Nextcloud introduces social features, joins the fediverse

That's a start, but my concern is that the volunteer militia will get swamped and burnt out when the real attacks come.

Right now Mastodon and other ActivityPub platforms are too small for a Cambridge Analytica / Russian FSB or other similar caliber actors to bother with. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. are where most of the users are so that's where most of the effort will go.

If these platforms ever "tip" into mainstream adoption, prepare to be targeted by organized crime gangs running financial scams, nation states, corporate PR firms, and other organizations with hundred million to billion dollar budgets.

What I really wanted to do was to stress the fact that this is a battlefield. One of the trends I see in the early 21st century is the dematerialization of warfare. Wars can now be fought entirely online. Governments can be toppled. Economies can be destroyed. Corporations can be imploded. All this can be done with a mixture of cyber attacks and propaganda. As a result we are seeing the redirection of military budgets toward these things. The sort of spam and amateur brigading that most volunteers are used to dealing with on social forums and platforms is nothing compared to what the big social media platforms are facing now and that is nothing compared to what's coming. Billions of dollars are currently being spent by PR firms, advertisers, and governments to develop increasingly advanced AI and big data powered propaganda platforms to weaponize the Internet. In the future we'll probably see fully automated AI driven propaganda, what I've started calling "con artistry at scale."

Federated and decentralized platforms are very vulnerable in ways that silos are not, and this has to be thought about. It's easy to create quiet apparently friendly and normal Sybil nodes that passively suck down data and then use that data to mount active attacks from other directions. Volunteers may fight active attacks, but they may have no way of knowing which apparently normal nodes are actually passive participants in those attacks. Also keep in mind that "attacks only get better." With each attack the attackers learn, and it's generally easier to attack than to defend (in cyber-security in general, not just here).

Given the kinds of communities that have flocked to the fediverse the past year, moderation tools have always been a top priority of apps adopting ActivityPub. Features have been killed due to the potential for abuse, too.

I don't think the important question to ask here is if it can survive, it's how can it survive. These sort of tools should be in the commons anyway, just like social media.

Monolithic social media is not sustainable and often times quite harmful because it optimizes for engagement. The Fediverse will deal with this one way or another, worst case everyone switches to whitelisting.

I've been in favor of adding a limit - once you can remove by deleting a few lines of code of course - to the number of users an instance can hold. Purely for symbolism. It worked when Elasticsearch was added to Mastodon and a "viewable_by" property was added so you could only search for things you had engaged with.

To be fair, most of the extra features (including this one) are apps that you either have to enable or can disable. And even though I initially installed Nextcloud as basically an FTP alternative too, I absolutely love how I've been able to migrate my contacts and calendar over (away from Google) with basically no hassle.

As an admin of a 500 user instance I'm having mixed feelings about Nextcloud. Sure it's GPL and free and it got a lot better than the old owncloud mess that broke always but it's still somewhat a gamble. My install is just a no-warranty, non-commercial use case and I wouldn't use it for any large commercial installation without having at least one dedicated and skilled PHP-dev on-site.

I came to resent their marketing blog posts. If you look it's just an alpha version that just got hacked together, often with problems, often not fixed long after the release. There still lot's of serious bugs in end to end encryption for instance.

There does not seem to be a lot of work to improve the base features. Syncing, ACLs, User Mangement leave a lot to be desired. It's not easy but they are in a position where they really could be a perfect solution for a lot of people and probably also charge good money for it - but at the moment it feels like they just build alpha-grade fancy addons.

Me and probably most users would love a no-feature, we just fix the most serious bugs on our github issues release-cycle. I'm fine when it's called Nextcloud 16 and takes a year, hell take your time, but basic functionality should be rock solid.

I also don't get why they ignore the existing open-source ecosystem. Make it possible to integrate SOGo for Calenders and Mail - it's all webdav in the browser anyway. SOGo at least has somewhat working ActiveSync. Same with SAML/Shibboleth/Kerberos - some things got fixed, very late. No deployment story for Active Directory or even Linux.

User management is a mess - the Circles app is a good idea that is crippled by usability and functionality bugs... that possibility to have self-selecting groups and decentralized management is a huge win for them, but they don't seem to realize that this is an important use-case.

Nextcloud is very close to what would be ideal for a lot of smaller organisations, but they somehow are unable to polish what they have but decided to pile alpha-quality on alpha-quality code (and ignore the bug reports)...

That beeing said, it mostly works but your users won't be happy.