WhatsApp is targeted because it’s the most popular messaging app. If another app becomes popular, it’ll be targeted too. I guess using a niche app is one way to avoid the spyware, but it’s likely collecting data from all apps, not just WhatsApp.

Also, hey man, stop using whatsapp

Spyware can affect any messaging app so I’m not sure what this has to do with this post.

to shut down its servers, so now it’s dumb as a rock and next to useless.

I hate this so much. There’s no reason a robot vacuum should require internet access to function. Companies only do it for tighter control of their products, to track your usage, to have the ability to paywall features, and to have the ability to disable it so you have to buy a new one.

It’s common in Australia too. There’s literally a brand called “Pink Batts”

Unraid is pretty beginner-friendly, so it’s what I’d recommend too.

I use it too. I have over 20 years experience running Debian servers and can write a docker-compose.yml file and Nginx config from scratch, but sometimes it’s nice to have a decent web UI that mostly “just works”.

Copying my comment from the homelab community:

I haven’t tried it yet, but here’s some initial thoughts:

Does it support multiple separate docker-compose.yml files? It would be useful if it could pull the list of containers directly from Docker rather than having to paste the docker-compose.

Does it pull changelogs so that the user can tell if a change is a breaking change that’ll require extra work?

It would be useful to support Webauthn/FIDO2 2FA instead of just TOTP. TOTP is being slowly phased out due to its weaknesses (it’s phishable). Similarly, it’d be useful to support single sign on using OIDC (OpenID Connect) as a lot of self-hosters use Authentik, Authelia, or Keycloak to have one login for all their self hosted services.

Automatic updates for bug fixes (e.g. 1.0.0 to 1.0.1) are usually fine - it’s major and minor updates that are scarier. I’ve never used Watchtower so I’m not sure if it has an option to only allow bugfixes.

please sir may I have a few more pixels?

The issue with that is that all of them require internet access for that, and there’s no way I’m connecting my fridge to the internet.

A while back, I saw a story in the Home Assistant Facebook group about someone’s child saying “Hey Google, turn on everything” and it messing things up. I was telling the story to my wife and forgot to replace “Hey Google” with something Google wouldn’t pick up on. Oops. It heard my “turn on everything” and chaos ensued. I have some Zigbee alarms that all started sounding. It enabled several different scenes and ran several scripts. All TVs turned on. My Xbox and Nvidia Shield were fighting for control of the TV (there’s some issue with HDMI-CEC that I haven’t figured out where if both are on, they get stuck in a loop changing the TV input between HDMI2 and HDMI3 about once per second).

Don’t do that. “Turn off everything” is bad too. I have used to have my server rack plugged into a smart plug to measure power usage, and “turn off everything” turns that off. I want to figure out how to disable these two voice commands.