@daaain I know - Nextcloud is one of those, and one of the few businesses I still trust, as we seem aligned on the same values and battles.

I also still overall trust Mozilla, even though they've had their share of mistakes in their long history.

But such businesses are increasingly rare. And, even if in some cases I may have the impression that our values align, I can't help kicking that nasty thought from the back of my mind - that, no matter what your values are, money comes first because businesses can't exist, pay bills or salaries without money.

The big problem here is that, in the lack of sufficient public investments, we don't have compelling alternative business models - or, better, no business models alternative to data harvesting, unsustainable VC funding and subscribe-to-everything are appetizing enough to provide a steady flow of revenue.

Until we change that, I will keep assuming that every single tech business will enshittify once they get the first bill that they can't afford to pay.

@FreePietje 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, all they can do is to rely on a large community of volunteers that will adapt 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 have full control over the protocol too, and lock people out even of the physical hardware with a simple unsolicited 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, or getting the hands dirty with I2C, SPI, UART and TTL? 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. Mostly because there was nothing like Hue around 10 years ago, until Ikea came up with its cheaper Zigbee lights a couple of years ago. 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".

@cambridgeport90 right now you can just pick any lightbulb that comes with a Zigbee compatibility logo - which is probably the case for most of the bulbs that advertise smart features.

There's hundreds of brands and models on the market, and the Zigbee specification for lightbulbs is (kind of) standardized around the Hue model. zigbee2mqtt (and therefore Platypush) currently supports thousands of devices (https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/), so you just plug in the bulb, put the dongle in pairing mode from Platypush, and everything should connect automatically. It's almost easier than the pairing process through the Hue app.

I have recently purchased a couple more Zigbee spare bulbs from a random Chinese store - around $10 for white and $20 for color. That's literally 70% cheaper than the equivalent Hue bulbs, they provide the same exact features and look exactly the same way from a software perspective.

A hypothesis is that everyone is now going for these cheap models, as they also come with out-of-the-box compatibility with the Hue bridge and official app, and nobody is spending $50 per bulb - and that's why Hue is trying to make up for their lost revenue with more aggressive data harvesting strategies...