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Recently people built a super-lightweigt alternative, named copyparty[0]. To me that looks like it does everything people tend to need without all the bloat.

[0]: https://github.com/9001/copyparty

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I think "people" deserves clarification: Almost the entire thing was written by a single person and with a _seriously_ impressive feature set. The launch video is well worth a quick watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15_-hgsX2V0&pp=ygUJY29weXBhc...

I don't say this to diminish anyone else's contribution or criticize the software, just to call out the absolutely herculean feat this one person accomplished.

There was an HN discussion about it 3 months ago with responses from the author, in case anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44711519

Yeah people there pretty much mean one dude. It's mine boggling how much that little program can do considering it had one dev.

Don't forget, "Lot of the code was written on a mobile phone using tmux and vim on a bus". That's crazy.

I have tried to run micro https://micro-editor.github.io/ on my phone but this is some other beast if someone is running tmux and vim on their phone

I have found that typing normally is really preferably on android and usually I didn't like having to press columns or ctrl or anything so as such since micro is really just such a great thing overall, it fit so perfectly that when I had that device, I was coding more basic python on my phone than I was on my pc

Although back then I was running alpine on UserLand and I learnt a lot trying to make that alpine vm of sorts to work with python as it basically refused to and I think I learnt a lot which I might have forgotten now but the solution was very hacky (maybe gcompat) and I liked it

I do a lot of development and sysadmin stuff on phones and tablets, to a large degree due to PentiKeyboard. It helps a lot to see the entire screen and have all the usual keyboard sends that a regular, physical keyboard has.

https://software-lab.de/penti.html

I'm using micro in termux on my android. The keyboard of termux is quite adapted to the CLU bindings (ctrl-f, ctrl-s,...). My main use is to take notes, though I bought a physical small bluetooth keyboard perfect for making a little bit of python scripts from time to time.

I must admit that coding in vim on a kinda big project on a smartphone is really impressive.

This is not an alternative as it only covers files. Mind what is in the article: "I like what Nextcloud offers with its feature set and how easily it replaces a bunch of services under one roof (files, calendar, contacts, notes, to-do lists, photos etc.), but ".

For us Nextcloud AIO is the best thing under the sun. It works reasonably well for our small company (about 10 ppl) and saves us from Microsoft. I'm very grateful to the developers.

Hopefully they are able to act upon such findings or rewrite it with go :-). Mmh, if Berlin (Germany) wouldn't waste so much money in ill-advised ideology-driven and long-term state-destroying actions and "NGOs" they had enough money to fund 100s of such rewrites. Alas...

Why should Germany be wasting public money on a private company who keeps shoveling more and more restrictions on their open-source-washed "community" offering, and whose "enterprise" pricing comes in at twice* the price MS365 does for fewer features, worse integration, and with added costs for hosting, storage, and maintenance?

* or same, if excluding nextcloud talk, but then missing a chat feature

It makes a lot of sense for Germany to keep some independance from foreign proprietary cloud providers (Microsoft, Google); Money very well invested imo. It helps the local industry and data stays under German sovereignity.

I find your "open-source-washed" remark deplaced and quite deragoraty. Nextcloud is, imo, totally right to (try to) monetize. They have to, they must further improve the technical backbone to stay competitive with the big boys.

Could you expand on what restrictions they have placed on the community version?

At the very least their app store, which is pretty much required for OIDC, most 2FA methods, and some other features, stops working at 500 users. AFAIK you can still manually install addons, it's just the integration that's gone, though I'm not 100% sure. Same with their notification push service (which is apparently closed source?[0]), which wouldn't be as much of an issue if there were proper docs on how to stand up your own instance of that.

IIRC they also display a banner on the login screen to all users advertising the enterprise license, and start emailing enterprise ads to all admin users.

Their "fair use policy"[1] also includes some "and more" wording.

[0] https://github.com/nextcloud/notifications/issues/82

[1] https://nextcloud.com/fairusepolicy/

> their app store, which is pretty much required for OIDC, most 2FA methods, and some other features, stops working at 500 users

How dare they. I just want to share photos and calendar with the 502 people in my immediate family.

This may come as a surprise to you, but there are organizations, for example German municipalities, that have more than 500 users but can't afford to start pumping tens or hundreds of thousands per year into a file sharing service. Nextcloud themselves recognize this and offer 95%+ discounts to edu, similar to what Adobe, Microsoft, and Git[Hub,Lab] are doing.

There is no way it’s going to be completely rewritten from scratch in Go, and none of whatever Germany is or isn’t doing affects that in any way shape or form.

Actually, it's already been done by the former Nextcloud fork/predecessor. OwnCloud shared a big percentage of the Nextcloud codebase, but they decided to rewrite everything under the name OCIS (OwnCloud Infinite Scale) a couple of years ago. Recently, OwnCloud got acquired by Kiteworks and it seemed like they got in a fight with most of the staff. So big parts of the team left to start "OpenCloud", which is a fork of OCIS and is now a great competitor to Nextcloud. It's much more stable and uses less resources, but it also does a lot less than Nextcloud (namely only File sharing so far. No Apps, no Groupware.)

https://github.com/opencloud-eu

Thanks for sharing this, I've been wanting to look at private cloud stuff but it was all written in PHP. It looks like OpenCloud is majority Go with some php and gherkin, which is a step in the right direction.

I have OpenCloud working on my home server, and it features integration with the Collabora suite of software for office apps. Draw.io is also already supported.

They offer a Docker compose file that sets up Collabora for you, but I can't find anything info on other apps, let alone integration. Where can I see what they support?

You're right, it was my mistake. The docker compose file can set up Collabora for you and allows you to open documents from inside OpenCloud by opening the file in an embedded Collabora view. Likewise, Draw.io works in a similar fashion, opening a view to embed.diagrams.net. Underneath it's just hosting the files and offloads the operations to other apps. It's convenient, but not particularly sophisticated.

There are no "Apps". It's not a universal App platform like Nextcloud. It's just file sharing (and optionally a Radicale calender server via Environment Variable but without UI). There's optional plugins to open vendor specific files right in the browser.

OCIS does only a small part of why people deploy NextCloud. I have run it, it’s great, but it’s not a replacement for the full suite nor is it trying to be.

It makes perfect sense to me that nextcloud is a good fit for a small company.

My biggest gripe with having used it for far longer than I should have was always that it expected far too much maintenance (4 month release cadence) to make sense for individual use.

Doing that kind of regular upkeep on a tool meant for a whole team of people is a far more reasonable cost-benefit analysis. Especially since it only needs one technically savvy person working behind the scenes, and is very intuitive and familiar on its front-end. Making for great savings overall.

Hetzner‘s storage share product line offers a managed Nextcloud instance. I‘m using them as I didn‘t want to care about updating it myself.

The only downside is you can‘t use apps/plugins which require additional local tools (e.g. ocrmypdf) but others can be used just fine.

Calling remotely hosted services works (e.g. if you have elasticsearch on an vps and setup the Nextcloud fulltext search app accordingly)

Germany does fund and work on a couple of serious OSS projects. Look for Opencode. They are also actively working on the matrix spec.

I think what you described is basically ownCloud Infinite Scale (ocis). I haven't tested it myself but it's something I've been considering. I run normal owncloud right now over nextcloud as it avoided a few hiccups that I had.

OCIS seems to have lost most of their team. They now work on a fork called OpenCloud. https://github.com/opencloud-eu

I found copyparty to be too busy on the UI/UX side of things. I've settled on dufs[0], quick to deploy, fast to use use, and cross platform.

[0] https://github.com/sigoden/dufs

Do you have a systemd for it, run it with Docker, or simply manually as needed? I find its simplicity perfect!

I run it manually as needed. It's already packaged for both Alpine Linux and Homebrew which suits my ad-hoc needs wonderfully!

> everything people tend to need

> NOTE: full bidirectional sync, like what nextcloud and syncthing does, will never be supported! Only single-direction sync (server-to-client, or client-to-server) is possible with copyparty

Is sync not the primary use of nextcloud?

Copyparty looks amazing, wow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15_-hgsX2V0

I watched the video, too, and while amazing, it's the poster child for feature creep. It starts out as a file server, and at some point in the demo it's playing transcoded media and editing markdown??

Really impressive, but I think I'll stick to NFS.

It's an amazing piece of software. If only the code & the configuration was readable. It's overly reliant on 2-3 letter abbreviations, which I'm sure has a system, but I haven't yet been able to decipher.

Personally, the only thing I need is stable clients on both desktop and mobile with bidirectional sync. Copyparty seems really cool, but it explicitly does not do that.

Have you considered syncthing? There’s shiny new and super cool Sushi Train (or Sync Train by other name) app for iOS (I wish the author would make it a paid app, so much I like it!): https://github.com/pixelspark/sushitrain

Not affiliated, but a very happy user.

I mention iOS, because that was what I needed personally, as there was syncthing for Android since forever.

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