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Comment by hardwaresofton | Hacker News Reader

The crossover I never knew I wanted but am glad to see

Does anyone know of any services that offer all the backing services for add-ons for thunderbird: WebDAV for filelink, CalDAV, CardDAV, (and now) Matrix?

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How much would you be willing to pay for it?

I provide Matrix hosting (as well as XMPP and ActivityPub Mastodon) on Communick [0].

At the moment I'm more focused on taking these services to offer custom domain hosting, and personally I've been staying away from servers and using DecSync [1] + syncthing to get my calendars and contacts on my devices [2], so I haven't thought about adding a DAV server to the mix on Communick. But if you tell me there is any actual demand, I would definitely consider it.

[0] https://communick.com

[1] https://github.com/39aldo39/DecSync

[2] https://raphael.lullis.net/thinking-heads-are-not-in-the-clo...

I was about to ask the same thing -- I run a service that offers DAV and was wondering if I should add CalDAV and CardDAV (I've been wanting to do it for a while) and offered this bundled service...

You might want to send that question jakecopp 's way though! :)

Oh, so you are the guy from Vadosware? That's cool, I really liked your idea of using AirTable to power the landing page of your site.

Oh I am -- thanks for visiting the site! -- it was Baserow[0] and since then I've actually finally gotten a chance to try out NocoDB[1][2] as well!

I'm a heavy Thunderbird (+ maddy[3]) user, and have been wondering lately if I'm missing anything by not having CardDAV/CalDAV

[0]: https://baserow.io/

[1]: https://nocodb.com/

[2]: https://nomorepizzaparties.com/accounting.html

[3]: https://foxcpp.dev/maddy/

NextCloud is what I think of when I think of self hosting a webdav, caldav, etc. setup.

Ahhh but I wasn’t thinking of quite self Hosting but a managed service… do businesses use Nextcloud in that way I wonder.

There are managed NextCloud hosts. https://nextcloud.com/providers/

Hetzner offers this [1]. For less than 5 EUR a month you get 1 TB of storage plus their managed Nextcloud!

[1] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share

Hi I went through the faq and it wasn’t mentioned, but does the “storage share powered by nextcloud” Hetzner service, include all the other features of nextcloud as well like chat, etc?

I last used it at a start-up a few years ago (I self-host everything now) so my memory is a bit hazy but yes, I remember the option at that time to add and enable any apps you wanted available from Nextcloud's app catalog.

Yes, it does

Thanks for verifying guys!

Thanks for sharing, I have been looking for a reasonably priced managed NextCloud solution, but had a hard time finding any. NextCloud should focus more on promoting the actors that offers a simple way to get started. I tried contacting several of their premium partners listed on their webpage, but none of the scandinavian ones offered anything ready to use.

When I tried to sign up they required me to send in a picture of my passport. Is this just me or did you guys have to do the same?

It's the unfortunate reality of many VPS providers nowadays. To be fair, in moat cases Hetzner will also let you pay up front to validate.

Signed up from Norway, did not have to give more than the usual name, address and email. No passport.

My Italian ISP, Fastweb, offers a service called wowspace for like 9,95€/years that offers unlimited cloud storage via a clunky web-app.

Turns out that's really a nextcloud with mustaches, and if you fiddle enough with the web ui you can extract a login token to use the desktop client.

I haven't bothered because i already run nextcloud at home... but yeah, businesses use nextcloud in a number of ways.

I haven't heard of anyone that hosts both Matrix & Mail/Calendar/Contacts.

That would be a really interesting enterprise solution though - effectively replacing Slack/Teams for internal comms!

NextCloud does all this, afaik.

Fastmail has been that all-in solution. They host Mail/Calendar/Contacts, and they used to host XMPP/Jabber. But unfortunately they made the decision to shut down XMPP (https://fastmail.blog/historical/shutting-down-our-xmpp-chat...) and probably for the same reason won't get into Matrix.

> For intra-business messaging, most companies seem to be sticking with proven multi-user protocols like IRC rather than XMPP Multi-User Chat (MUC), or are moving to more sophisticated proprietary collaboration platforms like Slack.

That sounds true as of 2015, however Matrix now has a large following in open source & in some governments & businesses. I can't find a list of orgs using Matrix but that would be interesting to see.

Yeah, it might be a hard sell compared to GApps for most businesses but I'd like to think there are is a subset that would want the F/OSS solution!

I wonder if bundling FF Send would also be useful, see there's a filelink provider for that as well which is interesting.

Unfortunately matrix is a no go for regulated business (read: you might be required to monitor employees and hand over chats to govt.)

If need be, you can require the use of a Matrix client that doesn’t support end to end encryption, or has support for it disabled. Nothing stopping you from doing that, almost all the clients are FOSS.

Or add a keylogger/eventstore into the Matrix client.

Even if End to End encrypted, the client has access to the decrypted content and could log it.

There is some development in that area. This is from an Element dev, apparently. Not sure if this is very up to date as it’s from about a year ago, but it seems highly topical.

https://brendan.abolivier.bzh/matrix-retention-policies/

https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/develop/docs/mess...

Matrix development is mainly funded by providing deployments for regulated business(!) - ie the French state, German armed forces, UK government, DOD etc. If you search for “audit bot” in https://element.io/enterprise/pricing#features you’ll see all the stuff available for enterprisey deployments from Element.

Thanks!

You might be, but you might also live in a country where this isn't a thing.

For some subsets the financial sector, that's highly unlikely.

Just add some LDAP services for identity management, authentication and it's fairly close to the project I'm on right now. A cursory look at getting a matrix server running didn't work out yet though, with issues for clients to recognise the server at all. I don't mind sysops work but right now a set&forget solution would spare some needed energy.

The Thunderbird+Matrix integration sounds like a match - I hope that holds up in practice as well!

Edit: as others mentioned, Nextcloud has the features.

Do you mind if I send you an email? I am looking for people/companies that might be interested in having a managed matrix provider.

May I interest you in Matrix (and/or XMPP) for messaging and Mastodon (for social media) on Communick[0]?

I've done some experiments with running an email server as well, but I don't think I would be able to run it as reliably and cost-effectively as the more established players.

> replacing Slack/Teams for internal comms

Also, Mastodon (or Pleroma) can work as a substitute for Yammer.

[0] https://communick.com

NextCloud does all that, I think?

>The crossover I never knew I wanted but am glad to see

You can also use IRC and XMPP in Thunderbird.

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