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Where do you go for help? (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/homeassistant@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 19 points 2 months ago

There's the forum at https://community.home-assistant.io/ or as the other poster says Discord, joinable via https://www.home-assistant.io/join-chat - personally I find forums to be more accessible

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    [–] 6 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Discord has replaced IRC in most cases.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 2 months ago

    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.

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    • [–] 6 points 2 months ago

    Web searches... they either take me to a blog where someone's worked through the problem, or the HA forums

    It's always slow going (ie for any product) until you build up the concepts, but when I can contribute something back again, it makes me realise my own progress.

    I personally hate chatrooms with multiple overlapping conversations going on - noone's going to be taking the time I need to walk me through something in depth, but forums can be responsive enough to allow time for trial & error thinking time between postings, which raises the signal to noise ratio.

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    [–] 3 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I get a lot of help using LLMs.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 months ago

    Yeah, they seem to be fairly good at bringing together lots of different sources of information and putting it together. They don't seem to deal with differences between how things were done and how they are done now, so it can give you bad advice sometimes, but at the same time it can be useful for getting started and figuring out what to try.

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    • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    I am making an effort to post here, there is a lot of experience and knowledge here and I cant view the reddit anymore so it may as well get populated here.

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