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Comment by zerof1l | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Nextcloud now for 4+ years. The latest major versions pretty much have no features that benefit regular home users. They are now chasing government contracts and AI hype.

Nextcloud can't even get Notes done right. I lost the entire contents of the note randomly not long ago. And the mobile Note app refuses to load the editor sometimes.

That being said, most of the time, Nextcloud works ok. I don't want to replace Nextcloud with another jack of all trades, master of none. Instead, I'm slowly migrating to good alternatives that do one thing well: Immich for photos, Obsidian for notes.

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> That being said, most of the time, Nextcloud works ok.

Most of the time isn’t enough when dealing with data these days unfortunately. I’ve been using google docs since 2009, and I have lost 0 data in that time. I still have my student essays from back then. Things need to be this reliable to compete unfortunately.,

Ok, I hope you take regular backups. Depending on Google risks sudden account lockout w/ no recourse. Everything suddenly gone, "poof". Others in this thread can do a better job than me describing other tradeoffs for self-hosting vs dependence on Google.

Others in the thread also do a good job of describing the risk of self hosting - these tools are buggy, have synchronisation issues, have workflow quirks and sharp edges. For all their pain points, google docs works and it’s reliable.

I’ve had way more issues of unrecoverable data with self managed tools than the major cloud hosted tools. There’s risks with everything, and I only have so much time in the day to spend on these things..

With self hosting tools I have found the key to success is simplicity. When I stopped conflating my home lab, home production, and what I thought I wanted, things just became so much simpler and more reliable.

YMMV of course. I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of self hosters are unintentionally confused about the differences between those things, and it makes an easy recipe for problems.

I find that people justify their own DIY things by fearmongering about Google (etc). Risk is so low with any of the large providers.

It is so rare. Often people want to self-justify their complex, painful homesetup for this kind of rare thing. If any of the cloud like Google was that bad with lost accounts then it would get less popular eventually.

Breaking nextcloud or failing a disk or lost phone is more likely. (Nitpick - Yes, most people have SIM based 2FA - so no problem with lost SIM - and most people are not >100K paid HN bros - that travel constantly around the world. so Google is good.).

I will trust Google even less than I trust Nextcloud. With Google if you run into any issues, it is like hitting your head against a wall.

Google has few walls, but the ones that are there are like solid titanium. Nextcloud has many thin, flimsy walls that are simply annoying but not terrible to tear down.

Self-hosting can be as dependable as google file hosting, more and more easily with each passing year.

thanks for the immich suggestion.

How have you liked Obsidian? I was going to use it but realized it pay walled sharing notes between devices. Looking into this again - are you self hosting Obsidian via LiveSync plugin?

Thanks!

I'm self-hosting Obsidian sync. I mostly followed the tutorial here: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1eo7knj/guide_o...

Except I wanted more security and multiple users. Instead of using the default admin user, I created one user for each person. Done in the "_users" database. Then create one database for each person. Assign each user as a "Member" to their respective database, not admin. Now each person has their own credentials that can access only their database.

You can simply put your vault in a cloud folder if you don’t want to pay for Livesync

Not OP but I'm a very happy longtime Obsidian user. Maybe a little unfair to characterize as "paywalled" given their sync service is optional (and works very well), and a directory of markdown files is about as portable and flexible as it gets for self-hosting.

Sync is a pretty core feature though for any such app, and it is paywalled for the many instead of the few who can figure it out for themselves.

Ok, maybe? But given Obsidian itself is FREE(!), IMHO charging $4/mo for sync is eminently reasonable.

Another alternative for sharing notes is git. This plugin [0] provides git integration to Obsidian making syncing with a git repo easy.

I have termux running on my phone with a cron job to pull in new changes. The plugin I mentioned is not very performant on Android unfortunately.

[0]: https://github.com/Vinzent03/obsidian-git

Obsidian is not self hosted or open source though,right?

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