that its tricky to find stuff that supports open standards. I was more than willing to go in on Ubiquiti's very expensive gear until I learned that they also lock you in and don't support RTSP/Onvif. Then you are mostly in dubious Chinese brands for things and you can't be sure of the quality- though at least I can block them from phoning home or sending anything out of my network.

The smarthome world is just a real mess right now.

[marcus0x62]

I started using HA tech at a time in my life when I had more money than time, the DIY stuff was very rough around the edges, and the cloud services I used mostly met my needs with a minimum of effort. I figured if something stopped working, I’d just go out and buy a replacement that did work.

Now, a decade later, I have more time than money, the cloud services aren’t so reliable, and I’m increasingly uneasy with the implications of relying on something that can disappear (or change for the worse) at a moment’s notice.

So I’m ripping all of that crap out of my digital life.

That’s at least one example of how someone can be savvy enough to set up something like Home Assistant but end up with a bunch of clown crap in their house.

[persolb]

It is mostly a matter of time. I have home assistant running locally, but started paying nabu casa to serve as the remote access bridge after my homegrown external site died when I upgraded my internet. I could fix it myself… but it was faster to just subscribe.

The other issue is that some cloud services are just better than what I can do on a raspberry pi. I’d rather get voice recognition from Google for ‘free’ than pay electricity and time for a server to always be on.

[plagiarist]

That perspective almost makes sense for me, if you still have control over your stack you're paying to make it accessible while out. They can go down, go bankrupt, or ban you and not break your house.

[connicpu]

Absolutely agree, I didn't get a single smart home device until I was certain I could have full local control and that it would work until the day the hardware failed. I started out making my own custom IoT controllers with ESP8266 chips that I wrote arduino code for, but while fun it isn't scalable to my whole house. In the last couple months I got a Home Assistant Yellow which has a built-in Zigbee radio, so my world was opened to so many local-only devices. Now I've replaced the majority of my lightswitches and put zigbee smart bulbs in a lot of my lamps, and it's all controlled from my Home Assistant instance, not a single proprietary app installed.

[m463]

It's hard for a "reasonable" person to follow this advice.

They get something home, and it is useful, and their spouse or kids like it... but it has to be hooked to the internet. maybe it needs an account to activate. or many of the other convenient/inconvenient tricks.

But I'm happy that we have home assistant and tasmota and esphome and all these other wonderful projects that route around lots of these problems.