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I tried nextcloud for a couple months earlier this year and found it to be overcomplicated poorly engineered junk. It was super unreliable on iPhone. Simple thi

I tried nextcloud for a couple months earlier this year and found it to be overcomplicated poorly engineered junk. It was super unreliable on iPhone. Simple things that should have worked perfectly, like uploading or downloading files, were very unreliable. There’s a certain class of software, usually written these days in a PHP, python, or JS, where there’s a big focus on making it “easy to use” or having a nice UI that usually accomplishes neither and you also have to contend with the underlying software being bad. At this point, the only solution I’ve found to the kind of self-hosting stuff nextcloud provides are various utilities built on top of SSH — like rsync (which works perfectly) - or samba (which works OK). I haven’t found anything that really works well on iOS.

alpaca128 6y ago
I learned the hard way that you should never, ever put huge (as in many files) directories on Nextcloud. In my case a couple Git repos. It worked fine at first but after a while it got really confused, to a point where Nextcloud randomly decided that the older version on the server was actually the more recent one, and synced that folder back onto my local, updated repository. And I was the only person touching those folders, the Nextcloud server was only used as a backup during that period. It's got a couple neat features, but problems like this are really not excusable. When the one core feature breaks in everyday situations for users doing version control it's not a good look.
rixed 6y ago
Very same experience here, except that I ended up with a simple webdav server to share with family and friends. And it was already quite frustrating to realize how few servers are available and how many client applications pretending to support that rather simple protocol were actually not working properly. Tells a lot about how badly selfhosting have fallen out of fashion. I can remember a time when you would get better service when hosting your own file sharing, emails, DNS, VoIP... and plenty of good free software servers for everything to choose from, but it seems not to be the case any more.

alpaca128 6y ago

I learned the hard way that you should never, ever put huge (as in many files) directories on Nextcloud. In my case a couple Git repos. It worked fine at first but after a while it got really confused, to a point where Nextcloud randomly decided that the older version on the server was actually the more recent one, and synced that folder back onto my local, updated repository. And I was the only person touching those folders, the Nextcloud server was only used as a backup during that period. It's got a couple neat features, but problems like this are really not excusable. When the one core feature breaks in everyday situations for users doing version control it's not a good look.

rixed 6y ago

Very same experience here, except that I ended up with a simple webdav server to share with family and friends. And it was already quite frustrating to realize how few servers are available and how many client applications pretending to support that rather simple protocol were actually not working properly. Tells a lot about how badly selfhosting have fallen out of fashion. I can remember a time when you would get better service when hosting your own file sharing, emails, DNS, VoIP... and plenty of good free software servers for everything to choose from, but it seems not to be the case any more.