I have had a bunch of little issues which ultimately come down to a knowledge gap, me just not knowing enough about Home Assistant to know where to even look. I’ve solved most of my problems with persistence and searching for other people’s issues, but some issues are just not going anywhere.
It used to be that a project like this would have an IRC chatroom and tonnes of handy experts would be there chatting and helping to point you in the right direction. Now that IRC has largely gone by the wayside where do you all go to have that quick back and forth chatting to get a vague idea of where to go with next steps?
To be clear, I’m not so much asking about where on the system to find logs or the like, I more mean the community of people chatting and helping each other troubleshoot issues.
Every time I see this I feel so sad. IRC was definitely not perfect, the security was crap and the user experience was awkward, but it was possible to have a fully open source self hosted stack. Discord is not a viable alternative in my mind.
Element/Matrix is a bit dodgy to me, with a lot of questionable stuff around original funding and development not to mention the amount of clearly illegal and immoral stuff on it, but at least you can run your own server in theory. I don’t know what the solution is, but it needs to have a lot of people on it to work so it needs to be easy and quick to get set up on, and ideally without the kind of verification stuff discord has.