When criticism is treated as disruption, a community stops being a community

Off-Topic
1

I came to Homey from Hubitat because its moderators systematically closed threads that became critical, uncomfortable for the company, or simply too popular.

I moderated a car forum for many years, and the tone there was often much harsher than anything I have seen here. We warned users who became impolite or made personal attacks, temporarily suspended them when necessary, and closed a thread only as an absolute last resort—usually when widespread personal attacks made a constructive discussion impossible.

That is why I am shocked to encounter increasingly similar behaviour here.

Threads are closed with arguments such as the discussion no longer contributing to a solution. But before closing them, was the thread creator ever asked whether the discussion was still useful? Were the people actively participating asked whether they wanted it to continue?

I no longer feel that this is primarily a community forum for users. It increasingly feels like a company-controlled platform where critical discussions are tolerated only for as long as they remain convenient.

Criticism should be seen as an opportunity: an opportunity to listen, to understand recurring problems, to show customers that their concerns are being heard, and to incorporate that feedback into future product and support strategies. Instead, critical discussions are cut short, and the company simply moves on.

Athom increasingly risks becoming another Samsung or LG: a company where customers and revenue are counted in millions, while marketing becomes more important than making existing customers feel valued.

I have been close to leaving Homey more than once and moving to Home Assistant, or perhaps Gladys Assistant. Each time, I stepped back because I genuinely like this box and still want Homey to succeed. But more and more, I feel as though Homey itself is pushing me away.

I have written five apps for Homey, and there is room for more. Yet I increasingly understand why several developers still have excellent apps in the store that are no longer actively maintained, and why some of them never publish anything new.

The people who invest substantial time in the platform, try to understand what happens under the hood, investigate what goes wrong, and are willing to help improve the system should be among Homey’s most valuable community members.

Instead, they increasingly seem to be treated as personae non gratae.
@ulrikb @deejayreissue @Rammstein @Doekse

2

Athom almost never closes topics. The only two I’ve seen are these (1, 2), for which the reason of closing them is very obvious.

3

Pascal, thx for your lines, at the moment its hard to find the right words, i really dont know how i should write all my thoughts here because aim sad about what I am experiencing here…i cant believe it in which direction this good and positive thread run…basically we only want to report & solve our Thread problems together too & with Athom in an effort to help them for fix problems in the future and now the thread is closed by a Athom employee hinself…???..its unbelievable for me because aim a new Homey User, full of hope - enthusiasm - happiness to find here a community with people who helping each other…I never would have expected that, even then @Doekse came on board, i thought now we have the power that we need to bring the Thread topic on track…but obviously I was mistaken, the opposite was true…i need time and come back…good night.

4

Thank you for noticing what I brought to that thread, @Pascal_Nohl A lot of it was not about Homey at all. It came from other systems and from experience gathered elsewhere, and I know that made it awkward to place. But it was meant as a contribution to this product, not as a comparison for its own sake. You are one of the few who read it that way, and I appreciate it. :slightly_smiling_face:

@Emile, I would like to put a question to you, since you wrote the house rules.

I opened that Matter thread in January. It ran for seven months. I measured, I compared, I wrote things up, and I offered my full logs to anyone at Athom who wanted them. I did that because I wanted the problem solved.

That approach was welcomed at the time, and I would like that on the record here.

There was also an open door to take it further.

I said yes to that, and I still mean it. I would like to set up an open session for the people who have actually been through this, and I would rather do it with Athom in the room than without. :hot_beverage:

I will say the uncomfortable part too. My own thread drifted. It began as a fault report and slowly turned into something broader, and I am part of the reason for that. So I do understand the wish to keep topics focused. :slightly_smiling_face:

What I do not find fair is that the answer to drifting was to close it. Discourse has more than one tool for that. A topic can be slowed down, it can be split so a new subject gets its own home, it can be paused for a day. All of those keep the work and remove the heat. Closing removes both.

Could the rules be made clearer about how that is meant to work, and when each of those steps applies?

Fairness has to run both ways. A good tone matters to me, and I do not believe I have spoken down to anyone in that thread. If anyone feels otherwise, tell me and I will own it. :handshake:

Two things I would like to see in the rules while they are being looked at.

A diagnostic report should be a normal part of reporting a problem, not something an owner is only allowed to generate when Support asks for it. If we are expected to bring evidence, make it standard to bring it.

And we should be able to read our own report. I no longer own a Homey Pro, so I cannot check this myself, but what I am told is that it goes straight to Athom and the owner receives only a number. If that is wrong, please correct me and I will say so.

So I went and read Athom’s own privacy policy, and the answer is already there.

You can request access of the data that Athom processes about you at any time, and have these corrected or removed by sending a request to data@athom.com

That is an open invitation, so let me pass it on to everyone reading. If you have sent a diagnostic report and been told what it showed, you are allowed to ask for the data itself. Write to data@athom.com and ask for a copy of what was collected about you. You do not need permission and you do not need a support ticket for it.

I would rather not have to use that route at all. It would be far better if the report simply arrived in your own inbox at the same time it goes to Athom, or if it could be viewed in the app.

While I was in there I noticed something else. The policy is detailed about what is collected and by whom, and it names every processor down to the bookkeeping. But it does not describe the diagnostic report anywhere.

So a straight question. What does a diagnostic report actually contain, how long is it kept, and where is that written down for us to read?

One last thing, and this one is meant as an offer.

Reading a thread with 273 posts is slow, and a lot of what people report here is spread thinly across many topics. So I wrote a small Python script that pulls a topic from the public forum API and turns it into plain text I can read and search across. It is a handful of requests, no login and no scraping of anything private, and I built it to find answers faster rather than to make noise.

My guess is that some AI assistant tools are already in use on Athom’s side, Anthropic among them. So this is not about bringing in something new. It is about pointing what is already there at the forum, so what people write here ends up in the developers’ hands.

I am not asking for anything to be reopened. I am asking that the rules be shaped so the next thread like mine has somewhere to go before it needs closing.

Ulrik

5

That is standard GDPR wording. It does not automatically mean that the user will receive the original diagnostic report in the form in which Athom collected it.

Because the report is sent directly to Athom and the user has no opportunity to inspect it before transmission, Athom is fully responsible for complying with the GDPR principles of data minimisation, purpose limitation and appropriate security.

Personal identifiers that are not necessary for diagnosing the problem must not be included or made accessible unnecessarily. This may include information such as the customer’s name, address, IP addresses and MAC addresses, all of which can constitute personal data. Access to information that links the report to an identifiable customer must also be restricted to the minimum number of employees who genuinely need it to process the support request.

The report can therefore be assigned a number and handled internally in a pseudonymised form. Only the people who need to connect that report number to the corresponding customer or support ticket should have access to that relationship.

Strictly speaking, this is pseudonymisation rather than full anonymisation, because Athom can still reconnect the report to the customer through the report number and the support ticket. A genuinely anonymised report could no longer be attributed to the user at all.

However, none of this requires Athom to prevent the customer from seeing the report. The GDPR does not say that diagnostic reports must be hidden from the person whose device and data generated them.

I do not know another company that handles diagnostic reports in quite the same way. TP-Link Support, for example, asks users to generate various reports that are downloaded to their own computer and then manually attached to the support ticket. Some companies provide readable text logs, while others use binary or proprietary formats. Even then, the user at least possesses the file that was submitted.

With Homey, the report is transmitted directly to Athom, the user receives only a report number, and the report itself cannot be reviewed. The user therefore cannot verify what information was collected, whether the report was generated correctly, or whether Support’s interpretation of it is complete.

That is why this is not merely a question of GDPR compliance. It is also a question of transparency and trust.

EDIT:
I just generated a such rapport for my TP-Link router. It is plain JSON, here is just one node:
{
“time”: 1785654600,
“cpuUtil”: 1,
“memUtil”: 13
},

6

Noemt has been bought by LG. So becoming the new Samsung or LG is for sure happening. Its a matter of transition time. Anyhow I share a lot of your thoughts as the developer of HDashboards. I see we have our own little community in discord. But also a lot of people that don’t use hdashboards but are there just for the Homey talks.

7

This is what is most confusing about my entire episode with Thread difficulties and which has lead me to the same unfortunate conclusions at Pascal.

Athom built ‘fixes’ for my scenario, a large Thread mesh of 50 devices in Firmware v13.4

Matter

  • Increases the maximum subscription intervals for more stable device reporting.
  • Adds the ability to override the default subscription intervals for a Matter device in its device settings, for finer control over how often it reports.

However, before this fix was implemented, support closed my ticket. Since then, absolutely zero effort has been made by Athom to reach out to me to see if I would be willing to move my Thread network back to Homey, in order to see if these fixes have made any improvement.

Do Athom actually care? @Doekse

What is the point in devoting employee hours in the form of support and development, if the company is not interested in establishing whether the time spent was actually worth the ROI.

Right now, no one actually knows if the changes fixed the issues.

It’s incredibly disappointing, confusing and baffling to be honest, especially as now “millions of users” will have installed these ‘fixes’ on their own Homey devices.

8

I didn’t really want to intervene here, but mind you, Athom receives a lot of support request, not just these 4 people currently in this topic.

Athom (Doekse) even offered personally to help, while being on his holiday, but was ignored fully (wouldn’t surprise me if he was still waiting for that diagnostic log code he asked for directly, as he has no (direct) access to the support mail, but still it only was send to there), and the narrative changed to just complaining that you aren’t helped, while he offered help directly!
That is also the main reason for that thread to closed, as it was getting more about complaining then actually accepting the help and respond on the question that were asked.

Having 1 on 1 help from an employee that usually doesn’t do support, but has more knowledge of internal workings then regular support people, sound a very good support to me that not a lot of companies have.

9

Mine is still on Homey, and it has appeared very stable since the latest update. So yes, it is entirely possible that the update fixed, or at least significantly improved, the problem.

However, I have now disabled automatic updates.

What makes this situation so frustrating is that my network had previously been stable. Then an update was installed and it became unstable, with devices becoming unavailable repeatedly. After another update, it now appears stable again.

When a previously stable system becomes unstable immediately after a software update, the obvious first step should be to investigate exactly what changed between those two versions. A new feature, a framework update or a change in subscription handling may have introduced significantly more communication or exposed an existing weakness.

It should not take months to at least identify the area responsible. Even if the precise cause is not yet known, Athom could acknowledge that increased Thread or Matter instability has been reported since a particular update and confirm that it is being investigated.

It would also be helpful to offer users a supported way to return to a previously known working firmware version. Other manufacturers provide rollback or recovery options precisely because an update can occasionally introduce regressions.

That is why I have disabled automatic updates for now. This version currently appears stable, and I do not want another update to make the system unreliable again without giving me any control over the timing.

By updating manually, I can wait for a while after a new release and see whether other users report serious problems before installing it on my own Homey. It is not a real substitute for a supported rollback option, but at least it reduces the risk of immediately replacing a version that is known to work well for me.

10

That would be strange, because he told me that he had looked at my support ticket. The diagnostic report number is included in that ticket, and the report was generated during a period when I was experiencing serious problems with devices repeatedly becoming unavailable.

As users, we do not receive or have access to the actual diagnostic report. We simply press a button, the report is uploaded to Athom’s servers, and Homey gives us a reference number. We then have to provide that number in a support ticket or an ongoing email exchange so that Athom can retrieve the report.

Therefore, I am not sure what else I could have sent him directly. I cannot download the report or forward its contents myself.

If he has access to the ticket but not to the diagnostic report referenced in that ticket, while users also have no access to the report, then the process becomes circular. His request would be impossible for the user to fulfil.

In that case, the problem is not that I failed to send the report, but that Athom’s internal access and support process do not allow the relevant person to retrieve it.

However, only @Doekse can clarify what he can actually access and whether he was able to retrieve the report using the reference number in my ticket.

11

He looked at your first ticket, which was (I believe) about something else then thread devices, and was already a few weeks old(?), or even some Homey updates have been passed.
And your current issue might not have been in that very ticket or log, judging on how big such a log could become, it is probably truncated and thus missing the issue then.
He asked a new diagnostic code 3 times after, where he did not receive any directly from you, but only got pages on pages of complaints/“critisisms”.

Even if you can’t look into the log yourself (you probably wouldn’t even know where to start looking in said log, but yes Homey is a black box in that and always has been), doesn’t mean if he asks for a new log, that the old one was provisioned enough, he asks for it with a reason.
So let me ask you, have you already obliged, and send that new log code?
By the time of all this typing, lots of logs could have been send, and perhaps even the issue been found.

12

It may not matter, but here is the text of my support request, so stop speculating please:

Hello,

I want to report a serious and highly disruptive Matter stability issue on my Homey Pro.

System

Homey model ID: homey7q
Homey version: 13.1.1

Issue
At the moment, Homey loses connection to multiple Matter devices every night, typically between 00:00 and 03:00. This is happening consistently and is no longer an occasional incident.

The issue affects both:

Matter over Thread
Matter over Wi-Fi

Examples of affected devices include:

Eve Energy
Eve Door & Window
Onvis S4
Eve Thermo
Freedompro Matter Roller Shutter (via Apple Home Multi-Admin)

Why this is a serious problem
This is not just a technical inconvenience. It directly affects daily life and core home functions.

When Homey loses these devices during the night, important automations fail the next morning. For example:

rooms are not heated when we get up,
motion-based lighting does not switch on,
and multiple automations depending on Matter devices become unreliable.

That is simply unacceptable for a device in this price range. A Homey Pro is not a cheap hobby product. It is supposed to be a reliable smart home controller, especially for essential automations used every day.

Observed behavior

Multiple Matter devices become unavailable overnight.
Error messages include:
“This device is currently unavailable.”
“Matter is not available. Please try again later.”
“A timeout occurred. Please make sure the device is turned on and connected…”
Rebooting Homey restores the situation, but only temporarily.
The same problem returns again the following night.

Important observation
Devices that are shared to Homey through Apple Home Multi-Admin continue to work perfectly in Apple Home while they are unavailable in Homey.

This strongly suggests that the devices themselves are still functioning correctly and that the problem is on the Homey side.

I also have an error log / screenshot showing repeated failures during the affected time window.

Because the problem affects multiple device types and both Matter transport types at the same time, this appears to be a platform-level Matter stability issue rather than an isolated problem with one specific device.

I am asking you to treat this as a serious reliability problem. Please let me know:

whether this is a known issue,
whether additional diagnostics can be collected,
and what concrete steps can be taken to resolve it.

Having to reboot Homey regularly just to restore basic smart home functionality is not an acceptable workaround.

Best regards,
Pascal Nohl

---- And the reply ----
Hi Pascal,

Thanks for reaching out to us and reporting this issue.
I have checked the logs of the diagnostic report you send along.
In these logs I saw many undervoltage notifications.
A faulty power adapter or USB-C cable can cause some instability.
Please test your Homey Pro with a different adapter. Make sure it has 5V and at least 3A (3000mA) output. Use for example the power adapter of your Smartphone.

If this does not resolve the issue please test using a different USB-C cable. Could you try testing it again with a different USB-C cable, one that supports data transfer. These are usually labeled as “USB 2.0,” “USB 3.1,” or “USB-C to USB-C data/charging

If this resolves your issue please send us your full address details so we can send you a replacement power adapter and/or USB-C cable.

Please let me know if your Wi‑Fi/router if it performing scheduled tasks between 00:00–03:00? Could you check this please?

Could you send me a new Diagnostics Report? To do this, please open the Homey app and go to More (…) → Settings → General → Create Diagnostics Report.

You will receive a unique ID. Please copy and paste this ID in your reply to this email so I can review the diagnostics.

I look forward to hear from you.
Thanks in advance.

---- And again my reply -----

Hi XXX,

I connected the Homey to a 60W USB-C PD charger this afternoon, and the Homey restarted. I am now using a high-quality, fully featured USB-C cable that supports PD, 4K, and Ethernet.

Unfortunately, the same issue occurred again. At around 22:30, I noticed that many Thread/Matter devices were missing once more. I created a diagnostic report, and the report ID is: XXXXXX.

This problem is extremely annoying and makes the system unusable for daily operation.

For reference, my Wi-Fi access points are ASUS XT units. On the 2.4 GHz band, they are configured to use 20 MHz bandwidth with beamforming disabled. Wi-Fi is on channel 1. Homey is using Zigbee/Thread channel 15. The access points are running the latest firmware and are not performing any automated actions.

Best regards,
Pascal

----- A shortened version of my next mail -----
Hi XXXX,

I see that my Homey’s last backup was the 13/04/2026. Why does he not backup ?

----- And the reply -----
Hi Pascal,

Thanks for the update.

The fact that your Homey Pro hasn’t been creating automatic backups since May 14, 2026, may indeed be related to the timing of the flow you created to restart your Homey Pro.

If this flow runs around the same time the backup is being created, it could indeed cause a conflict.

You could try disabling this flow for a day and then check to see if an automatic backup was created? Please let me know how that goes!

You could also try creating a local backup using your PC, laptop, or MacBook.
Connecting Homey Pro to a PC or Mac with USB, Choose Create Back Up.
Could you let me know if that works?

I look forward to hear from you.

Thanks in advance.

----- END -----

There has still been no follow-up regarding my original Matter problem. No request for a new report, no quetions to answer.

I also reported that my Homey backups were failing and asked whether this might be related, because the devices often became unavailable at approximately the same time the scheduled backup should have been created. I did not claim that the backup was necessarily the cause; I simply asked whether there could be a connection worth investigating.

Again, there was no follow-up from Athom.

For comparison, this is the message I received from TP-Link support after I had not replied to them for only 24 hours:

Hello,

We are hopeful that you’ve had a chance to review the latest reply from our support team. We are expecting further information from you to proceed with this ticket.

If you’d like to provide an update or require more time to work through our latest message, please simply reply to this email to let us know.

That is the difference I am trying to describe.

TP-Link actively follows the case, notices when information is still missing and asks whether I need more time. With Athom, I report recurring device failures, provide diagnostic reports, mention a potentially related backup problem and ask a specific technical question — and then hear nothing further.

Nobody expects every problem to be solved immediately. However, users should at least receive confirmation that their observations have been reviewed, whether a possible connection has been ruled out, and what the next step in the investigation is.

13

So being asked 3 times over for a new log, is not being listend to?

You keep trying to do the same “I don’t receive a mail from Athom, so they aren’t listening to me”.
Yes maybe Athom support is not fully up to par, and you aren’t receiving feedback about the back-ups issue which isn’t great, but you ARE receiving support still, from even an higher level then regular support.
Right here on the forum, which you are (again) fully ignore the questions that matter:

Have you send a new log code yet to Doekse?

Not via support, as describt before, he probably can’t reach the support mail, but Directly via the forum, in the topic itself, or via DM (like he asked for)

That might be able to help you with BOTH issues you are having.

14

I would be careful about making statements like that without knowing the background and capabilities of the person you are addressing.

You may disagree with someone’s conclusions, but assuming that they would not understand a diagnostic log is unnecessarily condescending—especially when you know nothing about their professional or technical experience.

15

As mentioned in the other thread. Your support ticket was automatically closed since we didn’t hear back after our last email. As stated in that very last email you’ve received;

As @Caseda mentioned, I’m not part of the Support team, so I don’t have access to your support tickets or diagnostic reports. My responsibility is Partnerships, as reflected in my subtitle. I simply reached out to my colleagues in Support during my holiday to get some additional insight into your case.

I’ve mentioned this in the other topic, sent you a DM about it, and I’ll ask one last time: could you please create a diagnostic report and share the report code with me? That way, when I’m back at the office tomorrow, I can go through it with the appropriate colleagues and see if we can spot anything unusual. Especially now that everything appears to be working again, it would be interesting to compare the diagnostic data and see what may have changed.

Once I have something concrete to share, I’ll happily reopen the other topic and post all of the findings there so we can continue the discussion based on actual data.

16

My glasses must be outdated, because that is not what I can see in the thread.

I submitted one diagnostic report on my own initiative. Later, I was asked once to generate a new report, which I did and provided immediately.

That makes two reports in total and only one request for a new one—not three repeated requests. Unless you can point me to the messages I apparently missed, please do not rewrite the sequence of events.

17

Okay, that at least helps me understand how Athom’s support process works.

Apparently, the fact that I did not reply to the last email about the backup issue was treated as a reason to close the entire ticket. However, the backup problem was only an additional question because the failed backups appeared to occur at approximately the same time as my Matter devices became unavailable. It was not the original reason for opening the support case.

The original Matter stability problem had not been resolved, and I had already provided the requested diagnostic reports. I was therefore expecting a technical follow-up on that issue, rather than assuming that the complete case would be closed because I had nothing further to add regarding the backup question.

When I speak about follow-up, I mean the kind of process I have experienced with companies such as TP-Link, Eve and Bosch. Before closing a ticket, they normally ask whether the problem has been resolved or whether any further assistance is required. They also inform the customer that the ticket will be closed if no reply is received within a stated period, for example 48 hours.

That gives the customer a chance to clarify that the main problem is still unresolved.

Automatically closing the entire ticket without such a final check may be an efficient ticketing process, but from the user’s perspective it does not feel like active follow-up or support.

18

I sure can, it wasn’t that hard to find:

Matter devices are unavailable - #182 by Doekse
Since I can’t see your history with Support, I would suggest creating a diagnostic report and sharing it with my colleagues there.
Matter devices are unavailable - #220 by Doekse
As mentioned before, please create a diagnostic report and share this with my colleagues from support.
Matter devices are unavailable - #227 by Doekse
Again, the only way I can really help here is with a diagnostic report. Without that, my hands are tied.
Matter devices are unavailable - #275 by Doekse
At the moment, I don’t have any diagnostics or other information that would allow me to determine what’s happening on your Homey or identify the underlying cause.

19

:backhand_index_pointing_up:

As for this, we always send an automated email informing customers that their support ticket will be closed if we don’t receive a response within a certain timeframe. I also mentioned that in the other thread. It’s possible that email ended up in your spam or junk folder if you can’t find it in your inbox.

20

Seriously, do you really think they leave tickets open forever when people don’t reply? So you first ignore all of their emails and @Doekse 's requests for the code, and the only thing you do is complain on the forum for the “bad” support experience? It seems like you’re only here to complain, and not looking to actually solve your issue.