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This will be a comparatively short article, I just
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need to rant a tiny bit...
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So, you may have seen this site long-ago-enough to
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remember that once upon a time there existed a service
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called GuzioHub Drive. That service was powered by the
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most overrated piece of self-hosted software on the
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planet, Nextcloud. Nextcloud is written in PHP. PHP,
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just like GuzioHub Drive...
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Has recently fucking died.
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The "death" of PHP I'm referring to is the
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widely-publicized (so widely, in fact, that I don't
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feel inclined to link to any sources because you
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probably already know it - I'm sure someone in 20yrs,
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if this blog (or even the internet itself, for that
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matter) survives that long, will be incredibly
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displeased by this decision) RCE security
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vulnerability in PHP. Of course, PHP didn't completely
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disappear as the result of that incident. It was
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discovered, patched, and after some very hectic 24h -
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things mostly came back to normal. Still, basically
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every PHP site on earth was offline for several hours,
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so a part of the internet DID die. It simply came
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back. You know what didn't come back, tho? GuzioHub
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Drive. This one stays dead. Forever.
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But why?
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Nextcloud SUCKS. I hated it from the very 1st day I
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deployed it, and it was the very first service on
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GuzioHub. 2 main reasons why it sucks:
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* It's TOO DAMN HEAVY. The amount of stuff a typical
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Nextcloud instance does it TRULY UNSETTLING. And...
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I get it! It's enterprise software. It needs to have
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many features. If you're an enterprise customer,
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you'd probably be happy. You know who isn't an
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enterprise customer? A single fkin user. Even if
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said user has prospects of expansion to their family
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and friends... Even on that scale - Nextcloud does
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way too fkin much. If you're setting up a family
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cloud for you and your partner - you don't need it.
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If you're setting up a "friend-cloud" - even if you
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anticipate expanding to as much as 100 users (say,
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your friends will be allowed to invite their
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friends, and so on) - you STILL DON'T NEED IT, trust
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me. I've ran across many larger-scale friend-clouds
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since I joined Matrix, and not a single one of those
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hosts Nextcloud. That's gotta be telling something.
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What it's telling, is that unless you're a real
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enterprise - with Debora from the reception desk who
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hadn't touched a computer in 30 years, and needs an
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enterprise-certified idiot-proofing level; with 500+
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employees; with an IT stack that's already a legacy
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tangled mess and an extra PHP service slapped onto
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it will seem right at home; with some enterprise SSO
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solution - you DO NOT. NEED. NEXTCLOUD. You're gonna
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get a much better mileage out of your server by just
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picking individual solutions to problems you
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actually have. In „Oh, but the integration!” SHUT
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UP! You want real integration? Set up an SSO gate
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like Authentik or LLDAP or LLDAP+Authelia (I went
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from option 2 (worked fine for NextCloud and
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Matrix/Tuwunel) to 3 when I migrated to Immich,
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because it didn't support "raw" LDAP and instead I
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needed to deploy Authelia, as an OAuth2 engine
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sitting on top of LDAP). I'm an integration nerd, I
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know what I'm talking about! Integration in
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NextCloud is a lie. Most actual Apps come with a
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little "It's only the frontend, please deploy the
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backend yourself and point to it from the admin
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settings menu!". Congrats! You managed to add a
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button to the top-bar with, that opens an iframe!
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Truly revolutionary tech; I totally couldn't
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replicate it on this very website if I wanted to,
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with a dozen of hand-written HTML lines. When I
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first got interested in NextCloud, I got truly
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hooked on it because I thought I'm gonna be able to
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automate the setup of anything else I may want to
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host, from a site like this to a Minecraft server,
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via that apps menu. And that it's gonna all be
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magically integrated, with a single account system
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and god-knows-what-else. That wasn't the case back
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then. NextCloud is written in PHP and any apps were
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also limited to PHP, which excludes a huge portion
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of services one may want to run because it's a dying
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language and no New And Cool stuff is written in it
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anymore (even if we exclude the recent security
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nightmare, it's not a secret that PHP was bleeding
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users for a while). NextCloud foundation finally
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noticed this and allowed Docker containers to be
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managed by NextCloud, but it's too little too
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late....... WARNING: THIS ARTICLE IS INCOMPLETE AS
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OF YET!!!
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