I agree, I’d be picking up a bunch of those, if that were the case.

esp32-c6 (supports zigbee), is pretty cheap.

I pay for the subscription solely for the purpose of supporting it. Most of the functionality it offers, just isn’t useful to me.

And, the best part- Home assistant keeps getting better and better!

I am still using a DIY/homemade one I made back in 2020ish.

https://xtremeownage.com/2020/07/29/diy-garage-door-opener-home-assistant/

Still works perfectly. Less than 20$ of materials total. 100% local control. Locally compiled, open source firmware.

Would recommend.

A year or two back, I think I looked for information on them, and found a few people who disassembled them… but, the hardware was pretty custom and specific for the application.

That being said, One of these days, I’ll take apart one of the ones I have laying around here, and see if it might be possible to solder a esp32 somewhere on the board, to take control over some of the functionality.

hardware is more generally available.

Yup, that is the one missing piece.

I have been using the new piper/wyoming stuff, and it actually works extremely nicely. I am very impressed with it.

Can’t wait until we have a device, that is as easy/affordable as picking up a new Alexa… that works with home assistant.

Once, that problem is solved in a way that doesn’t involve soldering and 3d printing… voice will really start to take off.

https://xtremeownage.com/2022/06/29/433mhz-fridge-freezer-monitoring/

433 mhz sensors work nicely. If, my fridge/freezer / other freezer gets too hot, I get push messages.

Backup wan connection and a LOT of battery runtime ensures I will know.

What would be the probability of u/spez being behind this attack, in an attempt to sabotage lemmy?

Lets be honest… he is too busy single-handedly destroy reddit to worry about messing with Lemmy. I think lemmy is the least of his issues right now.

That, IS instance agnostic. Works with any instance. Just visit Mlmym.org and enter the instance.

Click the edit box.

Would need to submit a feature request to Lemmy’s Github

Then, somebody would need to implement the feature.

Then, the lemmy devs would need to pull-request the feature.

Am I sharing my IP address/ location with my host instance?

You share your IP Address with ANY online service you interact with. This is how it talks back to you to send you content.

is there a log of my view history

Not by default. However, enabling verbose logging on the webserver can indeed log this information. Just- not in a pretty way.

are there general privacy concerns that I am not thinking of?

Anytime you comment, post, or vote, that data is stored in a database and sent to every other instance subscribed to the community for which you are interacting with, and then stored in their database as well.

So- tldr; lemmy isn’t really a privacy-focused place. Although, its honestly not much different then reddit. Reddit logs EVERYTHING you do, and then shares that data with third parties for the purpose of advertising.

Although, there isn’t anything in place in lemmy to prevent this data from doing the same thing. Silently, and without you knowing.

Can’t say I see this issue on 0.18.

The blockchain would just add the ability to verify somebody said, what it says they said.

Ie- if I say, hey, towerful is a great person. A blockchain could be leverage to ensure that that was said by me.

It does have a use- but, there is a big price to pay for using it, in terms of complexity, performance, and sized used.

In this case, I would call it unnecessary overhead, unless we determine there is foul play occuring at the point of centralization.

Edit- Although, it is still possible for users to sign messages, and still use a centralized location. That gives the best of both worlds, without the needless added complexity.

Well- I have not seen much evidence that supports this is actively being used… yet.

Just- bringing more attention to how easy it is to do.

This, isn’t a problem specific to activity pub, lemmy, or any individual platform in general.

Reddit faces this problem every day. Facebook faces this problem. Twitter faces this problem.

They all do.

And, each platform has to determine the best method for that platform to deal with this issue.

I am in agreeance with you, regarding the usefulness of the posts. However- I am looking at it from an administrative perspective.

Going back to my stance- I do not limit the content my users wish to see, UNLESS, it involves illegal, or extremist/hateful content.

It’s not my cup of tea- but, I am also running an instance for people who may share different viewpoints, and I do not wish to limit what they are able to do.

My viewpoint-

If the users of my instance want to view reddit data redistributed to lemmy- that is their choice.

A plus side- lemmy allows you to set the defaults to only show subscribed content too.