Well, same. The thing is that, if my stock vacuum starts behaving erratically, I can always contact the manufacturer without fear of being banned.

At this point, I have to choose whether I want a vacuum that phones home, or one where I know absolutely zero people will be able to help me, because they (and me) have all gotten banned.

>I think this thread went a bit off-topic with heavy discussions about the community or developer.

Not off topic at all but extremely relevant.

Not sure how this is off-topic, software and community go hand in hand. Despite the focus on community, there is still a healthy emphasis on the software part (and many compliments lol).

I can see why author's strictness in adhering to his community rules is off-putting, but at the same time, for all the complaining, I do not see anyone being willing to put the effort in to build a different community. Yes, this is work, but one wants it, go and do it (not referring specifically to you, stavros, but to the general theme in the entire discussion).

After all, this is free software, published under the Apache 2.0 license. Fork it and build a community you want it to have (you don't even have to do any code changes, and you can simply reject any external PRs more politely :)).

With that said, maybe the author is right in wanting to keep this "infrastructure" boring and to attempt to safe-guard their time, but at the same time, they do spend a lot of time defending their approach to this and complaining how nobody has read their 20 pages of "community instructions", which really, is an expected behavior for everyone (no matter how much one wishes otherwise). I can't not wonder if it would be less time & energy consuming if they did it more politely?

On the subject of bags vs cyclone collectors, My mother hates the cyclone collectors with a passion. and a disposable bag was item number one on her list of features when we were looking for a replacement vacuum for her.

I had never considered the subject before and sort of naively assumed that because the cyclone collectors were newer they were better. But she does not like cleaning them out and would rather have a bag so the whole thing can be disposed of neatly.

For me the point is automation of low value work. I don’t want to press a button. I don’t want to even think about it.

The shitty app requires cloud access to set boundaries to protect carpets from being washed.

My roborock S5 does not use consumables and works perfectly with this. It’s even installable OTA.

Haha yeah that's exactly what I did with my roborock as soon as I rooted it. The voice sentence "Going back to the dock" had such a weird accent that I immediately replaced it. So awesome to be able to do that with a device you own.

Scheduling automatic runs.

What is abnormal about it? I'm not familiar with what is going on with this software.

I have a schedule in home assistant for it to run on all weekdays at 1pm, except if my partner is home, it won’t run. She is afraid of robots and i wouldnt hear the end of it if she encountered it and couldn’t disable it. Home assistant knows if she is home based on her phone.

I have been exploring valetudo because the roborock integration breaks pretty often. But it seems like a chore and could brick my robot.

And sometimes when AWS is down you have a nice electric brick instead of useful device. Totally bonkers.

From their website:

> Contrary to common expectations when it comes to software released under a FOSS-like license, Valetudo is not a community-driven project; nor does it even have a community in that sense.

And I witnessed similar, very unfriendly interactions.

Heaven forbid you go there simply to praise the project. The last guy to do that got a 2 year ban and many, many paragraphs of irrelevant pseudo intellectial nonsense from the maintainer.

Not going to paste the message directly - but it happened five days ago and was along the lines of "thank you for breathing new life into my robot which was otherwise destined for landfill".

Yeah, they seem pretty clueless. Right now they're doing the classic 302 back to Hacker News when you visit with an HN referrer. So they appear to have this extremely unnuanced approach to wielding power where they just block people with minimal reasoning.

I used to focus always on the tech. Now I focus on the people. No time for this kind of behavior.

That’s rough but also a tiny bit funny

The docs say "search before asking"...did you do that? Maybe it's a well known issue they're tired of responding to.

Yeah that’s fair. Personally I very very rarely use manufacturer support because it’s just very limited. And also likely limited to 2 years.

And when the software is fully offline and I control the update cycle, it’s unlikely the vacuum will just start misbehaving unless the actual hardware is damaged

I think there's an actual Roborock integration for HA. I forget if it's official or on HACS, but I've used it and it worked well at the time. It requires cloud, which obviously isn't ideal, but better than nothing IMO.

It is unfortunate.

I think one must have a chat with our gods of capital in order to correct it. But I'm not sure they are listening.

Yeah, I’ve never seen a community more off-putting than this one. I’m thankful for it, it works on my robot, but I wouldn’t help or participate in any way. But it’s like they don’t want help or be a community like mentioned in their docs. In contrast, for example, https://github.com/Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt was such a welcoming community.

The main developer is toxic af, and the community behavior reflects that.

Totally second that, I was banned today on their Telegram channel just because I mentioned that I recorded a r2con2025 presentation to free Samsung PowerBot VR7000M vacuum cleaners (no Samsung bot seems to be supported by them to date), titled "Restoring the Vacuum" in here:

https://radare.org/con/2025/#vacuum

I wish I didn't mention Valetudo positively on my presentation now. Hypfer has bizarre (to say the least) views about what community building means and entails.

Yea HN is notoriously toxic to OSS projects, no wonder that many don’t want traffic from here

I'd check some of the comments around the creator's behaviour before donating any money to them.

If a site does not want traffic from HN, shouldn't HN remove the link?

Adding to the praise of "it just works". My Dreame L10S Ultra was straightforward to root after getting the breakout PCBs required. Now it only talks to NTP and the update server when I remember to check for updates every few months.

This person wanted to create an alternate community because the Telegram channel was such crap.

https://www.reddit.com/r/valetudorobotusers/comments/1lmz85n...

There's a huge amount of drama over there because hypfer came in and tried to poison everybody against him.

> I have only 3 relevant interests here:

> Spreading information about offline IoT, because this is the journey on which using Valetudo has put me

> Providing a safe space where anyone can discuss ANYTHING about Valetudo, without fear or retribution

> Provide help with Valetudo to anyone, including people who don't want to create a TG account, and especially people who were banned from TG

I've kind of gone down the rabbit hole on this whole thing this morning and after a lot of reading my conclusion is that the leader of this project thinks that they are communicating far more clearly than they are. But trying to use an analogy of a private garden when it's clear that they just don't want to field questions from people is not the way to communicate.

Here's another relevant example. Somebody that did a huge amount of work and then asked a technical question that reflected that they had done the work and was banned with no comment.

> With all of that prerequisite searching out of the way, I decided to create a Telegram account to join the support chat and ask there whether or not splitting the "Mop Dock Wastewater Tank not installed or full" error into two distinct errors has already been investigated, and to express this as a feature request if it hasn't. I included justification for why I think it might be a feasible task, since there are three vendor error codes in DreameValetudoRobot.js mapped to that error and it stands to reason that maybe they could be split out with some basic testing.

> The next notification I saw from Telegram was: Valetudo: Hypfer !pban 1y

> I do not see anyone being willing to put the effort in to build a different community.

There is a small community on Discord: https://discord.gg/tfPVDGQuYm

To manage expectations: It is less active than the official channel of course, but then it is not as old as the official TG groups and it's not exactly endorsed by the developer (e.g. it's not linked to on the Valetudo website as an independent/alternate support platform). But it's an option to discuss Valetudo and related topics, and get some support if the official way doesn't work out.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with that Discord, I just happen to hang out there.

You misunderstand, I didn't say hypfer should or shouldn't do something. I said I don't want to use his project, as is my right, because I don't like being banned from talking to anyone who might have the same problem as me if I say something hypfer doesn't like.

Even so, I'd be happy to run a community for any other project, but I don't really like hypfer's behavior and don't want to help him out.

> I can't not wonder if it would be less time & energy consuming if they did it more politely?

This is an interesting question that comes up from time to time and it's actually not as it seems. While it is work and taxing at all, the whole act of explaining is actually not very expensive. In fact, it is simply tapping into the stream of consciousness and piping it into a text input.

What _would_ be expensive actions would be to:

a) _not_ explain, see that something isn't quite right and then try to handle the internal discomfort sparking from that.

b) mask and play a different "more polite" role, which actually just means "accepting the unsolicited emotional offloading and the task of handling those attached to it"

both being "providing a service" to the random person that just approached me, and operating in a style that is unnatural to me. This is counterintuitive for the vast majority of people, because for them it works exactly the other way round.

Doing this emotional labor for free would also be just giving away the thing that makes me money. Specifically, being able to understand technical details and also communicating those to people that won't necessarily do.

Effectively, the free-plan includes technical support but not emotional consulting. This, for some, is hard to understand, for others, it is hard to accept.

And, of course, it always gets worse when social media (like HN) is involved, because these machines erase any context and replace it with violently jamming in defaults + rewarding those that dunk the hardest and make the in-group of the mob feel pleasant feelings.

See other comments. The amount of drama and behavior of some people means is just best to stay away.

Also, upgrades can bring issues and asking for help is super tricky as you may get banned for asking the wrong way. So better to not upgrade if it works.

This comment makes up for the whole thread's sadness. Thank you very much!!

There are more gems. I particularly like the ‘Valetudo is not a community’ section under ‘Why NOT Valetudo‘

You won’t miss much. The only thing I am missing is the mop after vacuum functionality, which was kinda borked and eventually removed in Valetudo for my specific model (Dreame L10s pro ultra heat)

It's a great analogy.

People seem to apply different rules of decorum interacting with "free" software that they wouldn't apply anywhere else.

Is it the internet aspect that makes it so? Or the ease of feedback to the creator?

I don't know, but it has become very obvious that what worked in the smaller "high trust" internet, doesn't work as well for a lot of people now.

The overall "I want you to have a project, not a product" vibe put me off using this when deciding what robot to buy. I want a clean floor, not another hobby that turns into a chore at the least opportune moment.

Luckily, someone explained to me that in practice once you've set up, it usually just works, and it runs completely on the robot (i.e. no second device/server/homelab that you'd have to maintain) and since updates are optional, you shouldn't be required to deal with it unless you want to.

(The offputting statements are at https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/why-not-valetudo.html: "it is very much not [a product]. [...] Instead, it is highly idealistic, anti-consumerism, anti-hypergrowth and anti just-continuing-what-we-do-now. [...] these aspects are baked into its design. There is no way of using it without being constantly confronted with them. If you’re not willing to reflect, introspect, grow and most importantly stop, you will not be happy with Valetudo.", plus this "not selling PCBs out of principle so people have to source and solder themselves" - I can solder, but I prefer to delegate boring, efficiently automatable tasks to robots in a factory and would much rather pay someone 10 bucks for a finished board than pay more for the shipping of individual parts and end up with 4 extra unpopulated PCBs that I have zero use for.)

There are IM groups where folks mail around breakout boards. There is, AFAIK, no point to the board after the inital rooting.

Any backstory to this or is the developer just not a fan?

  <script>
  // Every _single_ time it devolves and turns into shitflinging with nice words. Please just go away
  if (document.referrer.includes("news.ycombinator")) {window.location.replace(document.referrer)}
  </script>

I have two valetudo compatible L10s. Where did you source your dongle?

The Roman goddess of Hygiene (Hygieia in Greek Mythology) is named "Valetudo."

I (and probably many others) more closely associate the term with Brazilian no-holds-barred fighting matches called Vale Tudo.

Sounds nice until you read people's experience with trying to discuss anything about the project (see alien site links in a thread above).

One partner afraid of robots the other roots vacuums. Interesting combo

This makes me want to flash mob them and see how many people we can get banned for how many funny reasons

I posted your presentation to the discord. tehre seems to be some interest, some people would love to ask you some questions if you join us.

It's still a very harsh response.

Wealth is imaginary to a certain extent. Nonfungible certainly.

I think JWZ enjoys people looking at his testicle.

https://www.jwz.org/

Oh, see, I actually wish I was part of a community that would have flagged this to me. Maybe there is? Regardless, thank you for sharing, I'll be watching this :)

It is a very typical experience for folks asking questions in the telegram group.

https://www.reddit.com/r/valetudorobotusers/comments/1lmz85n...

It's integrated into HA now as a core component, and it's not cloud it's a local (polling) integration. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/roborock/

  > The docs say "search before asking"...did you do that?

This was a typical response that makes people hate communities.

I cannot stress this enough

  Just because the user didn't find it doesn't mean they didn't search

It especially pisses off the noobs, because, frankly, they are noobs! They didn't even know what to search for yet! They're learning. Search is still a hard problem. Get a few words wrong and you'll get nothing of value. Worse, it'll lead you to lots of irrelevant information you don't yet know is irrelevant.

The worst part is when it's claimed it's been discussed and no link is provided. If you know it's been discussed, prove it with a reply with the link, then move on. At worst you have made the issue easier to find. At best the issue isn't actually related and you've gained clarifying context.

But banning is just a silly response that's clearly going to enrage people. Are you building a community to work together or a community to circle jerk?

At least when Linus yells at people he explains to them what the issue is.

{citation needed}?

I thoroughly disagree. On the surface, his behavior may seem very similar to the behavior exhibited by toxic people, but once you understand his reasoning, I find it makea perfect sense.

To summarize and paraphrase: the project is his personal garden. It's by him, for him. But he has also decided to open that garden to any random stranger on the internet, free of charge. In a lot of similar projects, that means an invitation is extended to plant stuff in the garden or to suggest that certain plants are moved. He wants to make it clear that that's not the case in his garden. If you wanna plant, you're free to freely and instantly duplicate his garden and get cracking. But he will not be planting your plants in his.

Since people struggle to accept this, he's taken on a harsher-than-normal tone. That's understandable to me.

Well, given that they had to discuss among themselves whether the question was relevant or not, I'll guess that it wasn't a well-known issue.

Even if it were, I wouldn't ban people for a year in my community, I'd simply have an "RTFM" bot response.

> This project is the hobby of some random guy on the internet. There is no intent to commercialize it, grow it or expand the target audience of it. In fact, there is intent to explicitly not do that.

Then it begs the question of why they even publicize the Telegram chat. I guess it’s for contributors only, not a support chat.

I find this topic in particular difficult to judge because it:

- very much represents the Hacker approach of taking things down and rebuilding them in a better way

- contains technically interesting methods to circumvent DRM, region-locking, and replace the built-in manufacturer's cloud

- uses Node.js + React, so a rather popular web stack, and is Open Source, so it represents a learning opportunity based on a real-world project

- it's a genuinely useful product for people who like home automation

On the other hand:

- the project self-describes as highly idealistic, anti-consumerism, anti-hypergrowth, all of which don't really go well with VC funding or VC-style start-ups

- the author clearly doesn't want HN to talk about him or his project

But I find it problematic to follow your suggestion in general, because I'm sure many companies that get grilled on HN don't appreciate it. And that jwz blog who just redirects to an insult with a picture of hairy balls also keeps getting discussed on HN. Similarly, I'm sure Elon Musk, for example, also doesn't appreciate all the hate he gets here on HN.

Yeah, I more meant if there's a bug in Valetudo, I'm SOL since I can't contact anyone.

I couldn’t care less about the creator’s behavior if the software they wrote works wonders.

You happen to have links for those or is it straightforward enough to just take the first search result? Would love to stop mine from spying.

That's not really how the internet operates, or was meant to - and besides, it looks like the author has already solved the problem on their end.

Yeah I just found someone on reddit who no longer needed their breakout board, so I sent them a shipping label and that was that.

(/r/valetudousers)

>shitflinging with nice words

Criticism?

Ew.

I wholly agree with the anti-closed vibe. I even run Valetudo on my roborock. But lol I just want to control my vacuum cleaner locally and that's it. I haven't updated mine for years exactly because I just want shit to work and not have to be constantly fixing things and "be confronted".

I think "discuss" is actually an interesting and probably accidentally specific (and correct) choice of word here.

If you look up the definition, you find

> to talk about a subject with someone and tell each other your ideas or opinions

> to talk or write about a subject in detail, especially considering different ideas and opinions related to it

In contrast, the garden text:

> You can take inspiration from it and bring that home to your own garden, giving it a personal twist and adapting it as needed. You can even make friendly suggestions if you have a really good idea that ties into the vision that is already there.

So the name is actually genius! You get into valetudo expecting hygiene and wellness but as you encounter the community you discover it's actually about intense fighting.

I get you, and I can understand how emotionally taxing it is to not do anything and "keep it in" (should have said this, could have done that, why are they not reading simple instructions... — I've spent one too many sleepless nights mostly when I wasn't behaving as myself but rather adapting to social expectation).

So I think you are completely right to set the boundaries you want to set, but perhaps you can recruit someone else in the community who doesn't get so annoyed at people not respecting others' time, because let's be honest, that's what people do (mostly because it usually works due to the social norms being what they are).

It is why some people are unapproachable and build boundaries (eg. imagine even executive assistants to executives in order to not divide their attention on every little thing).

One option is to not help him at all: fork the project, run it completely independently in any way you see fit.

Many a FOSS project has been forked due to disagreements with how it was maintained, technically or socially — this is the lovely thing about free software, that the author agrees to as well.

There was a guy who not only didn't need your help. He came nicely and politely talking to you about a idea for future updates and has done all the technical investigation to check how the feature is and how it could be implemented.

You banned him without even acknowledging him.

Also, Opnsense, home assistant, the homelab community, the dozen of thousand of docker maintainers, they ALL either support directly the people using their software or at least do not try to hinder the community efforts to build their own self help spaces. Which you tried to do with Reddit.

People have simply asked a simple question yet you banned them directly, as if they are asking you directly, they didn't DM you directly and they asked the group telegram that you said they will find help in, yet you want to be the one leading the conversation and not let anyone ask questions and have other people helping them.

Just the moment you were writing this comment on, you were clearly irritated and banned people from Telegram for asking mundane questions just because you were in a bad mood.

Also, and the final thing that leaves no doubt, purging the whole github issue backlog was just demonic. There was literally no gain from this beside some sadistic privilege of showing who's boss.

Now that I had more time to order my thoughts, I have updated the comment there with a more in-depth explanation.

If you're still curious, feel free to have a look.

The comments here seem to prove him right. Half of them are airing their personal grievances or talking generically about what it means to have a community.

HN frontpage posts also have a way to get the attention of some pretty shitty people, directly or indirectly. HN itself takes active steps so site operators cannot detect when someone is coming from HN or not (like adding noreferrer to links to some domains) so the admins here are aware of the problem and decide to go against linked authors' wishes.

It is easy enough to source the parts and do it yourself and solder them together as the site descriptions, but I was lazy and bought from tindie (https://www.tindie.com/products/scacht/dreame-pcb-breakout-f...)

Same in my house. :D

If they spend time handholding 1000s of lazy people not willing to do basic search provide logs etc before helping they would spend all their time handholding instead of working on the software they are coding in their spare time as a hobby.

As much as I personally do not like the abrasiveness from many open source devs I empathize with their behaviour as most people are not willing to do the slightest work to help themselves and just expect to be hand fed. And this abrasiveness usually comes after years of trying to be helpful.

Btw if you asked a question then got an answer and figured it out hopefully you would have added it to the help notes of the open source software you are using so others would find it

Damn. Those comments are damning.

Ah, thanks. Now I know to stay way the fuck away from this project

Wow that's a sublime example of weapons grade autism on display with full self awareness.

That's horrible. Matches the vibe I got by reading the project pages though, felt tiring just trying to get to 'what is this project'.

But according to the FAQ, the vacuums still dont work when they are offline, as they will turn reset their wifi until they are online again.

> When the vacuum is disconnected from the internet, it will attempt to disconnect itself from Wi-Fi and reconnect itself until it can reach the Roborock servers.

If this was the case, why have a public telegram group then? Why ridicule members and air drama?

Sounds more like a fetish basement than a garden to me.

That is an explanation not a justification. Toxic is toxic.

The toxicity is not about accepting contributions. I have zero issues with this, the project is, as you said, his personal garden. But the behavior in chats is absolutely toxic.

If you put out a sign "come listen to my music" and then throw out every second person, everyone wearing blue and every blonde with no warning, that is toxic. It is your play, but you are not treating people coming in with respect. My 2c.

> the author clearly doesn't want HN to talk about him or his project

The author has a HN account, but seems to have gotten upset after having a few comments flagkilled

funny thing, there was a bot with ready responses, created by a member of the community, and there was an RTFM bot response.

guess what, eventually the member got banned and the bot got thrown out the window.

also Hypfer likes to diss the bot, but him and his sycophants stillr egularly link to its responses. Hilarious!

I don't have any links for assembled boards, but there seem to be some available [1]. You can find the PCB files here [2] including more documentation. The same page also has a Telegram group link to find people near you who might be able to help out.

I got my PCBs made via JLCPCB, but there are other options as well. Pay attention to select the correct PCB thickness, noted in the Readme. I fell into that trap and had to order again. Sourcing the USB port with the correct footprint was a bit annoying, I just ended up ordering a selection of kits with multiple variants from Aliexpress.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45699184

[2] https://github.com/Hypfer/valetudo-dreameadapter

In theory, you can contact anyone who is willing to dive deep and fix it for you, right? Including the original authors.

Obviously, open source vacuum robots don't have a strength in numbers yet, but suddenly, they are appealing to me too.

I find this so interesting and it seems like this happened because the project became popular?

You're just making excuses and ignoring the problem.

The problem is being verbally abusive towards people with no ill intent of any kind is unacceptable in ALL circumstances. No exceptions. You can refuse requests and ban whoever from your chatroom, that is his right.

You don't get the right to abuse and mock and harass people. Ever. Assuming that you do makes you a toxic asshole.

It's all very cut and dry. There's not really a gray area here. You either treat people with dignity or you're an asshole. Insisting that this kind of behavior is ever acceptable or excusable just means that you're also an asshole and looking for ways to rationalize and justify your own behavior.

That is the case with every FOSS software where you did not buy a support contract.

Would it help you to be able to contact me when I then say "actually, I do not care"? And then what?

>Valetudo is not a community

>Contrary to common expectations when it comes to software released under a FOSS-like license, Valetudo is not a community-driven project; nor does it even have a community in that sense.

How can someone ban someone from a community if it doesn't have one.

No. There is 0 reason to be toxic or an asshat in general. It should not be accepted. He might have reasons to be protective, but one can do that in a respectful manner. But going around, making something up, banning people for asking or criticizing is not the way to go.

Once you make something public it's not a private garden anymore.

For some robots, they intentionally published false rooting instructions online, so you could only get it rooted via the telegram chat.

Then they banned you if you asked the wrong questions in there.

It's certainly the most hostile place on the internet I've encountered so far.

Well that's great for you, I was just pointing it out so people were aware of it.

Thanks.

You were not worthy of consorting with the council of wizards.

In all seriousness though, I didn't need to search too hard to find numerous other testimonies of the project author acting neurotically. I'm not sure you missed out on much. Someone on Reddit mentioned being banned after joining the Telegram group for a similar question only a week ago.

See, this is what I don't understand about this type of developer.

When you publish an OSS project, it is an implicit invitation for collaboration, and for being part of a community around shared interests where everyone benefits. That is the entire point of F/LOSS.

Yet I've heard many people, on here, in fact, arguing against that idea. That publishing free software but not accepting feedback, contributions, or providing support, still counts as OSS. And, technically, that may be the case if you consider OSS to only be about the license itself. If you take license terms like "THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND" as the only literal definition of what OSS is. When, in fact, it is, and can be, so much more than that.

People who think like this are doing themselves and their software a disservice. Software is better when it is worked on as a community effort, much like a garden. An individual might have good ideas, and be able to execute them well, but they're not omniscient nor omnipotent.

If Linus Torvalds had published Linux as his "personal garden", it would have never been even remotely as good and popular as it is today. It would have probably been another niche project in the footnotes of history.

> but perhaps you can recruit someone else in the community who doesn't get so annoyed at people not respecting others' time

No, I can't. The world, in this aspect, is wrong. It is flawed. Rotten, even. I (and actually we) cannot approach this by just accommodating what is broken.

Everyone has been doing that and you can see what damage this has done to democracy and to reality itself.

As the docs state, Valetudo is counter-culture. The definition of being that is that you will hear a steady stream of loud screaming, because culture is being countered. If this stream stops, that means that the countering also stopped.

I do not think that we can afford to let the world deteriorate even further than it has already. We need to re-learn context. No matter how painful that might turn out.

I know HN is the last place for this :D But I also didn't ask to be linked here. I did however ask to not be posted here anymore.

I also believe that Valetudo is a unique opportunity for this, because no one is being held at gunpoint and forced to use it, nor will anyone die because they can't use it. But, at the same time, it is highly-polished software that just works and offers massive amounts of value for free. You only pay with accepting that context exists and that other humans exist.

> It is why some people are unapproachable and build boundaries

This is precisely what I am doing. I would argue thought that the "unapproachable" really depends on where one is coming from.

No, the lovely thing about free software is that enables people to work together, not that it has an escape hatch for when they can't.

Forking a project duplicates effort and requires much more work than just allowing collaboration.

Again, though, I have no particular desire to do anything here. I don't even use my vacuum.

The community rules here supersede how the internet operates. For example, if the author put up a message with profanity towards HN and the moderators here I'm sure HN would remove the link. So why doesn't it do it for something more polite?

  > lazy people not willing to do basic search

It seems you did not read my comment. Here, let me reiterate in case you are too lazy to look back. I even indented it to change formatting the first time

  >> I cannot stress this enough

  >>   Just because the user didn't find it doesn't mean they didn't search

Handholding isn't hard. You can be firm and critical while doing it too. See my example.

  > provide logs etc

They probably could, but that depends on the community.

  > I empathize with their behaviour

I do not. It is better to just leave the message on read than to respond with hostility. Growing up around my house we stressed "Thumper's Rule"

  If you don’t have somethin’ nice to say, don’t say nuthin’ at all.

It applies here too. You can just ignore it instead of investing your time getting upset. You'll feel better too! Maybe just give them more time to keep searching. If you must respond, suggest a query. Either way you're responding, but a nothing response is a lot less effort than an angry response.

  > Btw if you asked a question then got an answer and figured it out hopefully you would have added it to the help notes of the open source software you are using so others would find it

I do!

But not in communities I get banned from for not finding the (supposedly) previously discussed issue. They won't let me.

Yep it's an important distinction -- the vacuum itself depends on the cloud, but the integration in Home Assistant does not.

Yeah its sorta hilarious that someone has taken a "make my life simple and easy" technology to the extreme of "if you don't solder your own breakout board you should get off my lawn".

I'm hoping to sidestep the drama and just enjoy the software.

Yeah, that’s exactly what happens if I don’t add an exception for it to my iot vlan - it keeps reconnecting to WiFi. Scheduled cleaning doesn’t work without internet either..

I guess I’m not buying the next vacuum until I’m 100% sure it works offline and supports Matter or something..

> If this was the case, why have a public telegram group then?

I recently set up my first Valetudo robot, and therefore thoroughly read the documentation multiple times. In it, he comes across as genuinely wanting to help people succeed running Valetudo. I assume that's the reason for the group chat. At the same time, he also very very much does not want to give people the illusion that they can demand anything from him. The fear that people will is not unfounded. Think of what happens in any moderately popular FOSS project. He's just opting out of all that, in no uncertain terms.

> Sounds more like a fetish basement than a garden to me.

Fine. So he's made a fetish basement, and he's letting others use it for free. He wants to make sure that nobody demands, or even suggests, he change his basement to accommodate their fetishes.

Happy?

> Would it help you to be able to contact me when I then say "actually, I do not care"? And then what?

Well, yes, because it's not just you being contacted. In this hypothetical world, it's also all the other people that you have banned. And if any of them know the answer, they can answer and help the person, you can announce you do not care and be ignored, and then everybody goes on and the world is a strictly better place for it.

> You either treat people with dignity or you're an asshole.

I don’t think you need to treat people with dignity that don’t treat you with dignity.

There is - as always - a bunch of grey area.

You don’t need to be tolerant towards people that don’t practice tolerance themselves.

Doing so would untermine the whole basis that allows you to be tolerant.

I don’t know anything about this particular case though

Saying it doesn't have a community doesn't magically make it true. There are people in that Telegram channel who talk to each other about the software, which is what a community is.

Someone else had the same problem and helps, the way I help other people with their problems.

You seem to be saying that OSS communities don't help, which is obviously not true. I'm a member of many OSS communities where users help each other, and that's a core part of why I prefer OSS projects.

This doesn't happen when you ban most people.

> No. There is 0 reason to be toxic or an asshat in general. It should not be accepted.

So, you wanna shame or force him into accepting contributions? That's ridiculous!

> Once you make something public it's not a private garden anymore.

Wait, are you saying if I have an actual garden that I myself own and maintain, and I let random people from the street come see it between noon and five every Sunday, it's no longer my private garsden? Then you and I are on different planets in this debate.

> See, this is what I don't understand about this type of developer.

That's ok. It's ok to be different. I'm probably more like you for my own projects, but that doesn't invalidate this guy's stance.

> When you publish an OSS project, it is an implicit invitation for collaboration, and for being part of a community around shared interests where everyone benefits.

It is not.

> That is the entire point of F/LOSS.

If it were, don't you think that part would be written into at least one popular FLOSS license?

> People who think like this are doing themselves and their software a disservice. Software is better when it is worked on as a community effort, much like a garden. An individual might have good ideas, and be able to execute them well, but they're not omniscient nor omnipotent.

Who are you to decide for another person? Can I decide such things about your actual garden?

> If Linus Torvalds had published Linux as his "personal garden", it would have never been even remotely as good and popular as it is today. It would have probably been another niche project in the footnotes of history.

I'm glad he didn't. But if he had, do you really think that shaming or pressuring him into doing it differently would have in any way made him feel like continuing? Linux would have died.

respect boundaries, most ppl sharing code with you aren’t looking for a relationship

Yeah, it seems that way. Ah well, it's his project, I see the ban as saving me time and aggravation.

Is it counter-culture to post about Valetudo here when you asked for it not to be or is it only counter-culture when you’re enforcing your preferred social construct?

We are getting philosophical, but I wouldn't say the "world is wrong": the world simply is.

Yes, people engage on a topic they have spent few thoughts on. But let's be honest, many who have spent many thoughts on something do not really come up with some genuinely interesting insight either. Thus I have doubts that humans as a whole can "re-learn context", and even those who can, will usually not invest enough in the topic the other side might care about.

I applaud you for your desire to "fix the world", but over time, I've learned to accept it for what it is, and I don't feel the same annoyance you seem to when I am being misunderstood even when I state things plainly (I am mostly — I admit — smugly amused, except when it's the person who can directly affect my life).

Anyway, as long as you are not overly frustrated, keep doing what you are doing (which sounds like building great free software for de-clouding robot vacuums), and fighting the fights that matter to you!

Edit to answer the first point: free software as a cultural movement grew out of a need to control the hardware a software engineer bought and which came with no source code for the drivers. Friends made along the way was great, and I agree that's lovely, but ultimately that's what free software enables, among other lovely things (like not depending on a manufacturer you disagree with, or another programmer you disagree with).

Forking a project does not duplicate the effort — collaboration requires a lot of effort, and the more collaborators, the more expensive it is (usually even more than 2x). This is why many well-run free software projects have their own BDFLs (Linux, Python... OK, maybe not so benevolent at all times :)).

If the two of us wanted to take a project in a different direction, and insisted on keeping it a single project, we'd have to do more work to reach compromises all the time, neither side ever being fully happy, but doing duplicate work for an imperfect result.

As you are well aware, RoI calculation is not as simple as LoC count, and typing in the code is the fast part. With two projects with clearer missions, willing contributors flock to the one they align better with, which leads to one being more stable, another being quicker to add new features.

And no, getting all of those contributors on a single project would not result in a single project that is both stable and adding new features quickly.

Obviously, no expectation on you to do anything. I just find it surprising you do not see the value in a different way to organize a community compared to what's common, even if what's valuable to you is different.

Personally, Im currently looking at the switchbot vacuums.

They recently started working with Home Assistant with their "Works with" program.

Not 100% sure what the status of each robot is though.

> The community rules here supersede how the internet operates. For example, if the author put up a message with profanity towards HN and the moderators here I'm sure HN would remove the link.

I don't see anything in the community guidelines that would indicate this submission is inappropriate, with or without the message: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Why are you so sure a more profane message would result in a removal? I don't think that would violate guidelines either.

> When you publish an OSS project, it is an implicit invitation for collaboration, and for being part of a community around shared interests where everyone benefits. That is the entire point of F/LOSS.

There is no one single "entire point of F/LOSS". Even in the struggle to name it (free software vs open source software), the desire and intent is obviously different.

Sometimes people build something and publish it because they are OK if someone else makes something else out of it, extends it or whatever... But they don't want to be bothered about it anymore.

Running a community around a free software project indicates desire to collaborate on something, but even that does not indicate a desire to collaborate on everything this project could become (imagine someone coming in with a desire to port it to robot mowers — sure, it sounds related, but the author might not have any interest in it if they are living in an apartment, and they don't want to spread their limited time and energy on maintaining something they will never be able to test/support themselves).

The escape hatch is the feature that force everyone to be nice.

What if you don't like Windows 11 forcing to make an account? You get a time machine, go back 30 years and start a hobby OS project and hope the best.

What if you don't like Linux? You fork the project and just ignore what Linus publish in his tree. (The hard part is doing a better job than Linus and convincing enough people that you can do it.) So Linus must be nice enough to keep most people happy.

When you’re two days and one solder in, you’ll need an answer from someone, and you know exactly you’re in for a ride now… been there, done that

There's a way to do all that without being an arsehole.

Also putting an open source project out there doesn't absolve you of all social obligations simply because it's free. You can't say "well you are free to not use it, then it doesn't affect you at all" because that isn't true. By making and publicising this project he is actively discouraging other similar projects from happening - ones that might have less toxic leaders.

I should write a blog post about that because it seems to be an extremely common misconception.

> you ban most people.

I do not ban most people as so much that I ban people that did not read and act according to the rules of the space. Which does turn out to be "most people" when you look at an unfiltered set of all humanity, because the ideology of the space is rather far away from that baseline. That is on purpose though and clearly explained many times in the documentation.

The "Why not Valetudo?" page is a good start. The "FAQ" also houses some info. Code of Conduct, obviously and the Contributing.md too.

The information is out there and I did try my best to make it comprehensible and coherent. Most people that get banned usually get banned because they did not read the information first but instead showed up with defaults.

You forgot to quote the part where I said he can refuse in a normal and respectable way.

If you make a garden and then declare it a public garden then yes. If you want people to not step on your flowers you can tell them in a normal way. No need to shout around, belittle them, and ban them from your garden for a year....

He could have just kept his Project private if he doesn't want people to interact. Simple as that.

And this is why I like LLMs, they hardly ever bark at you...

> Sometimes people build something and publish it because they are OK if someone else makes something else out of it, extends it or whatever... But they don't want to be bothered about it anymore.

I understand that. My argument is that that mentality is doing the project a disservice. For every person the author might find difficult to collaborate with, there will be many others who will contribute positive input and changes to the project. By not being open to collaboration, someone else will step in and build that community instead, given that the software is actually good. And that's fine, it's their prerogative, but chances are that their closed-but-technically-open project will languish in comparison to the project that's actually open and invites collaboration.

So, really, I don't see what they gain from releasing it as open source in the first place. Personal satisfaction from thinking they're helping others by providing code only? Building their personal portfolio or brand? For demonstration purposes? I honestly find it puzzling.

> Running a community around a free software project indicates desire to collaborate on something, but even that does not indicate a desire to collaborate on everything this project could become

And that's fine as well. No project will satisfy the use cases of everyone. The line has to be drawn at some point, and this should be made clear. Upstream code contributions often add additional maintenance burden to core developers, since the contributor will likely disappear once their code is merged. Forking is always an option when visions don't align. I get all that.

But it's one thing to have a clear focus for the project, and another to make it completely closed to contributions. Or to have this confusing in-between state where you have a website to promote the project, provide user documentation and places for community discussion, but then alienate your users by being hostile, not open to feedback, etc. It sends mixed signals to anyone interested in the project and willing to give their time and energy to improve it.

This is why I strongly believe that OSS only works when there is an environment of mutual good will, respect, and collaboration that allows a community to thrive. This is not encoded in any legal frameworks or licenses because it doesn't need to be. It should be common sense that the alternatives lead to everything OSS is opposed to: less freedoms for users, and proprietary software that benefits only a select few.

> keep most people happy.

Not _most_ in the sense of a plurality of all users. _most_ in the sense of some subset of contributors. Free software is still a dictatorship of the able. A person who cannot contribute (whether that be code or money to pay someone else to code) something important is still without recourse.

If Linus decided to add a bunch of malware to the kernel, my mom would still be unable to fix that.

FOSS is still better than proprietary, but it's not perfect either.

Because the moderators here will remove you or rate limit your account for disparaging them. They have very thin skins. So why wouldn't the same apply to criticism coming from elsewhere?

They didn't say either of those things. What they said is that you can say no and not accept contributions without being a toxic asshat.

putting an open source project out there doesn’t entail _any_ social obligations actually.

I can imagine the author took abuse from some extremely entitled people for some time and then just snapped.

If you ever ran any moderately successful oss project you get dozens of these people all the time; they demand your time, work, and attention and screech, complain, and blackmail you if you don’t instantly succumb to their demands.

It’s the one thing that always turned me off from doing oss more seriously; users are just the worst.

Of course only a small fraction of users but if you have many users it’s a never ending flood

> Also putting an open source project out there doesn't absolve you of all social obligations simply because it's free.

If I understand the guy correctly, he doesn't think that sharing software that he wrote comes with any obligations once he's sufficiently informed the recipients about damage it may cause. I agree with him.

Your reasons are your own, but that doesn't change my point above. For me, an OSS project without a strong community looks about as bad as the original manufacturer software, with all the phoning home and other disadvantages that entails.

> If you make a garden and then declare it a public garden then yes.

He didn't. He made a garden, declared it private, and set specific terms under which you and I and others can come enjoy it. Take it or leave it.

> No need to shout around, belittle them, and ban them from your garden for a year....

Then follow his rules, or don't go to his garden! He's offering you a free favor. Take it or leave it.

> He could have just kept his Project private if he doesn't want people to interact. Simple as that.

Of course he could have. However, I'm adamant that those of us who find Valetudo useful – i.e. find his garden beautiful – would be worse off for it. Why would you want the overall usefulness given to the world to decrease? What's the benefit? Not feeling annoyed that he won't let you help?

What I'm observing is you are asseting a lot of priors about how HN's moderation is, and then exhibiting confusion when reality does not match what the priors would predict.

Perhaps this indicates your priors are incorrect? Considering this post remains up.

You are right, but your mom would easily benefit from someone else who would be able to fix that: free software relies on the fact that someone "able" is at least not looking to hurt you, which is, for a popular enough software, a given.

For software that is not popular enough, you are right that in practice, your mom wouldn't be able to do anything other than stop using the software.

But of course FOSS is not perfect, it's just a way to empower your users: nothing more, nothing less.

> I understand that. My argument is that that mentality is doing the project a disservice.

In the world where we accept unfinished software all around us, from government and banking services, to our daily general computing devices like computers and phones, to appliances like TVs, washing machines or elevators, the project seems to be doing great for many a user: we've heard accounts here from people putting the software on their device once years ago and forgetting about it — it just works.

Their focus seems to be exactly that: ensure this project works for them, and allow a select few trusted partners to make it work for their own equipment too. But work it must.

I might have a different perspective on making software and evolving it, but that does not make this perspective any less valuable — it's actually great to have it out there in the world.

> For every person the author might find difficult to collaborate with, there will be many others who will contribute positive input and changes to the project. By not being open to collaboration, someone else will step in and build that community instead, given that the software is actually good. And that's fine, it's their prerogative, but chances are that their closed-but-technically-open project will languish in comparison to the project that's actually open and invites collaboration.

The project has been there for years now, and this hasn't happened. Either there aren't "many" who'd "contribute positive input and changes", or the issues with the project management aren't as big as some are making it seem here.

> So, really, I don't see what they gain from releasing it as open source in the first place.

They don't have to gain anything: they publish it because they don't mind it, not looking for any gain.

> This is not encoded in any legal frameworks or licenses...

Many companies have nothing to lose if they released their IoT device firmware as open source, but they have nothing to gain either, so they don't do it. I'd much prefer it if they released it, even if for the most part, I wouldn't touch it.

But I'd feel the sense of trust that this device is never dying on me, even if a company does.

So I disagree: a free software license is enough to "encode" all that you seek! Just by having access to the source code, and rights to modify and distribute it, anyone can decide to build a different community, evolve a product in a different direction, or change it to have a new technical foundation.

When this need becomes strong enough, it will simply happen: for better or for worse. See eg. LibreOffice vs OpenOffice case. Or the cdrtools maintainer frustration with Debian/Ubuntu forks (https://cdrtools.sourceforge.net/private/linux-dist.html).

You can do it the first couple thousand times. After that it just becomes harder and harder to be sociable.

Would you still be so nice after doing it the ten thousandth time?

I don't. Not morally anyway. By sharing it he's ensuring that no other less toxic projects can flourish (at least not as easily). That comes with some moral obligation not to be a complete dick.

> putting an open source project out there doesn’t entail _any_ social obligations actually.

I disagree with that though. See my other comments.

> If you ever ran any moderately successful oss project

I do (if 600 stars counts, which I'm sure you'll tell me it doesn't). We don't get people like that, and from the sounds of it none of the people who have been instantly banned have been like that either.

Oh, yes, absolutely.

I am not in any way challenging that. That is the correct Take-away. Genuinely.

As said, the culture is different. I do not intend to convince you that my project would be better than what the vendor can offer. In fact, you have correctly pointed out that in your situation, the vendor might actually offer the _better_ experience with actual paid support.

Suggesting I am confused is an ad hominem attack.

> Perhaps this indicates your priors are incorrect? Considering this post remains up.

I have an opinion and I stated it. I'm not sure what you hope to achieve by defeating the personal opinion of a stranger on the internet.

I get where you’re coming from.

Although if the project is so toxic and horrible to interact with - wouldn’t people look for a more wholesome project?

I don’t agree that the toxic project would stifle growth for other less toxic projects solely by existing. If it’s that bad then it shouldn’t be that much more popular?

Besides what is stopping people from forking and building a less toxic community?

What irks me mostly about these complaints is exactly that: a whole lot of complaining and handwringing going on and very little action to improve the situation or even trying to understand how it came to be.

It's not an attack, it's a description of your behavior. Alongside your stated opinion, you keep asking questions wondering why reality isn't different than the way it is.

> shouldn't HN remove the link?

> So why doesn't it do it for something more polite?

> So why wouldn't the same apply to criticism coming from elsewhere?

And yet the submission stays up. I'm sorry you felt attacked by the word "confused" being used to describe your behavior when you are asking questions about how you do not understand why things are the way they are. I'm open to using other terms if you prefer.

While we're discussing terms for behavior, often when someone assists another person who is wondering at how they do not understand why reality is as it is, that is referred to as "helpful".

Actually there is a big understanding of how this all came to be. You are all just too new to currently grasp it.

Also most of the people with big interest to fork are banned from the GitHub, which blocks direct forks, and this makes it much more difficult to rebase the source after change to the main

I'm done with this conversation. In the future if you see my comments I would appreciate it if you didn't respond.

I'm sorry to have upset you so badly. This might not be the site for you if you react so poorly to someone pointing out the things you say are not self-consistent. Considering your opinions of the site's staff, this will be no great loss for you.

I'm not up to the task of remembering your username. Since you care, feel free to remember mine and not reply to future comments.

Thanks.

Of course.