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Comment by lrvick | Hacker News Reader

Nextcloud is pretty much a drop-in replacement for Google Apps and Office365 these days for most use cases.

Maybe it has improved in the last 3 years, but that certainly was not the case when I tried it for my company. Fist, it was self-hosted, which adds monitoring, security, and tech support. Second, its concurrent document editing was absolute shite.

It's more than enough to build on. If a government simply decided that it was important to have ownership of their code and interoperability & future-proofing of their data & documents, then relatively over night any rough edges and weaknesses could be cleaned up.

It's like saying a house is unusable shite because the sink has dirty dishes in it.

But this is a government. Their operations, and the impairment thereof, affects millions of people. Further, they should be in the business of governing, not cobbling together solutions based on stackoverflow posts.

Collaborative, concurrent document editing is a must-have feature, especially now with so much remote work.

So it’s not just dirty dishes. A more apt metaphor would be a house where 10% of the time when two people enter a room together, they both lose their phones in the room, can never find them, and have to get new phones. I mean, I guess you could decide that outcome is better than a house in which 0.0001% of the time, the US government looks at the contents of the phone, but I don’t see why you would.

They can be exactly as in the business of governing while paying one set of programmers as while paying another.

Try again.

bonus try agains:

And they have an obligation not to waste taxes on rent.

And they have an obligation to transparency even if currently all fail to meet.

It has dramatically improved in the past 3 years to the point that I finally switched to it for my family and company.

I balked at it for several years but honestly today it is good enough for music streaming, file sharing, collaborative document editing, photo management, contact management, calendar sharing, issue management, appointment management, etc.

Also passwordless fido2 login.

How's the upgrade story these days? Some years ago there were a lot of scary stories about upgrades going horribly wrong due to DB changes or otherwise being non-trivial.

Better, but just last week a test upgrade failed even using their own docker image and docker compose file.

Why? Because you can’t upgrade between major versions. If you do, part of the software is upgraded and the rest is not. Now you can’t go back either, because the persistent config directory has been modified in the process. There are countless posts in forums about failed upgrades (including this).

I have tried bare metal and docker, and the upgrades have failed once in a while. I am not sure if the snap version is any better.

Thanks, that's just the kind of stuff that keeps me away. Life is too short for such shenanigans.

Life is too short to put my data in the hands of third parties who will use it to target and manipulate me.

Democracies require more decisions from citizens than dictatorships but freedom is worth a bit of thinking once in a while.

Done several major version upgrades without issues. As long as you do one upgrade at a time and are not doing anything nonstandard it is smooth in my experience.

Any good articles covering this setup? I was looking for a one stop solution for streaming and file management but it always seemed like many systems had to be combined or I had to pay other companies.

Just install nextcloud per the official docs, then install the addons you want from the admin interface. All are open source and free. That is literally it.

NextCloud has integrated OnlyOffice for document creation and editing.

Does it scale to tens/hundreds of thousands?

(Asking, I actually don't know)

If it doesn't now, it can be made to in a figurative 11 minutes once a state level entity simply decides it matters.

All that's ever been missing is for a few politicians to have the vision or fortitude to ignore MS/Apple/Google sales pitches and then stick with it through the inevitable difficult transition period and complaints and address them by addressing them rather than by just going back to the familiar comfortable bad deal.

This is completely true.

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