Danacus

CIQ is the company behind Rocky and they joined. I believe Alma is taking a slightly different approach than the others, hence they did not join.

Like $XDG_CONFIG_HOME and $XDG_DATA_HOME?

Probably yeah, but then Meta will have made yet another walled garden, and for some reason so many people seem to really love Meta and they will stay there. Then we’ll be exactly where we are today. So the way I see it, this new plan from Meta means nothing, but I’m curious to see how things will go.

The fact that W3C defines the protocol doesn’t stop large companies from doing whatever they want. Have a look at Google: their web browser has become so widely adopted that Google effectively controls what is considered part of the spec, not W3C.

If Meta’s platform grows to become the biggest fediverse project, they will control the spec and others will either have to follow, or risk dropping out. This is just like how Firefox is forced to follow Google to ensure all websites work properly on Firefox, even if these sites don’t comply with the spec.

I agree, I also make sure everything is fully local. I have separate subnets for the server that runs home assistant, the IoT devices, and the trusted home network. Then I have some firewall rules that ensure that the IoT network cannot communicate with the WAN or the trusted LAN network at all, only with home assistant.

We have some simple automations at home to turn on the boiler in the afternoon when we have an abundance of solar power, and some basic automation to turn off aquarium lights at night such that the fish can sleep. Anything more complex just becomes unreliable and annoying.

Being able to monitor energy usage is very useful. We can see how much our solar panels are producing and how much we are importing and exporting from the network. Based on this information we can decide whether we should start a dishwasher, washing machine, water boiler, air conditioning, etc. That way, we can save a lot of money by optimally making use of free solar energy.

Making sure you are still able to control everything when the network is down seems like a good idea.

In our house, the smart plugs have a physical button that can be used to toggle them on or off. The lights are still connected to a physical power switch, so they can be reset by flipping the switch a few times, in which case they will probably just act as a normal light. Air conditioning units have an IR remote.

In Belgium we have a similar system, also fully open source. It’s pretty cool that different countries are going to be using the same system soon.

The only thing that worries me is that the EU has this habit of creating open source libraries and releasing it under a permissive license, which is then incorporated in proprietary apps. This also happened with the corona contact tracing. Germany made their app open source, Belgium didn’t, but I could just use the German app instead.

Another example is the Belgian eID stuff. Anything government related uses the open source tech, but ISPs and banks made their own proprietary app that does the same thing, and then everyone started using this crap. Now, the government started paying a third party to make yet another proprietary app that does the same thing, but no one cares about it or uses it.