cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/487981
Today’s story is about Philips Hue by Signify. They will soon start forcing accounts on all users and upload user data to their cloud. For now, Signify says you’ll still be able to control your Hue lights locally as you’re currently used to, but we don’t know if this may change in the future. The privacy policy allows them to store the data and share it with partners.
(more in the article)
What is wrong with tech companies this week? Did a memo go round saying “let the enshittification begin!”?
There’s no need for this move and it just seems like they felt they had enough people locked in so they could start tightening the screws.
This will only get worse, enshittification goes faster and faster. Some companies (like epic with their store) are already skipping the first phase of providing value to users.
The only thing you can do is to use FOSS and hardware with open standards because those are the only things that are safe from enshittification. As a bonus you’re also voting with your wallet.
Yes indeed. I’ve now shifted everything over to Zigbee control through Home Assistant (just packed away another hub before reading this) and all the recent news makes me pleased I did.
did you go ZHA or z2mqtt?
ZHA and everything went smoothly (my only problem was the dongle was so big it blocked the other USB ports). Packed away the IKEA hub last night.
the dongles tend to get better reception if you use an extenion lead anyway so might be worth considering that.
Ah well that’s good to know as I used one. Reception seems solid.
My only real issue was when I changed the firmware to add in Thread Border Router functionality - it seriously degraded the performance (for no actual benefit), so I changed it straight back and haven’t had an issue since.
I’ve now got a fun task of migrating my lamps over to zigbee, it seems!
Depending on how it goes, I might put a post up about it.
Edit: I will put a post with more detail when I have a second, but I’ve managed to move mine.
If you have a hub, the process is to delete the bulb in the hub, then immediately search with Zigbee (I use ZHA).The bulb should show up (you may need to power cycle it if it’s not appeared within 10s or so)
Functional differences:
Positive: Bulbs respond more reliably when controlled from HomeAssistant.
Negative: Changes don’t seem to be “smoothed”, and only update twice per second. This is not a big deal for me, but it is noticable when dimming the light, or scrolling through the colour palette. Though interestingly, “colour loop” is able to scroll colours smoothly.If anyone would like to buy some hub hubs, let me know ;)
ZHA and z2mqtt are both pretty good and stable these days, it wont’ be as painful as you might think
I just did it (admittedly with IKEA bulbs) but it was all very straightforward- I just put them in pairing mode and ZHA spotted them and scooped them up. The only hassle would be updating your automations but that should, hopefully, only take a few minutes.
Glad I only got as far as a single bulb. Adding lights to the self hosted to do list.
