However setting up and managing Syncthing is far from self-explanatory for a non-technical audience. It's OK in our case as we can hand-hold and onboard people in-house, but not ideal. Syncthing's usability would benefit immensely from an updated front-end UX, consistent across platforms.
Dropbox for all its recent dark patterns and upsells is still one of the most intuitive systems. Yes, the client UX has worsened, but the core service retains a very predictable behaviour. A folder is a folder. Shared with X and Y. When un-sharing or deleting a folder or file the options are clearly communicated. Compare this with Google Drive, where a "file" can become orphaned and keep existing in limbo, where it's invisible in the browser or filesystem, but it's discoverable by search. It drove us nuts multiple times making it very hard to track access to old documents without having to update settings one-by-one, etc. Google Drive feels like an afterthought to accompany the otherwise great Docs, Slides. and Sheets.
Does anyone know a solution that allows me to self-host something like this?
Regarding nextcloud - it only seems to do full syncronisation like dropbox does. How can I store large shared directories on the server side only? eg, my FreeNAS box has ~20TB in it, and I'd like to be able to access it as a shared directory, but obviously not sync it to my laptop.
It might work fine for small amounts of files, but it doesn't scale as well as Dropbox does.