Mastodawn

Maxthecomputerfox 🍉4d ago

Stephen Collins

Mastodon is 100% the early days of social media all over. Some of you will already be familiar with this story.

My weather station (a very nice Netatmo that has served very well) crapped out after nearly 10 years of excellent service. I asked for recommendations here for a new station that would play nicely with #HomeAssistant, and hopefully, also HomeKit. I received *many* recommendations, with Ecowitt (and the brands it manufactures for) taking the lead.

A connection on here offered me their *unopened* Ecowitt weather station for a very generous price. It arrived yesterday, and I set it up, and it's already doing a great job. Works offline, talks to Home Assistant without any problems. I just need to do a couple of bits of configuration jiggery-pokery and it will pass data to HomeKit.

This is very much how things were when I first joined Twitter in 2007. In spite of attempts at #enshittification of everything, the #fediverse is putting up a good fight.

May your day online be as satisfying as mine was yesterday.

LATER EDIT: I’ve been thinking, and I do realise this good experience isn’t necessarily what happens for everyone. It’s still the case that too many good people don’t find a welcoming place here, especially if they are queer or of color. If this is you, know that I see you, and that I will always try to be welcoming and listening, even if you have things to say that bring me discomfort.

Infocalypse Now 5d ago

@trib thanks for sharing

Greem (Graeme. Not Graham!)5d ago

@trib Isn't it great? Asking for, or providing, detailed info about $ANYTHING and finding that it works without being rapaciously consumed by some org that will then claim it as their own.

I've been on t'Internet so long, it's turned full circle :)

Stephen Collins 5d ago

@greem we can but hope it persists. I've been online in one way, shape, or form since about 1990, and the Fediverse is keeping the good bits going.

Greem (Graeme. Not Graham!)5d ago

@trib Yarp! You're ahead of me by 7 or 8 years (although I was online from 90-93, it was a wildly different experience then). The Fedi, and the randomness thereof, definitely keeps the good bits going 🙃

[HANDMAIDEN] xan 5d ago

@trib Heeey, same! I mounted my Ambient Weather station Sunday afternoon. Got the gateway dingus set up with an HTTP-to-MQTT gateway and got that plumbed into Home Assistant and woo!

@trib 🤘🏿

Future Sprog 5d ago

High five! And welcome to the EcoWitt + Home Assistant club here on the Fediverse.

Stephen Collins 5d ago

@futuresprog hello! How do you find the lightning sensor goes? I can get one on sale at the moment, so I’m tempted.

Future Sprog 5d ago

Pretty good. Pretty accurate. Has a range out to 30 kilometres. Usually I’ve seen the Storm rolling in before then but That’s the nature of where I live.

Uses the same gateway. Super easy
@trib

Ilka 🌐5d ago

@trib I am happy to read your story & that everything went well. 👍 My experience on mastodon is mostly fantastic as well. But recently with the more & more from other SM into the fediverse lured bottom feeders it is starting to change. The reason other SM is so unpleasant is the ppl - thus I don't understand why they are actively lured to join here. I'd like the positive experience you describe to keep going on.

Elena Rossini ⁂5d ago

@trib wonderful to hear this Stephen, thanks for sharing!

If I have advanced questions about self-hosting or tech stuff, now I don't even bother running internet searches. I just ask here and typically get 5 responses within a couple of minutes, with brilliant solutions. The level of skill in this network is unparalleled - and so is the generosity ❤️

@trib Mastodon is 100% the early days of social media all over. Some of you will already be familiar with this story.Mastodon is a latecomer to the Fediverse, GNU Social would be more apt to be the early days. I'm familiar with the story of Mastodonters barging in and pretending the Fediverse is all them, though.This is very much how things were when I first joined Twitter in 2007.Most of the people here don't want this place to be like Twitter, because Twitter sucks. We came here instead, because we like this better. If the Fediverse becomes more like Twitter, it will only inevitably be ruined in the same way.the #fediverse is putting up a good fight.Some people are, but Mastodon surely isn't, it's enshittification of this beautiful Fediverse.

Nature Punk 5d ago

@trib Spot on. It doesn't matter how many people arrive in each influx the ones who stick around want pre-2010 Twitter as a minimum standard and will moderate their behaviour to the norms of people they engage with completely friction free.

This is what social media is when it's created and maintained by the society and not the media barons or tech bro's :)

Hans-Cees 🌳🌳🤢🦋🐈🐈🍋🍋🐝🐜5d ago

@trib where can I get this ecowitt? preferably in europe?
#ecowitt #homeassistant

Stephen Collins 5d ago

@hanscees the Ecowitt online store sells European spec equipment out of their online store. Correct channels and such.

@trib love to hear this! Thanks for sharing it made my morning.

@trib The Ecowitt detail is quietly perfect too. A device that works offline, talks locally to Home Assistant, doesn't require a cloud subscription that evaporates when the company pivots, it's the hardware equivalent of the same fediverse philosophy. Own your data. Own your tools. Reduce dependency on entities whose interests quietly diverge from yours.

Stephen Collins 5d ago

@bayo there are so few companies that explicitly don’t need you to sign up to their service. I like that Ecowitt offer it as an option, but absolutely do not require it. That’s good corporate manners.

Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE 5d ago

@trib That's how Usenet was waaay back into the last century.

@trib love this. I contributed a lot on Reddit for a while on HA and ZigBee related stuff, and even sent some random people unused products for free that I didn't use. I was happy to do so. I had to leave Reddit eventually, it just became too toxic. Not the HA or ZigBee subs, just in general. Way to cesspooly. I'm liking the Mastodon vibe and happy to contribute to anything endorsed by Sir TBL.

Stephen Collins 5d ago

@ropatrick +1 on the trash fire that is Reddit these days.

@trib oh, need to look into that, as I am looking for something like that as well

Simon Zerafa (Status:

Usenet and IRC were very similar back in the second age of Middle Earth 🙂

Very useful and helpful, then became enshitified.

We moved on to something new, like old Twitter before that turned to fascism.

Stephen Collins 4d ago

@simonzerafa I miss Usenet and IRC.

@simonzerafa @trib I've never touched Usenet and barely used IRC. Would you be willing to talk a little more about how those got enshittified? I'm a little confused as that doesn't jive with my understanding of what that word means.

Stephen Collins 4d ago

@wheeljack @simonzerafa this could get long…

Also, I am an internet old. I’ve been online since the early 90s and on the internet since
1995. I have some very rose colored glasses.

Once upon a time, those services (and others) that underpinned what was the major functions of the internet were everything. If you wanted to chat, ask questions, move files, etc., you had to use them. ISPs owned servers that hosted mirrors of various kinds, as did universities and public institutions. Eventually, so did things like Yahoo! and Google. You could log on to a server anywhere and your messages would propagate out to everywhere.

Over time, as people moved to using the big corporate services, they wrapped things like Usenet up into other services like Google Groups, muddying the initial intent of those things, and polluting them with paid and corporate equivalents. Over time, with the migration to those big capitalist platforms, people used the older services less and less. Eventually the big platforms shut them down and replaced them with their walled gardens.

Enshittification by stealth and replacement over time.

Those early services often did one thing and did it really well. No ads. No algorithms. Just the thing you wanted to do, stripped down to basics, and working every time. The big corporate services that replaced them usually tried to be all things to all people (Facebook is the most glaring example of this) and rapidly evolved into ad platforms that tried to trap you in.

Progress is a good thing. “Progress” in the name of walled gardens and selling more ads is enshittification writ large.

@trib I appreciate you typing that all out.

Where my confusion lies is that doesn't feel like it fits the definition of enshittification. As I understand it, enshittification is the result of an active decision that benefits the company at the cost of the user experience, (e.g. the addition of inline ads in a feed). However IRC and Usenet weren't actively made worse, they were abandoned in favor or options that appeared to be easier/better/more convenient (and then those options enshittified).

I suppose this could just be me being pedantic. I really do try to not be a dirty prescriptivist where language is concerned.

Stephen Collins 4d ago

@wheeljack I’m taking a pretty broad definition, for sure.

There are even places you can still find bits of active Usenet, but not many, and very incomplete. It’s a real shame. It’s the place I built my first online friendships.

@trib Thank you for sharing your insights. My instance just picked it up because you used the #HomeAssistant hashtag. Glad you like it here too. I was looking for a good solution to replace my Netatmo stuff, because I don't want to use an online solution anymore. Your recommendation of Ecowitt is great, because I've never seen it here in The Netherlands, but it seems I can buy it online.

SamuelJohnson 5d ago

@trib And for anyone interested Ecowitt gear works well with weewx, popular open source weather station software (https://weewx.com).

One tip: Buy the GW3000 gateway.

#Ecowitt #weewx

WeeWX: open source weather software

@trib Well, you *need* to get it posting weather stats to mastodon to close the loop

CC: @sw14_broadcast

Phil M0OFX 5d ago

@trib Fedi really does feel like the last bastion of people who believe in the "old internet". Maybe we're dinosaurs, but I'm loving it, and the dinosaurs had a hell of a good run until that meteor hit!

Wouter Verhelst 5d ago

@trib
Enshittification doesn't work if there isn't a single party controlling (almost) everything. You try to provide a shit service, I will move to a different instance (or roll my own).

@trib I've had several such nice interactions, the fediverse is a high trust society!