After my private Gmail was leaked somewhere, I’ve started to receive an enormous amount of spam that came through into my inbox, which made me switch to Proton and a self-hosted SimpleLogin setup.
So I decided, I might as well dirch Google entirely, for private and work-related stuff.
While Proton already covers Mail and Calendar, I’m in search of alternatives for the following services to replace.
- Meet: I like the idea of starting a quick meeting by simply sending a link to a customer, who can join instantly. What would be an equivalent software to do that? I tried Mattermost, but it seems more like a Slack alternative, with invites, etc. and is overkill for my case. Revolt chat looks like a Discord alternative.
- Drive: In short, If possible, I’d prefer one consolidated place to access and edit files. Docs, Excel, PDFs, pictures, videos, etc… Is Nextcloud really the only option here, with the corresponding plugins for onlyoffice and memories (photos)? I tried running thst on an intel nuc, and it’s slow as hell.
You must log in or register to comment.
I’ve talked mad shit about Nextcloud repeatedly. That said, I keep trying it. Almost compelled to make it work for me. This stubbornness lead me to NextcloudPi. And I don’t know what they do to that image/build, but it works very well on my Pi 4 w/4GB. Then I tried it in a docker container on my main server and it ran like trash again. So, ymmv? Easy enough to stand it up for a test though.
I’m a huge fan of Seafile. It’s the best Google drive/Dropbox replacement, imo. It does support Collabora or Open Office integration as well, but I can’t get that to work. Take that as a sign of me still learning rather than a slight against the product. I will say though, their documentation needs work. It’s quite a mess.
In danger of stating the obvious, I would suggest nextcloud for google drive (and their office equivalent) replacement , since it is very well integrated in most operating systems and there are many apps/add-ons for it. You can even integrate your web services into their web dashboard. I’m in the process of moving my iCloud stuff there.
NextCloud 😂 😂 https://lemmy.world/comment/346174
Well to be fair it might be as reliable as iCloud…
So your complaints are mostly about the mail app? Because I have not tried that yet, mail is something I have not yet moved away from iCloud… I think, we are not at 1 Tb data in NC yet, will remember what you said when we reach that and everything is on fire 😅 What do you use for working simultaneously on the same file at the same time, if may ask, I’m interested in learning more about NC alternatives.
So your complaints are mostly about the mail app? Because I have not tried that yet,
No, their UI is horribly slow and if you just open your browser console you’ll see it spitting errors unlike anything else you’ve ever seen.
What do you use for working simultaneously on the same file at the same time, if may ask, I’m interested in learning more about NC alternatives.
FileBrowser with the OnlyOffice server, gets the job done without much fuzz. Official integration is coming but there’s a fork by the same guy with the PR open that works just fine. js.wiki and/or getoutline.com might work for some situations.
I‘m also migrating from iCloud (to NC among other things) and its been slow to say the least. Things I struggle with:
- setting up photo alternative with face recognition (recognition app is okayish but not as strong as I‘d like)
- getting whatsapp to somehow backup outside of iCloud
- getting my passwords out of iCloud (you need a mac for that) into vaultwarden
- NC being quite slow now that a couple apps and mid 5 digits of photos are in there, will try memcache soonish
For those who don’t know NC, these things are 1/10 of the stuff that NC is actually good at imo.
How is your experience so far?
I use the password app in nextcloud. I really like how the app is integrated into iOS. I have set it to be my only autofill and migrate the passwords manually when I need them. For whatsapp, my solution was to delete it and all other meta accounts some years ago without backup 💁🏻♀️ matrix is my messenger of choice, btw. We defeat the slowness of NC with enough power, I guess, but a more efficient service would surly lessen our electricity costs (but we invest in solar in long term anyway) About photos, I have honestly no clue yet, and since my girlfriend definitely keeps her fotos there, and we have a shared photo library, I fear I’m pretty stuck there. Additionally, I have invested quite some time cleaning it by deleting shitposts from the old WhatsApp times.
Thanks for elaborating a bit. I opted against the password app since I wanted to diversify services. My nextcloud is a bit finnicky at times and wants to be updated before you can proceed with stuff. Having no access to my passwords in that moment would be harsh. So I opted for vaultwarden and it even has firefox integration, cli integration and a desktop app for linux (dunno about windows, honestly). I‘m not sure if it was a bad idea to put NC‘s database on spinning discs though. Maybe that was stupid.
As you can see, very much a WIP as well. I feel like we need some kind of place to accumulate iCloud -> NC expats. A lot of good could be done there.
I‘m on matrix as well but i‘m not proficient yet. My wife is still on whatsapp so I need to be patient. We have gotten rid of twitter and reddit which I count as a win.
What other projects do you have? Feel free to send me a dm with your matrix username if you want to keep in touch about this.
I may also add that if one doesn’t want to host something himself, Hetzner offers quite cheap Nextcloud instances with admin access and thus the possibility to add users/apps.
Meet -> Jitsi
For Drive, do you need the editor to be web-based? If not, you could just enable SSH access and access it through SFTP using keyfile authentication.
Thx… will have a look into jitsi. I thought it was just a webrtc server that other services can connect to via plugins.
A web based editor is a necessity, so I can acces files from anywhere, which I also do sometimes.
Which file formats do you mainly use? You can likely open them on mobile or desktop as long as you have a viewer for the filetypes without requiring a web-based viewer/editor, which would reduce the strain on the server as well.
It also makes the server setup way simpler, as it just deal with hosting and serving files, and the data processing / rendering is all done locally.
Easier to do backups too.
As of right now, I mainly store PDFs and docs/sheets on drive, which I frequently access via desktop (browswe) or mobile. So these two are a necessity.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access
[Thread #226 for this sub, first seen 19th Oct 2023, 18:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
If you’re not set on self-hosted give a try to mailbox.org, they have everything you described in one place.
For Meet, I’d also suggest Jitsi. For Drive, I’d recommend giving cryptpad.fr a shot; that seems to be the closest to Drive’s file editing capabilities.
It involves spending money, but I wonder whether a Synology NAS might suit you rather well? Synology Drive, Synology Photos et al make a pretty respectable replacement for the Googles.
I have considered NAS, but I always saw it as something for those who have lots of large files to store, like pictures, movies, shows, system backups etc. which I simply don’t utilize right now.
It can be whatever you want, if you want it only for documents the disks don’t need to be to large, it can even be NAS SSDs (depending your backup model), but considering the office apps requirement I also think synology is a good option.
If your “meeting” requirement is just viewing a screen then Rustdesk is super easy. if you want video and audio Webex Teams is great, or jitsi if you want to stay away from cisco.
Yes… I want to stay away from webex, msteams, etc. as much as possible
Not because of the big-corp, but because the software is just a bloated crap.
Then what you can do for meetings is set up a matrix instance with jitsI integration.
Element and fluffychat apps have direct messageing and chatroom like slack with calling and conference call integration from jitsi. You can essentially have your own MSTeams.
You can email links to external clients that they can just run in the browser also.
It also has screensharing.
If you don’t want to self-host, you can also just pay monthly to element and they will host it. That seems pretty easy if you are looking for reliability.
Webex Teams Free
Features
Meeting length limit: Up to 40 min Meeting capacity: Up to 100 Breakout rooms Video messaging by Vidcast Meeting recording: Local Storage
Seafile might be able to replace Drive.
Yes, but don’t they have a weird folder structure, where it’s almost impossible to locate stuff outside of their apps?
They do. I thought I’d mention it as some people don’t mind that aspect of it.
I might give it a shot since it comes close enough featurewise.
I think it’s worth investigating. I took a look but I didn’t want to deal with the file chunking, and settled on something slow and simple in SFTPGO.
Why not proton drive?
It’s very limited, and I’d prefer a self hosted solution
Syncthing, owncloud
