> Saying a self-hosted cloud service is easier when someone says it's a lot of effort to set up the cloud service by saying you should already have set up the cloud service is quite a strange argument.

In my eyes there's a large number of ways to run applications, some of which are easier (containers) and some of which are harder or more error prone in the long term (manual installation of DBs, configuration files etc.).

A telltale sign of the person perhaps thinking of the second approach is the fact that they suggest that configuring Nextcloud would take a weekend, whereas with containers (and sane defaults/example configurations that can be run as code against your cluster vs a long document of steps to take) it becomes more easy.

Additionally, some software out there takes long time to configure regardless, due to its complexity. Nextcloud is not one of those pieces of software, so it's probably helpful to point that out. Not knowing that or perhaps having a different opinion is fine. Claiming that all software is cumbersome to setup and would take a weekend is false (from my perspective).

> I think I'm going to counter your argument by saying you should write your own web application for keeping notes because that's far simpler and quicker if you've already built it.

As stated before, different things work for different people. I wouldn't write apps for such narrow purposes because general solutions for file storage etc. work for me, whereas someone else might benefit greatly from the learning experience and the hassle free hosting of PaaS like Heroku (if they can afford it), whereas someone else might just sign up for a web app that someone else has developed, versus someone who'd just write their stuff down on a USB memory stick, or even store a file in their file system with no backups.

Of course, it's not just a matter of personal preferences, but also familiarity. I can tell someone that setting up a cloud service is a good option because it's almost effortless for me to do so, yet it won't be so for everyone out there. Likewise, someone could tell me to replace my weather station with an Arduino that has a humidity and temperature sensor, as well as a LCD screen - if they've worked with embedded and SoC devices a lot, they'd also be right, but their suggestion might not be quite as viable for me.

Each approach have their advantages and disadvantages. My argument is that you don't have to write an app even if you need the aforementioned fancy features (backups, cloud storage, sharing, editing in the browser etc.), because there are solutions out there that let you get pretty much all of those out of the box and not just for your notes.