Last week or two I've been learning more about passkeys, and it makes threads like this seem ridiculously out of date. Given the choice between emojis and passwords and hard crypto, I'll take the crypto.

Try HomeSeer. I ran it for years before switching to HA.

I assume by “Raspberry Z-Wave module” you mean the RaZberry z-wave addon board, and I couldn’t agree more. I tried to get that thing going with another home automation package and gave up after a few hours of fucking with it.

That said, these days I’m using Home Assistant on a RPi with a Nortek z-wave/zigbee combo radio USB interface and I couldn’t be happier. If you’ve never used HA it’s worth trying out; used to require a lot of scripting but now it’s a beautiful and polished system that has all the tweakability a nerd wants with a nice high-WAF GUI. They have a plugin that does exactly what you’re doing and makes a virtual alarm system out of existing sensors.

I also agree block connections and use a VPN to access it, I do the same thing.

Very interesting. So you basically have an alarm system in software then? What do you use for software? Do you have an arm/disarm function?

security? For surveillance or something more?

I’d be happy to donate $100 via crypto if it meant keeping the instance up.
I can also help troubleshoot federation problems although it’s not my primary area of expertise… if there’s some sanitized logs or something I can look at them…

For me it’d be Don’t Even Reply: E-Mails from an Asshole.

Bunch of funny ones. Like someone offered a ride in a Prius for a long car trip between cities, he said he’d have to stop at a river to pour out some motor oil because he doesn’t support the environment and had to make up for the environmental damage the Prius wasn’t doing.

Very sad :( I know this has been a challenge, and I really hope you guys reconsider and don’t give up. This is one of the only more free speech focused instances that hasn’t turned into a far right wingnut cesspool or borderline-racist bullshit.

FWIW I’m happy to donate some crypto to the beer fund if such a thing was created… Things have been going well for a week or two since the restart, at least I haven’t noticed any problems. I hope you guys don’t give up <3

That’s cool. Does it have the ability to post notifications, like an explanation of why there’s downtime or ETA for restoration?

First- thank you for your work keeping this instance operable. I know it’s not easy. Just want to say it’s appreciated.

As for my comment- I think you misunderstand.
I’m talking SOLELY a status update system for FMHY Lemmy and perhaps FMHY website too. The equivalent of very.bignutty.xyz. There would be no piracy on it or even links to piracy. You could run THAT on Twitter. Even The Pirate Bay has a Twitter account and they don’t get banned or blocked.
Think about it- of everything you guys post on very.bignutty.xyz, how much of it would get you banned from Twitter, Facebook, or any other anti-piracy centralized service? I haven’t seen a single thing. It’s all just downtime updates.

So I’d say find a Mastodon instance that seems like they’d go for it, reach out to the admins and say we want to use you guys for our downtime tracker account, we promise no links to any pirated material only our own website and not deep links to specific piracy items. If they give you the go ahead, you’re good to go.

That said, interactivity is a plus but not a requirement. I like your idea of a status page hosted on github.
The important thing to me is that it NOT be on FMHY infrastructure, so it can still work if FMHY infrastructure has problems.

I’m in the same boat as OP- I’d never even heard of FMHY before Lemmy, and of the options presented I agreed with the values of FMHY more than the alternatives. So FMHY is also my portal to the Fediverse.

I agree with this 100%, but I’d add one key detail-

Please add another communication channel that is not hosted by the FMHY team or on any of the same systems.

The system at https://very.bignutty.xyz has not proven reliable and quite frankly while it’s very cool, during the big .ml domain outage, I found it hard to find the most up to date information. I had to find a few accounts that appear to be on the FMHY team there and bookmark them. It’s a heavyweight system, you need something very lightweight. And this system seems to have as much downtime as FMHY’s Lemmy instance, which is less than ideal for an outage notification system.

I’d strongly suggest something like Mastodon. One account, where all updates go. Pick someone else’s instance and make an account and use that.

Try dd-wrt firmware. Lets you dip your toe into the water so to speak, with a lot less of the complication of openwrt. At least it used to when I last used it several years ago.

If you have a spare old PC, pfSense is a great way to screw around. Even if it only has one NIC there is (or at least used to be) basic hostap support so you could use the builtin wifi card as a base station. Otherwise spend $20 on a supported USB-Ethernet adapter and you’ve got yourself a router to play with.

So would a router running pfsense then also become my primary WiFi routers too? Or is it best to keep pfsense strictly as a firewall and have a separate router strictly for WiFi?

pfSense doesn’t really do WiFi. So you’d use it as a router/firewall, then have something else do your WiFi. I generally recommend Ubiquiti.

It’s worth noting that a ‘WiFi router’ is usually 3 separate things in one box- a router/firewall, a WiFi access point, and a small switch of usually 4-6 ports. In a home you usually want these things in the same place so they’re in one box. In an enterprise, the router/firewall is usually in the basement where there’s no WiFi, network switches may be in many places and a tiny one in the router won’t help you, and WiFi is up by where the workers are. So it’s that sort of setup that pfSense is designed for.

The way I have my place set up- a pfSense machine is the router/firewall. I then use Netgear managed switches (there’s a few, mainly GS110TP’s), and Ubiquiti WiFi. The Ubiquiti controller runs inside Docker on a small Synology box. Highly recommend this setup.

But I’d just as highly recommend going Ubiquiti all the way. Dream Machine Pro SE is a great base router/firewall, and it has a built in PoE switch so you can hang a few U6 Pro access points off it. You get a bit more flexibility with pfSense but in most home environments it’s not needed.

It’s sort of both.

Netgate is the company that develops pfSense. They make pfSense available as a download that you can run on your own hardware or your own VM. They also sell pfSense routers that have official support and a free upgrade to their slightly nicer ‘pfSense Plus’ version. I generally recommend the official hardware (support the project and all that, and it’s good quality if a bit more expensive). However if you want to save a few bucks you can get a cheap NUC-type PC with a few Intel Ethernet ports from Protectli or similar brands on Amazon.

Routers - Netgate / pfSense. Best router GUI I’ve found. If you understand what you want to make happen, chances are you can figure out how to make it happen without touching a CLI. And generally free of Cisco for license bullshit.

Routing and WiFi- Ubiquiti. Not as flexible as pfSense but even easier to use and if you do both routing and WiFi with them you get a bunch of cool analytics. Their surveillance package is great too as long as you use their cameras, pretty much the best mobile surveillance app I’ve found. Door access system also gets a mention.

Synology for almost everything they do, but particularly storage, backup, surveillance (they support almost every camera, albeit with a license requirement) and hosting of self hosted apps using a nice docker GUI. Not as much bang for buck vs. an old PC in terms of CPU power, but very easy to use.

For home automation- Home Assistant or HomeSeer. Both are open platforms that support almost everything. Home Assistant pulls lightly ahead for me because it’s free and has more 3rd party integrations, even if it has a steeper hearing curve in some areas and some rough edges that require tweaking for basic usability (specifically, Z-Wave requires the ‘z-wave js ui’ plugin to take real control over a Z-Wave mesh, and Z-Wave door locks need the Keymaster plugin to get any sort of user code management, neither are straightforward to install). That said- pair Home Assistant with a Z-Wave dongle and some Inovelli light switches and you have a really beautiful setup with insane flexibility.