Comment by SushiHippie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SushiHippie | Hacker News Reader

My 2cts about Nextcloud and why *I* think it's not viable as an alternative for the average user:

I host my own nextcloud since a few years.

I mostly use it as an alternative for google photos/icloud photos, basically backing up all the images from my smartphone.

Hosting the instance is one thing, but setting up the automatic upload on your phone is another thing.

The automatic photo upload feature in the official nextcloud app is most of the time broken and slow. And on iOS you need to keep the nextcloud app open and the screen unlocked, otherwise it won't upload.

That's why I use FolderSync on Android, but I don't think the average user wouldn't want to set this up and might even misconfigure it, which could just delete all images.

And Nextcloud itself is just very slow. With google photos you can just scroll through thousands of images and easily find the image you took 3 years ago.

If i do this in nextcloud, I already had the following stuff happen:

- Your browser freezes

- The Nextcloud server (php-fpm in my case) OOMs (it used around 15-20G of RAM)

(The OOMs also often happen when syncing with FolderSync.)

I definitely wouldn't recommend it as a google photos alternative.

I'm not complaining as I didn't pay a penny for nextcloud itself (only the cost for the dedicated server I rent). And I still use it, as there is no better alternative.

But for the "mass" there is no convenient and comparable alternative to the "surveillance capitalism" services.

Nextcloud is good enough for me, as its the only viabke option, but IMO it doesn't cut it for leaving the other services at scale.

I switched from Nextcloud to Syncthing a while ago. ST is a plain file syncing program, like Dropbox, but distributed P2P (you can have a server running it as an always-on node). I sync the Camera & Screenshots folder on my phone to my computer & server. If you have multiple phones add the folder on each phone. It's bidirectional so photos you take or files you add will show up on all devices. It works much better than Nextcloud, and admin/maintenance/setup are all much easier.

For calendar & contacts sync I use Radicale. Syncthing with a regular shared folder + camera folder + screenshots folder combined with Radicale covers everything that I used Nextcloud for.

However this is all on your devices, there's no web interface to access your files from other devices.

> However this is all on your devices, there's no web interface to access your files from other devices.

I tried Syncthing and it worked really well and it was fast. But I definitely want to have a webui, like Nextcloud, that's why this is sadly not an alternative for me.

(Though I use syncthing now for other stuff, where I don't need web access)

If your main use case for a web UI is browsing photos, have you considered a self-hosted photo gallery like PhotoPrism, Immich, or Lychee?

I'm in a similar boat, where I use NextCloud but really wish there was a better option (especially for mobile photo sync). Syncthing + Photoprism is currently at the top of my list of possible viable alternatives.

PhotoPrism could have been an alternative, but the FOSS variant does only have admin accounts, and does not allow to have "normal" users.

I also tried Immich, but it just didn't work well.

I think I didn't try out lychee, but I took a look at the demo site, and it seemed a bit to minimal for me.

Though I'll definitely keep an eye at these galleries, as I don't think Nextcloud will improve their UX in this regard.

Syncthing seems to be by far the best solution for synchronising files, I just wish there a gallery that would suit my needs. If I was proficient in frontend development I'd already have created one.

Since this is about privacy, do note that syncthing relies on a discovery server to find peers on the internet. You should probably run your own public discovery server if you care about privacy and want to seriously use it outside of your home network.

>It's bidirectional so photos you take or files you add will show up on all devices.

My camera devices are set to send only and while my receving devices are a tight knit send/receive group they're all set to the advanced option of "ignore deletes".

Makes it a bit of a pain to delete the file off of 3 servers, but now my laptop and my smartphone don't sync with each other and someone can't delete media off of my portable device in an attempt to destroy it if it's already been synced.

> there is no better alternative

If your primary device is Android, please check out Ente[1].

We are an E2EE alternative to Google Photos. We had launched on HN[2] a while ago, and have been working towards feature parity. We aren't "there" yet, but hope to soon be.

If you've any feedback, please share it with vishnu@ente.io, I'd be grateful!

[1]: https://ente.io

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28347439

This does look good, but it does not seem to be self-hostable. Though this may be a good alternative for people that do not care about hosting their own services!

Have there been any considerations for self-hosting? I understand that is your “secret sauce”, in a way, but I thoroughly believe there’s a compromise here. Perhaps offering source code via GitHub (with no binaries) and then offer the full source code + binaries via purchasable licenses? Similar to TagSpaces business model of selling binaries to their app, while maintaining it openly on GitHub: https://www.tagspaces.org/products/ https://github.com/tagspaces/tagspaces

Either way, will definitely be keeping an eye on your app, it seems ducking cool ;)

Thank you!

Ente was first a piece of hardware, then a self-host-able project, but we had a hard time monetizing both, which lead to the E2EE pivot.

TIL about TagSpaces, thanks!

Our server can be open-sourced, but we're unsure of the value E2EE will provide, with services like Photoprism[1] and Immich[2] already doing a good job of serving customers who prefer to self host. In this context E2EE might become a constraint, rather than a feature.

[1]: https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism

[2]: https://github.com/immich-app/immich

You're not wrong.

Have you tried https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/memories - it solves all of my issues with photo management in nextcloud. (Together with the recognise app) I don't see why they haven't replaced the default photos app with this already...

I think improving the photos experience would have the biggest impact on home users, but nextcloud certainly seems to be chasing the enterprise/gov market in the EU? I'm not complaining!

Yes, this makes it at least usable, without it it is even worse.

But it is still worse compared to google photos/icloud photos/etc.

The issues I described above also happened with memories.

I think improving performance and memory usage in their webdav implementation would, by far, have the biggest impact.

Nextcloud is a fork of Owncloud, and Owncloud did the right thing to move away from php for the webdav implementation, though they are now rewriting it once again, which I don't really like, as they store the files and all information in some binary format.

I currently use nextcloud, but while I was deciding my infrastructure, I also tried syncthing. I'd recommend trying it out since your preferences make me think it may be a better fit for you. Its pretty painless to set up, auto syncs based on your preferences. I dont know how fast it is, since I only used it for trivial testing purposes while deciding which to use, but I'd say worth comparing.

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