From d7c259bd28f5352dd30ec6a9aa2e95ac272cb68a Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: =?UTF-8?q?S=C3=B6ren=20Beye?= Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2024 22:05:59 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] docs: Matter support FAQ entry --- docs/_pages/faq.md | 52 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 52 insertions(+) diff --git a/docs/_pages/faq.md b/docs/_pages/faq.md index 43cf474a928..3dcd2dc52d0 100644 --- a/docs/_pages/faq.md +++ b/docs/_pages/faq.md @@ -215,3 +215,55 @@ It's not about money. It's about not enabling these business practices. Further reading: - [2011, 28c3: The coming war on general computation, Talk by Cory Doctorow](https://archive.org/details/GeneralComputation) - [2023, Technofeudalism, Book by Yanis Varoufakis](https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781847927279) + + +## Why is there no Matter support? + +A few reasons, actually. + +The most important one being that Matter attempts to be a solution to a problem Valetudo simply doesn't have. +Any smarthome software that respects you and thus is suited to run something as vital to your +life as your home _already has open interfaces where you can connect Valetudo_. +We've had them since years. Decades even. + +The only "smart" home "solutions" that won't nicely integrate with FOSS are those cloud-based Big Tech ones and supporting +these is a strong non-goal for the project for obvious reasons. Besides, why would you even uncloud to then recloud again? +The stock vendor apps for our vacuum robots already integrate with Google Home/Alexa/etc. + + +Secondly, if you look at the spec, you'll find that Matter was designed exclusively to solve Big Techs use-case of being +able to talk to other Big Tech products. +This of course didn't happen because they wanted to but because it was the absolute bare minimum they _had_ to do. +Customers disliked the interoperability issues of IoT crap _so much_ that they decided to just don't buy any IoT products at all anymore. + + +If you look at the Matter spec, this shows, because you'll see that to use it, you will need one of the 65535 possible +Vendor IDs that you can get for $7000 a year from the Connectivity Standards Alliance that is behind Matter. A maximum of +65535 Parties _forever_ and all of them required to pay thousands of dollars yearly for the right to use a protocol. + +Does this sound open to you? Does this sound like something designed to "solve smarthome" in a way that +goes beyond the needs of few large corpo players? + +
+ +Nearly everything FOSS you've seen so far that talks Matter uses one of the reserved "Test Vendor 1-4" Vendor IDs that +are supposed to be used for development only. Don't think that is the intentional escape hatch for that fee though, +because the vendors thought of that. + +If you want to use your home-built Matter device with Google Home, you will have to jump through 6(!) hoops for every +single device you want to use as documented in [the Tasmota documentation](https://tasmota.github.io/docs/Matter-with-Google/). +It is only a matter (heh) of time until the other Vendors will follow. So much for an "open standard". + +And even if you don't want to build your own devices, remember that with Matter, you will still need all the vendor apps +for most product features because anything beyond the basics can't be exposed via matter.
+"Solving smarthome" but you'll still need all the vendor apps with all their accounts. What was the point of it again? + +Lastly, if you've followed the launch of Matter and are also following the current state of it, you will see just +how much of a dumpster fire that is. It just doesn't work even for the bare minimum it promised to do.
+By-design of the spec, it is unsuited to solve what people wanted it to solve and yet even the tiny subset that it would want to solve doesn't work properly. + +
+ +Matter is purely marketing that doesn't deliver on any of its promises. Don't let it fool you. Especially since the real thing is already here.
+The FOSS smarthome actually _is_ what Matter _pretends_ to be. It's here right now and has been since years. +