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Comment by e-Minguez | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little bit worried with the shift from a 'cloud' storage solution to a groupware software... I only need the storage bits but it seems they are focusing on the groupware thing lately...

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This is my problem with it as well. I used to have a self hosted nextcloud instance, but my main usage was for the file syncing. Nextcloud seems to be poor to decent at everything it does, but never great. So unless your goal is to have a suite of mediocre appliances that do the bare minimum, nextcloud is good. But all I wanted was a nice and quick way to sync all my files (I'm talking 500k files here) and have some sort of versioning in case I fuck up, so I moved to syncthing.

I moved from syncthing (and seafile) to nexcloud because I was missing one key thing: the ability to share files (by providing an URL, or to a group (think common files with spouse)).

Otherwise I completely agree with the sentiment.

It does work with Nextcloud, though. [1] is the Nextcloud logo linkes from my instance, [2] is the direct link.

Or am I misunderstanding your point?

1: https://cloud.zwog.org/index.php/s/TmKoyWqxXaGAnqo

2: https://cloud.zwog.org/index.php/s/TmKoyWqxXaGAnqo/preview

Yes, it does work with Nextcloud - and this is the reason I moved to Nexcloud from Syncthing (and previously - Seafile).

I was just commenting on your migration to Syncthing, which is a superior syncing app IMHO. It is just that when I was using it I realized that I am missing the share ability, which is avalable in Nextcloud, though my (somehow unhappy) travel the other way round from Syncthing to Nextcloud.

I think that Nextcloud is trying to cover too much things, with half-baked apps.

Syncthing is awesome for being a dropbox-like service for computers. I've setup a syncthing share as a folder inside of nextcloud which is enabled as "External Storage." This gives me the best of both worlds. Sharing between computers is rock solid. The mobile use cases is a lot more reasonable and I can share files.

I don't like syncthing on mobile because it needs to maintain its connection to sync and therefore drains battery. Also, there isn't a way to have less than 100% of a particular share local to the phone. This isn't usually waht I want on my phone.

I use Seafile and it has the feature to share to other users on your Seafile instance and to create a public link for uploaded files requiring no account. Is that what you're speaking about? I tried Nextcloud about a year ago, I spun up a Nextcloud and Seafile instance and Nextcloud was much slower for uploading and downloading files.

I presume that is where the money is.

Either independent contributors who make money as consultants, or a foundation that gets sponsoring, or a commercial company behind the project: enterprise has the money. So inevitable, it will gravitaye towards more enterprisey features.

I'm not saying that I have knowledge about what happens here with Nextcloud. But in FLOSS this has been seen often: from Drupal to LibreOffice: it moves away from 'consumers with simple needs' and towards 'heavy users'.

I feel precisely the opposite. Replacing Dropbox is fine, but replacing like the majority of Google's services is waaaay more useful.

They are focusing on entreprise features, because that's where money is.

I also wish they had a separate "light" offer with just the storage and a few basic apps. As it is, I think they are stretching their resources and some part of their offering is going to suffer as a result (we already saw quite a few severe bugs in the past year and some basic functionalities, like file locking or caching, is still not right). Personally I'm only staying with Nextcloud because there's unfortunately no good alternative for now.

Actually there is quite a ton of self hosted cloud storage project but very little those that provide the other services Google has the biggest lock-in on - calendar, contacts, notes, galleries, bookmarks, collaborative editing, etc.

So personally I very glad they are not just trying to be yet another cloud storage tool but also working on these IMHO more important cloud services.

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