ownCloud has launched Infinite Scale 4.0, the latest significant update to its secure content collaboration platform. It introduces new features and functionalities, including enhanced capabilities for importing data from 3rd-party clouds, simplifying data upload, refining search functions with the use of tags and filters, and further enhancing user-friendly linking and navigation.
I’m not into the topic too much, is Nextcloud the obvious alternative?
There was moral disagreement between the ownCloud company and the developers, so the main developers forked it and created NextCloud.
To be more exact, ownCloud started as a community first project and they did pivot to a more enterprise facing project, starting to pack features behind a paywall and so on.
ownCloud Infinite Scale is almost a complete rewrite in Go instead of PHP, which is something very welcoming, because my instance starts to have subpar performance, i will test and find out if it’s worth the hype.
Are you aware of what features are those exactly besides SSO/SAML? Their page doesn’t show much information.
!remindme 1 week
And now there’s a growing disagreement between some users and the Nextcloud devs. We’re told to hack our systems to disable a badly working “AI” mail inbox, same with privacy leaks from the text editor. Asking if Nextcloud Talk can work on non-google phones, users are borderline insulted for wanting something different than what the devs deem we want. There’s so many features that’s advertised that doesn’t work right or at all. In particular NC Social and E2EE, two “massive” features that first drew me to Nextcloud years ago. They still don’t work.
I don’t want an AI assistant system most self-hosters can’t use anyways (AFK it needs a beefy GFX card, which most VPS and self-hosting setups don’t have access to), I want to be able to write down links in my text-files without my “privacy conscious” server visiting the link to get a preview.
I just want a system I don’t have to fight and Nextcloud is increasingly becoming one.
And the performance is seemingly going down, at least that’s my experience.
The guy who founded owncloud (Frank), sold it to american venture capitalists. When Frank didn’t like how the VCs were planning to enshittify Owncloud, he forked the project and moved it back to Germany from Boston. The American VCs saw this, realized they couldn’t exploit the software anymore, so they sold Owncloud to a group of German businessmen. Ironically for Frank there are now two german owned non-VC backed cloud software based on the same code. But yeah they’re taking different strategic paths for growth.