I agree about the installation but what's a good solution? If you're self-hosting something (at home) there are two main problems you need to solve. You need to be able to access it from the internet and you need a backup strategy. I would argue that an install isn't complete unless you have those and they aren't easy to automate.

As for the UI, I agree. It's pretty blah. But I would take that over pretty much all of the recent garbage UIs that are more catered to making money instead of improving the UX.

One of the Nextcloud designers here – thank you for the honest feedback! :)

Could you share some more details on these two things specifically? - Where did you have issues with the installation? On the website, download, permissions, install page, etc.? - Which parts of the UI you see as outdated? Is it the web interface, specific apps, the desktop client, the mobile apps, all of it? Any specific things which seem off to you and we should focus on?

We continuously work on improving the design of course. As it is we are not so many designers, as unfortunately the problem is in open source. Also we’ve been working on many things in parallel like accessibility, standardization, the new Vue components, and of course our breadth of apps, etc.

So thanks for bringing this up! We’ll do better.

The setup was painful, the UI would randomly not respond to my requests, and in general it just felt like a bad PHP hobby project.

Then to top it off their sync client basically deleted half of my photo collection for some reason, and nobody seemed to have any idea why, in general adopting a ‘that sometimes happens, just reset the sync client’ stance.

I mean, that’s cool, but meanwhile it’d synched the deletion across all my machines.

Thankfully I had everything still synched to Google Drive as well, but I need to be able to trust my sync client.

Eventually I did get it going with Ubos on a raspberry pi 3 booting from a fast sandisk cz80 usb flash drive. Ubos under the covers is based on arch linux.

It was pretty straightforward to set up.

I then installed nextcloud apps for iOS and Mac OS.

It is nice -- it does files, contacts, calendars, photos, etc.

Then I didn't touch anything. It works, although I'm at least a year out of date, but everything is stable and all my stuff syncs back and forth.

Second, there is simply no reason to rewrite everything from scratch. We know our code base well enough to be able to maintain and keep driving it forward.

Nextcloud can already scale to hundreds of millions of users. See nextcloud.com/globalscale - GS is in production since 2017 and at at least one customer, some nodes have shown to scale to 250K users, as part of a larger architecture designed for tens of millions. We have about a half dozen other customers using GS or working on deployments, and some in proof-of-concept stage.

In short, we have no plans to change a working, proven architecture which actually scales from Raspberry Pi to a global deployment for something which actually doesn't do either of those.

The only thing that's happening here is they appear to have struck a huge contract with a few EU countries to build internal clouds.

I believe NextCloud is open source, and a fork of owncloud from the original owncloud developer who wasn't happy with the direction it was taking, or something like that. Also, they are a profitable company, and the product is open source, so this only looks like a boost to their business model and the open source product it's based on.

Dunno what your threshold for abandonment is, but that’s already a better shelf-life than most profit-driven startups.

So, the difference between the internet and the minitel is nothing like the difference between Nextcloud and American alternatives (Dropbox & Co).