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 Yet I increasingly understand why several developers still have excellent apps in the store that are no longer actively maintained, and why some of them never publish anything new.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

[image] Pascal_Nohl: 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. 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.

[image] Caseda: I sure can, it wasn’t that hard to find: You are drifting away from the point I was making. I was talking specifically about the official support process. @Doekse has stated himself that he is not part of the support team. Therefore, his requests in this forum cannot simply be counted as repeated requests from support. As far as the actual support case is concerned, I submitted one diagnostic report on my own initiative and was asked once to provide another one, which I did. Whether @Doekse separately asked for information in this thread is a different matter and does not change my criticism of how the official support ticket was handled.

[image] smarthomesven: Seriously, do you really think they leave tickets open forever when people don’t reply? No, of course I do not expect tickets to remain open forever. The point is that I believed I was the one waiting for a reply regarding my unresolved Matter problem. I expected either a request for another diagnostic report, a suggestion to test something specific, or simply an update saying that the investigation required more time. I received none of those. @Doekse, I also checked my spam folder, and there is no missing email there. While any message can theoretically be filtered incorrectly, this was an existing email conversation with a known sender, so suggesting the spam folder does not explain what happened unless Athom can confirm that a specific message was actually sent. My criticism is not that the ticket was eventually closed. It is that I was not aware that Athom was waiting for a response from me, while I was still waiting for Athom to follow up on the unresolved Matter issue.

But wait—aren’t we drifting away from the actual topic? This thread was not originally about my Matter problems or about the details of how individual support tickets are handled. It was about closing an active, serious, calm and technically interesting discussion simply because it may have become uncomfortable for the company. Instead of addressing that concern, the discussion is now being redirected towards how many diagnostic reports were requested, whether an email may have landed in spam, and whether a support ticket should remain open indefinitely. Those may be separate topics worth discussing, but they do not answer the original question: Why was a constructive discussion closed when users were calmly exchanging experiences and technical observations? A discussion should not be closed merely because it contains criticism or raises uncomfortable questions. As long as it remains respectful and relevant, that is exactly the kind of discussion a support forum should allow.

Do you even want to be helped? sounds more like you don’t want to be helped. if it is you → support → dev team, or you → doekse → dev team, the end result is the same, you getting helped. The point of this thread was that the previous topic was closed, which you disagreed on, so you are also drifting away from the original topic titel. So in the end, no-one has been helped by this thread, which happend now once in like 5 years time or something. So making a complete topic, about a once in a long time thing…

[image] Pascal_Nohl: Why was a constructive discussion closed when users were calmly exchanging experiences and technical observations? Here’s the answer! Should I mark the question/thread as solved? [image]Matter devices are unavailable I also want to clarify that I’m not suggesting we close this thread to ignore the issue. The reason I mentioned closing it is simply that in its current state the discussion isn’t moving us any closer to a solution. To troubleshoot a problem, we first need to establish what the actual cause is, and at the moment we don’t have enough information to do that. Once we have some diagnostics or other relevant data, I’m more than happy to continue investigating. To that end, please feel free to generate a diagnostic report and send it to me via DM. Once I have that, I’ll gladly take a closer look. Until then, I’ll be closing this thread, as there’s unfortunately not much more we can accomplish here without additional information.

[image]Matter devices are unavailable I also want to clarify that I’m not suggesting we close this thread to ignore the issue. The reason I mentioned closing it is simply that in its current state the discussion isn’t moving us any closer to a solution. But that is precisely the point: you do not currently see sufficient value in continuing the discussion, while many of the users actively participating in it clearly do. @ulrikb and @Rammstein, among others, have replied here and explained their disappointment and concerns. For us, this has not been an unproductive discussion. It has allowed users to compare experiences, explore possible causes and better understand what may be happening. Your focus appears to be primarily on whether the thread is moving directly towards an immediate solution. However, a useful technical discussion does not always follow such a straight path. It may also examine possible architectural limitations, hardware design decisions, implementation choices or patterns that are not yet fully understood. Those broader discussions can sometimes provide a new perspective or reveal a possible direction that was not obvious at the beginning. Even when they do not produce an immediate fix, they may still help users understand the problem and may also provide valuable feedback for the future development of the product. In real life, discussions rarely remain perfectly confined to the question with which they started. A conversation about a hardware problem may eventually lead to ideas for designing a better network, at which point the original problem may no longer even be the central subject. Conversations over coffee may briefly drift towards the weather or the colour of the carpet before returning to something useful. That does not automatically make them worthless. The important question should therefore not be whether the discussion follows one person’s preferred path towards a solution. It should be whether it remains active, respectful and meaningful to the people participating in it. Closing such a discussion because it does not match the company’s view of how it should progress risks appearing dismissive of the users who are investing their time and knowledge in it. Ultimately, it is also a question of respect: whether a calm and constructive community discussion is allowed to continue even when it develops in a direction that Athom did not originally expect or find comfortable.

And if you’d like to continue discussing any of the topics that came up in the thread, which originally started with the simple question; “Why are my Matter devices offline?”, please feel free to start new topics in the appropriate sections of the community forum. As mentioned before, we don’t close threads because they’re critical or because “we at Athom don’t like them.” I closed this thread because it no longer followed the Homey Community Forum rules about staying on topic. That’s not my personal opinion; it’s simply how the forum is moderated. Over time, the discussion shifted away from troubleshooting the Matter issue and into topics such as whether I should or shouldn’t be active on the forum during my holiday, customer support, moderation, and our communication. Those are (almost) all perfectly valid topics to discuss, but they deserve their own threads so they’re easier for others to find, follow, and contribute to. At that point the discussion was no longer addressing the original support question, which is why I decided to close the thread.

[image] Doekse: I closed this thread because it no longer followed the Homey Community Forum rules about staying on topic. In my professional life, I spent a great deal of time managing teams and de-escalating conflicts. One of the most important lessons I learned was to avoid making disagreements personal and to focus instead on actions, decisions and consistent standards. However, I find that increasingly difficult in this discussion because your explanation does not appear to be applied as a general principle. If staying strictly on topic is the standard being enforced, then I have several questions: Why were you and other participants allowed to redirect this thread towards my support ticket, diagnostic reports, spam filters and other matters that were not the original subject? Does this mean that anyone can now introduce unrelated content into a discussion and thereby provide a reason for the entire thread to be closed? Do you recognise that some of the posts and moderation decisions in this discussion do not appear to be consistent with the forum rules you are citing? Would you agree that forum rules are intended to provide a general and consistently applied framework, rather than being enforced selectively only when a discussion develops in an inconvenient direction? Rules naturally give moderators discretion. However, that discretion must be applied consistently and fairly. Otherwise, users may reasonably feel that the rules are being used to justify a decision after it has already been made. Now that I have said what I felt could no longer remain unsaid, I also want to make something clear: I respect your willingness to help, the time you invest in the community and you as a person. What I cannot respect is the way this particular discussion has been moderated. In my view, it has not been neutral, consistent or sufficiently respectful towards the users who were participating calmly and seriously.

[image] Doekse: 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. Then perhaps Athom should delegate a member of the support team to actually converse with users, in the Homey Community Forum. Not the partnerships manager. Just a thought guys

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

Off-Topic

Doekse August 2, 2026, 5:45pm 25

Here’s the answer! Should I mark the question/thread as solved?

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

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