Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nextcloud introduces social features, joins the fediverse

nextcloud.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 134 posts

Re: Nextcloud introduces social features, joins the fediverse

#81

Post by kop316 »

jospoortvliet wrote: post #68
nisa wrote: post #30

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 marketin…

Let's be honest, if we did a release with only stabilization, it might get us more users. Not more customers. And it is customers who pay for the development. Everyone asks us to focus "on the basics" and then claim their pet feature requests are, of course, basics. ACL's and user mgmt in your case, perfectly fine features, but features nonetheless. In the end, our development is guided by the community and customers…

I use Nextcloud and it is an integral part of my life, but your current set up does not allow me to pay you, as it focuses only on enterprise use case.

If I may make a suggestion, could you make a page for donation, and then you can have a "put your donation to Nextcloud to the following uses: - New features - Stablilty - Android Client development"

I think you get the idea. I would very happily donate if I was given the option to.

Re: Nextcloud introduces social features, joins the fediverse

#82

Post by driverdan »

krn wrote: post #43

The personal issue I have with ownCloud / Nextcloud, is that I simply don't trust the technical competence of the developers, who picked PHP as the most suitable programming language for a multi-platform network-intensive application in 2010. There were simply no technical reasons for doing this – and there are still none.

I downvoted you because PHP is a perfectly fine choice. All web scripting languages are cross platform and work perfectly fine, there's no one right language.

Re: Nextcloud introduces social features, joins the fediverse

#83

Post by mnutt »

nisa wrote: post #30

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 marketin…

My knowledge is a year or two out of date, but I think “it’s all just webdav” is part of the problem, and they sort of painted themselves into a corner by using it as a protocol. They ended up with a bunch of extra API hacks on top of WebDAV for things like multiparty uploads, and things still go wonky if you try to connect a random WebDAV client to it.

I built an ownCloud file storage replacement that worked with their front end client, while it was all technically WebDAV, syncing issues were a nightmare. I have a great amount of respect for how much effort they put into getting WebDAV to work, I just think it’s not not as solid/specified a protocol as one would hope.

Re: Nextcloud introduces social features, joins the fediverse

#84

Post by krn »

bauerd wrote: post #71
krn wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think immediately dismissing anything written in php is wrong I have specifically pointed at multi-platform, network-intensive applications, and never claimed that PHP is not suitable for anything. If someone is not able to choose the right tool for the job, how can you trust him to do the job right ?

Please elaborate why PHP is an inadequate tool for developing multi-platform, network-intensive applications?

Go has much better concurrency, networking, and packaging capabilities. NodeJS can be used for both, front-end and back-end, including iOS / Android. Clojure(Script) provides more than Go and NodeJS combined, but was too new at the time. Even Python would be a much more powerful choice than PHP for anything, that is not a simple LAMP application.

Re: Nextcloud introduces social features, joins the fediverse

#85

Post by bauerd »

krn wrote: post #84
bauerd wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please elaborate why PHP is an inadequate tool for developing multi-platform, network-intensive applications?

Go has much better concurrency, networking, and packaging capabilities. NodeJS can be used for both, front-end and back-end, including iOS / Android. Clojure(Script) provides more than Go and NodeJS combined, but was too new at the time. Even Python would be a much more powerful choice than PHP for anything, that is not a simple LAMP application.

Most of your points are irrelevant (packaging, JS as a compilation target, mobile development) as they do not support your argument that PHP would be inadequate for the task at hand. You seem not to like PHP, which is fine, neither do I, but this is not conclusive.

Re: Nextcloud introduces social features, joins the fediverse

#86

Post by krn »

bauerd wrote: post #85
krn wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go has much better concurrency, networking, and packaging capabilities. NodeJS can be used for both, front-end and back-end, including iOS / Android. Clojure(Script) provides more than Go and NodeJS combined, but was too new at the time. Even Python would be a much more powerful choice than PHP for anything, that is not a simple LAMP application.

Most of your points are irrelevant (packaging, JS as a compilation target, mobile development) as they do not support your argument that PHP would be inadequate for the task at hand. You seem not to like PHP, which is fine, neither do I, but this is not conclusive.

I have spent many years doing PHP development and still do, but the only technical people I know who pick PHP for new projects are the ones, for whom it's the only programming language they know. Therefore, my trust in their all-around competence is very limited.

Re: Nextcloud introduces social features, joins the fediverse

#87

Post by jacquesm »

kop316 wrote: post #81
jospoortvliet wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be honest, if we did a release with only stabilization, it might get us more users. Not more customers. And it is customers who pay for the development. Everyone asks us to focus "on the basics" and then claim their pet feature requests are, of course, basics. ACL's and user mgmt in your case, perfectly fine features, but features nonetheless. In the end, our development is guided by the community and customers…

I use Nextcloud and it is an integral part of my life, but your current set up does not allow me to pay you, as it focuses only on enterprise use case. If I may make a suggestion, could you make a page for donation, and then you can have a "put your donation to Nextcloud to the following uses: - New features - Stablilty - Android Client development" I think you get the idea. I would very happily donate if I was given…

I like your 'vote with your wallet' idea for open source. Want to get that issue to the top of the ticket queue? Pay up! It makes perfect sense.

Re: Nextcloud introduces social features, joins the fediverse

#89

Post by dsumenkovic »

jchw wrote: post #79
jospoortvliet wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be honest, if we did a release with only stabilization, it might get us more users. Not more customers. And it is customers who pay for the development. Everyone asks us to focus "on the basics" and then claim their pet feature requests are, of course, basics. ACL's and user mgmt in your case, perfectly fine features, but features nonetheless. In the end, our development is guided by the community and customers…

GitLab seems to suffer from a similar conundrum, and they also seem to have gained a reputation for being unstable. Which is sad. In my experience, GitLab is very stable, nowadays, but it will probably never fully recover from its first impressions for some people.

Thanks for your comment, we really appreciate your feedback about GitLab. Our team is working hard on improving the availability and stability of the platform. Our goal is currently to achieve 99.95% availability on GitLab.com. According to Pingdom, over the last year our availability has been 99.81%, although this includes the large (multi-hour) maintenance window on 11 August 2018 when we migrated GitLab.com from Microsoft Azure cloud to Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Since the migration, our availability has improved greatly (caveat: we obviously have much less data than from Azure).

There are multiple reasons for this improvement. We chose Google Cloud Platform because we believe that they offer the most reliable cloud platform for our workload, particularly as we move towards running GitLab.com in Kubernetes. It is worth pointing out that we also used the migration as an opportunity to improve our infrastructure, simplify some components and otherwise make things more stable and more observable. Finally, we've also been focusing on building the infrastructure team up, having hired many new team members over the past few months. This means that the team has been better able to balance the job of running GitLab.com with making it more stable.

Re: Nextcloud introduces social features, joins the fediverse

#90

Post by bayesian_horse »

nisa wrote: post #30

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 marketin…

I had to deploy Nextcloud at work for a couple dozen users and it was a nightmare. There was zero response to any bug reports / questions I had. I even tried to get commercial support, and they wouldn't answer.

The client is effectively a black box, and we can't even get synchronization to work correctly. Some of it certainly is the fault of me or the users. But some of it probably isn't, and it's hard to tell the difference, what with nobody responding to bug reports.

Post reply on HN