A personal cloud with Nextcloud – But How and Why?

As you may have noticed I attended the Nextcloud Hackweek (day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4, day 5). I decided to help out with documentation in Github and I did a few little changes. The documentation ist separated into an Admin-, a User and a Developer Manual. I struggled a bit with the organisation of everything on Github (master, stable10, stable9) but step by step I'll manage. What confuses me most was the fact that I personally used ownCloud/Nextcloud as a file syncing mechanism like Dropbox. Attending the hackweek I noticed that Nextcloud is and will become so much more.

I want to give a few examples

• upload your music and listen to it on your mobile or at home (like in iTunes)
• Edit and share your documents (like Google docs)
• upload photos, that you have taken with your mobile automatically and manage and share them (like Flickr)
• be a part of a federation of Nextcloud users. What is federation and why is it useful? (This is really unique and important)

My Federated Cloud ID is [email protected] https://t.co/IZLj3oQarj#federation #nextcloud /@Nextclouders— Hagen Graf (@hagengraf) August 11, 2016

• why it is a good idea to control your own data?
• run it on your server at home (on a Raspberry Pi or a MacMini or whatever)
• use it as your own telephone provider (with the Spreed integration)
• store and sync all your contacts and calendars via Nextcloud (like iCloud)
• read your emails in Nextcloud (via mail app)
• use nextcloud as your news aggregator (like google reader)
• offer all this features to your friends or your company (because you can :) )
• and of course ... sync all your documents between your mobile and your desktop (like Dropbox)

This is just a small list of features that is interesting for me as a consumer. But I learned from the past:

If something is interesting for me, there are usually millions of consumers outside that find it interesting too!

My Plan

My plan is to try out the feature list by myself, describe my experiences in my blog, contribute to the documentation and spread the word about Nextcloud in general.

First steps

I'm still running our "cocoate cloud" for file syncing. When I'm really sure about a feature I will add it there. If you are interested and not able to setup your own Nextcloud - just ping me for a user account.
So far I wrote blog entries in German language for the Novatrend blog. A general one about the the fork ownCloud -> Nextcloud and one about package managers, snap and the Nextcloud snap package as an example Paketverwaltung und Snaps unter Ubuntu 16.04 LTS