My bootstraps broke when I pulled them harder.

Turns out the local company that made bootstraps for 125 years was bought out by a hedge fund, which promptly fired all of the workers and subcontracted manufacturing to a company in Sri Lanka who could make them much cheaper by using inferior materials and by paying the Sri Lankan workers in 6 months what a fired local worker made in a day.

Ironically, the hedge fund CEO with the MBA he received as a legacy admission to Cornell only wears slippers because fuck you, I’m the boss.

Canadian confirmed, eh.

lemmygrad would like to know your location

CSS: Myhammy

Thanks for the thorough writeup! It’s worth noting that the captcha will be back in the next version, but not exactly sure when it will be released.

They removed it during the switch from web sockets (which apparently took a lot of time and effort to keep updated), but someone submitted a pull request for a non-web socket version of the captcha code, which was accepted.

So hopefully we’ll all be able to update to the new version soon.

You can create an account on a single Lemmy instance/server, and use that one account on that instance to subscribe to other communities on other instances. Those communities then show up in your subscribed “feed” on the server where your account is.

You can see all the posts from all the communities you’ve subscribed to on your feed on the instance you signed up on, without needing a client app, or you can install one of a few apps for either Android or iPhone. On these apps, you sign into your account by providing the address for your “home” Lemmy instance, and then enter your username and password for your account on that instance. Then you’ll see your feed and everything you’ve subscribed to.

You can post on any community on any server you’ve subscribed to using that one account, and your home instance will sync your posts to that community in the same way it syncs posts from your subscribed communities to your home server so you can see them when you look at your feed.

“The customer is always right” mindset, except that doesn’t work with open source when they’re using something they downloaded for free.

You’ve put your finger on the thing that was bothering me about the tone of the original post - it’s very similar to a Nextdoor post.

We had a good solution…

Did we? Do you know why it was removed in the first place?

Someone has already submitted a PR with the changes the dev recommended. The captcha stuff is in a new db table instead of in-memory at the websocket server.

However, from one of the devs:

One note, is that captchas (and all signup blocking methods) being optional, it still won’t prevent people from creating bot-only instances. The only effective way being to block them, or switch to allow-only federation.

Once people discover the lemmy-bots that have been made that can bypass the previous captcha method, it also won’t help (unless a new captcha method like the suggested ones above are implemented).

The root of the issue seems to be that they’ve removed websockets, for the following reasons:

Huge burden to maintain, both on the server and in lemmy-ui. Possible memory leaks. Not scalable.

I can understand them wanting to make their lives a bit easier (see "huge burden to maintain) - Lemmy has exploded recently (see “not scalable”) and there are far bigger issues to fix, and an even larger number of bad actors (see “possible memory leaks”) who have learned about Lemmy at the same time as everyone else and want to exploit or break it.

Is this a collective undertaking by a community of multiple stakeholders or is this the Dev’s individual project and they don’t have to listen to anyone?

Devs, especially extremely busy ones “listen” via pull requests. Instead of badgering the devs, put together some devs of your own, get some code working, and submit it as a PR.

If they don’t accept it, you now have code that does what you want, and it would be easy to create your own fork.

Really glad to hear it! Feel free to ping me if you have questions.

Edit: The Deconz is a good starter device, but it doesn’t support nearly as many devices as Z2M. I got an Aqara Pet Feeder that Deconz doesn’t support, but Z2M does, which is why I switched. You can’t use Z2M with the ConBee.

This is the video I used to set up Z2M to work with the new controller.

It’s a lot easier and cheaper than you might imagine. A used Dell 7040 for $120, a ZigBee controller for $30, install Home Assistant OS on the Dell, plug in the controller, and you’ve got a really powerful smart home hub that can control any ZigBee device you have locally without ever needing any “cloud” services.

Since you don’t need cloud services, you don’t need to worry about firewalls or networking or VLANS, because the controller replaces the “required” hubs that manufacturers say you need, that force you to use their servers.

With the controller, Home Assistant becomes your hub, and the ghost of Orwell will smile and nod at you approvingly, maybe even give you a cheeky thumbs up.

No, I am currently using a TubesZB Ethernet controller, but before that I used a Deconz ConBee II. There are others available as well.

I used the hue bridge before setting up HA, but after setting up and configuring the other controller, you can unpair your hue bulbs from the hue bridge and pair them with the new controller instead. You can then unplug the hue bridge, because the new controller is now handling the hue bulbs.

This is possible because devices that comply with the ZigBee protocol specs must accept properly formatted commands from a hub/controller after a successful pairing.

So if you have one of these controllers, AND the ZigBee device you purchase is compliant with the protocol AND the device is supported by the controller, the controller will be able to control the device locally, and you can throw out the “required” hub from the manufacturer that sends your data to that company’s servers. This is why you need to plan things out ahead of time, to ensure that what you get will work with what you have. Every controller has a list of what devices are supported. For example, here are the devices supported by the ConBee II, and here are the devices supported by the TubesZB device, which uses Zigbee2MQTT.

Bonus: with one of these controllers, your smart home stuff will now work just fine if your internet goes out. As long as your local network is up and running, all of your HA stuff will work as well.

Everything became very easy for me once I decided to go all open source. In my opinion, the problem is all of the different proprietary “hubs”. I got a ZigBee controller that can control all ZigBee devices without requiring a hub (there are several options available).

Lights: ZigBee Hue. Plugs: ZigBee Innr. Motion sensors: ZigBee Aqara. Cameras: Ethernet Amcrest. NVR: Frigate.

Everything is local, no data leaves my network, and everything is controlled directly from Home Assistant dashboards via the ZigBee controller, and I never have to open any proprietary apps.

Care does need to be taken to plan the network at least somewhat in advance, but that doesn’t take too long, and everything is very stable and super reliable.