If I’m in the bedroom, I may want my ceiling lights on if someone is in there if it’s dark outside, but if my wife and I are in bed, then only turn on the baseboard lights, at 1% brightness when someone is still in bed. Presence sensors aren’t that fine grained, and I certainly don’t want to wake up my wife when this old fart gets up to go pee again. She’s grumpy when awakened. 🤣

Correct. Unlike zigbee and zwave Matter does not define a single communication technique.

It can be used with thread, or over a standard tco TCP IP network.

Typically, Matter devices will support either thread or WiFi, but there’s no definite distinction to Matter itself.

If you also want to use Matter over Thread devices, you will need a thread dongle. The ZBT-1 can do either thread OR zigbee but not both at once.

In fact, the biggest issue I see with Matter is that there’s no real easy way to tell if the device uses WiFi or thread.

There are a lot of Matter devices out there now, but only a few use the Thread protocol.

My Matter (and Zigbee, and Z-Wave) hub is a laptop I paid 300.00 for almost 10 years ago, when I wanted something cheap for the semi truck.

I run Home Assistant on it now. I have both a $40 zwave USB stick, and a similarly priced Zigbee stick.

The software for the hub comes with HA. Just install the matter server

Their zbt-1 dongle can do either zigbee or thread, but matter does not technically need anything else. Thread does, but not Matter. Install Matter Server addon and you can use any matter WiFi device.