Moving out of Nextcloud ⛅️
I loved Nextcloud. Still do.. But there are certain things that concerns me being somebody who likes to self-host almost every service under my own nest. This month I was thinking seriously about usability and convenience, asking myself questions like,
“The efforts that I’m putting into self hosting and maintaining xyz service on my RaspberryPi really worth it? Or should I move to some other service or create an account in somebody else’s self hosted setup?”
After this self-introspection, it occurred to me that there are a few changes I had to make in my self hosted setup, and this is a result of a lot of brainstorming related to it.
Why not Nextcloud?
Yes exactly, Why not Nextcloud? It’s amazing. It has a lot of add ons, plugins, custom css and many more. Just make sure you install it properly and you don’t need to worry about installing another service for news/podcasts/calendar/contacts and much more.
Yes, I get that. That’s what anyone would tell. But the flipside of the coin is that, you are using one service to be a base for every other type of service you use. So even when one of the service starts being janky, you are deemed to stay with it. Since I use a RaspberryPi to self host most of my services, Nextcloud would take up almost all the memory not to leave any space for any other service I would like to deploy.
I used nextcloud as a drop-in replacement for Google drive and Google photos all in one. Eventually I started to make it as my ecosystem keeping my calendar and contacts in sync with it. It’s a really good service but not good enough to be self hosted on a raspberry pi and low-memory chips.
What next?
I’m planning to move to a diversified ecosystem than putting all my eggs in one basket. I’ll focus on services that does one thing and does it well. (I briefly spoke about it in this toot) And have different services to host files (?seafile) and host photos/videos (?photoprism). So that when they become unusable for my use-case, they can be easily replaced. Hopefully when I upgrade my setup to use machines with better memory, maybe I’ll come back to Nextcloud. Until then, Bye Nextcloud :(
Categorized Under #MyTechXperiments
Tags : #nextcloud #ecosystem #files #photos #selfhosted
Timestamp : #June2021