The topic of self-hosted cloud software comes up often but I haven’t seen anyone mention owncloud infinite scale (the rewrite in Go).
I started my cloud experience with owncloud years ago. Then there was a schism and almost all the active devs left for the nextcloud fork.
I used nextcloud from it’s inception until last year but like many others it always felt brittle (easy to break something) and half baked (features always seemed to be at 75% of what you want).
As a result I decided to go with Seafile and stick to the Unix philosophy. Get an app that does one thing very well rather than a mega app that tries to do everything.
Seafile does this very well. Super fast, works with single sign on etc. No bloat etc.
Then just the other day I discovered that owncloud has a full rewrite. No php, no Apache etc. Check the github, multiple active devs with lots of activity over the last year etc. The project seems stronger than ever and aims to fix the primary issues of nextcloud/owncloud PHP. Also designed for cloud deployment so works well with docker, should be easy to configure via docker variables instead of config files mapped into the container etc.
Anyways, the point of this thread is:
- If you never heard of it like me then check it out
- If you have used it please post your experiences compared to NextCloud, Seafile etc.
What puts me off of Owncloud is the new ownership. I couldn’t care less if it’s written in the blood of Christ, if I have to worry about the rug getting pulled out from under me for self-hosting, it’s a no-go for me, Joe.
Nextcloud works well for me and has for years. The people that don’t like it can go use this, and we’ll see you back in a couple of years when it goes open-core or worse.
Ya it was bought by kiteworks which provides document management services for corps (which explains why that mention traceable file access in their features a lot).
That being said, they bought them in 2014 it seems and it’s been a decade now
Correcting: they were bought very recently, they have been accepting corporate funding for more than a decade however. That’s not bad in and of itself.
I have no issue with corporate funding. I have an issue when a company gets to make all the decisions. Lot of good software has gone to hell when the shareholders need profit now instead of seeing a long term vision.
We’ll see, but I’ve been around this rodeo enough to just avoid it from the start and take some pain now instead of putting in effort that’s going to be wasted later.
I find it really weird that something as simple as the basic functionality of nextcloud seemingly can’t be implemented in a stable and lightweight manner.
Nextcloud always seems one update away from self destruction and it prepares for that by hoarding all the resources it can get. It never feels fast or responsive. I just want a way to share files between my machines.
There are other solutions, I know, but they’re all terrible in their own way.
Exactly, Seafile is the best I’ve found so far but a clean re write of the basic sync features would be great.
Seafile for example has full text search locked behind a paywall even though tools like Elasticsearch could be integrated into it for free. Even the android app as filename search locked behind a paywall. You have to log into the website on your phone if you need to search.
Pathetic state of affairs.
You can get a free Seafile Pro license if you create an account with them. Limited to 3 users, iirc. That’s what I’ve been running and really using it to keep stuff on phone, desktop, and laptop reachable from any of the devices. I love it.
I have no problem supporting devs but locking what should be core features behind a paywall in unacceptable for me.
If you only need file syncing, there are better options than Nextcloud. But Nextcloud is the only real option if you want to create a full suite of replacements for office365 or google thanks to the large plugin ecosystem.
All I want is Nextcloud Files and Calendar in one place. If there’s something that can do that more performant and with a similarly nice gui i’d be all over it
I run seafile, but holy shit do I regret looking at the source code.
There was something wonky with the mapping of OIDC attributes to user properties, so I decided to look at the seahub source and see if it would be easy to fix.
Turns out, the whole thing is held together with hope and spit. Literal beginner code.
Everyone moved to NextCloud by now
I personally like Nextcloud even though it is a pain
I personally will never use nextcloud, it is nice interface side but while I was researching the product I came across concerns with the security of the product. Those concerns have since then been fixed but the way they resolved the issue has made me lose all respect for them as a secure Cloud solution.
Basically when they first introduced encrypting folders, there was a bug in the encryption program, and the only thing that ever would be encrypted was The Parent Directory but any subfolder in that directory would proceed to not be encrypted. The issue with that is that unless you had server-side access to view the files you had no way of knowing that your files weren’t actually being encrypted.
All this is fine it’s a beta feature right? Except for when I read the GitHub issue on the report, they gaslit the reporter who reported the issue saying that despite the fact that it is advertised as feature on their stable branch, the feature was actually in beta status so therefore should not be used in a production environment, and then on top of , the feature was never removed from their features list, and proceeded to take another 3 months before anyone even started working on the issue report.
This might not seem like a big deal to a lot of people, but as someone who is paranoid over security features, the projects inaction over something as critical as that while trying to advertise themselves as being a business grade solution made me flee hardcore
That being said I fully agree with you out of the different Cloud platforms that I’ve had, nextCloud does seem to be the most refined and even has the ability to emulate an office suite which is really nice, I just can’t trust them, I just ended up using syncthing and took the hit on the feature set
Ugh. I know that feeling. That’s why I’ve blacklisted salt stack.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5993959
There’s a particularly toxic combination of ignorance, laziness, NIH and hubris that you need to make a mistake like that, and I want it nowhere near my servers.
Saying files are encrypted when it is not true is an issue, regardless of who owns the host box. Even for a small instance that is private family or friends.
Yes, it is. If people are relying on files to be encrypted they may dispose of their disks differently. Or the NAS might be stolen.
