This is a complaint about recent heavy-handed moderation by @petro.
Background
I am new to Home Assistant (HA) and this forum, as of a few weeks ago. I chose Home Assistant specifically because I boycott surveillance capitalism (as we all should), and I strongly agree with the principles of the Open Home Foundation, as stated by its founder @balloob:
Summary
- “We have created a bulwark against surveillance capitalism”
- “The Open Home Foundation’s projects, support, and advocacy stand in stark contrast to the smart home alternative driven by surveillance capitalism. You should [u]never[/u] be the product—whether the products or services you use are free or paid.”
- “Home Assistant … exists to put users in control of their homes, their data, and their personal well-being.”
- “The Open Home Foundation [represents] major efforts to create open standards, prevent vendor lock-in, and protect privacy.”
- “We aim to educate the public and public servants, and … companies … about the value of open standards, open-source projects, and privacy, choice, and sustainability”
- “Something far more troubling [is that the] smart home landscape grew increasingly dominated by Big Tech—whose purpose is to constantly sell you something new, while siphoning off your personal data for financial gain. This destructive change brought into focus the importance of privacy, choice, and sustainability. Principles that in 2021, [the Open Home Foundation] called the building blocks of the open home.”
- “Everything from … the services you use, to how you use them … should never be influenced by uncertainty about who knows what.”
The Open Home Foundation maintains:
- HA
- this forum
- ZHA, which is HA’s default library for handling Zigbee devices
In my Home Assistant journey, there will likely be Zigbee devices I want to use that don’t work with ZHA out of the box. For those, I would have two options:
- Try Zigbee2mqtt (Z2M). Z2M is open source, but: it is not part of Open Home Foundation; I don’t know how to use it (already tried); it needs an extra Zigbee coordinator or migration of existing Zigbee devices; worse, it has no open-source user forum, just GitHub, so I would have no direct way to file requests or report problems.
- File a feature request for a new ZHA Device Handler.
The latter is obviously best. This forum is open-source, I already use it, and it has a Feature Requests subforum. But I was dismayed to see this guidance demanding that HA users create an account with a proprietary Microsoft service (GitHub) in order to request new handlers! That completely violates the Open Home Foundation principles mentioned above.
So, I started a feature request thread: Way to request new ZHA device handlers without involving Microsoft.
N.B. Other HA users are also concerned about Open Home Foundation reliance on Microsoft/GitHub.
Complaint
12 hours after I started that thread, and in the middle of a civilised discussion, moderator @petro posted a non-solution, wrongly marked it as a solution, and closed the thread. This prevented all votes and further discussion.
Suppressing votes and discussion is literally a dictatorial move. Violent. Top-down. The opposite of community-building.
Especially if it suppresses well-intentioned discussion that supports Open Home Foundation goals.
It is also against Home Assistant’s guidance: “The number of votes and the amount of thoughtful discussions and creative ideas matter, so please participate in [Feature Request] threads and help guide the direction of our project.” By shutting down my feature request like @petro did, he effectively said votes and discussion don’t matter.
I PM’d @petro politely to request reopening the thread so discussion could continue. He refused.
I asked: how are users supposed to request improvements to the Feature Requests forum, if mods shut down such discussions?
He told me to post here in the Social subforum instead (even though it’s clearly not the right place for feature requests), and said that if I messaged him further he would apply a warning to my account!
I repeat: this is againast Home Assistant’s guidance. It is very heavy-handed moderating: extreme, really - not “moderate” at all.
My request
Can a mod reopen the thread, and un-mark it as solved, so that the democratic approach - discussion and voting - can resume? That would promote open community over dictatorship.
(If instead @petro and other mods leave it closed - or worse yet, dogpile on me for posting this - we’ll know that the mods are taking an authoritarian approach, at odds with the Open Home Foundation principles. That would be dismal.)