Notes from the Nextcloud Conference 2023

Earlier this year I traveled to Berlin to attend the 2023 edition of the Nextcloud Conference (thanks to Nextcloud GmbH for partially sponsoring my trip; this did not influence any opinions in this article). My short talk on building high performance Nextcloud apps can be found here, with the inspiration mostly coming from Memories, which is over a year old now! In retrospect, I think I tried to cram too many thoughts into 5 minutes, so I’ll be happy to chat if you’ve any comments / disagreements.

Overall, I’m very happy to see Nextcloud making progress both as a massive open source project, and as a company. To keep it short, I’ll enlist three key takeaways for me from the event:

1. As an outsider, I realise how little I knew about the scale and administration of the project. Nextcloud is much larger than one may realise, both in terms of components / teams / full-time engineers, and the number of deployments (or the sizes of these). There’s still, of course, tremendous potential for growth, and it’s great to see a good business team pushing ahead in this direction.
2. As a network security researcher, I admire the broader goals of the folks at Nextcloud. Ownership of data, privacy, and the centralization of the Internet are highly pressing issues with no resolution in sight. While I don’t agree on many aspects of the design / implementation of Nextcloud (e.g. especially surrounding E2EE and federation), no other project has gone as far, especially also on the non-techincal front of Internet decentralization.
3. Finally, while I can understand that having AI features is the “hot” topic, I don’t necessarily agree that they’re the best / most useful features to implement at the moment. In my opinion, other issues could take more priority, such as performance (particularly for file sync) and tackling PHP-induced issues such as the high bootstrapping overhead. The Nextcloud codebase is aging fast, and while the team has been doing a great job of keeping everything up-to-date, some deeper changes to the core might already be overdue.

Regarding the last point, Nextcloud 28 shipped out a few weeks ago with some major improvements such as a re-written Files app and significantly improved loading times (I contributed a few of these patches; and I can attest that the review process has massively improved over time).

As a closing remark: I believe Nextcloud is a highly underrated piece of software. It can be a bit hard to set up initially (hopefully AIO can help here), but has been running in my modest homelab for a long time now with zero hiccups and butter-smooth updates (read Docker). I hope Nextcloud keeps evolving, and I can continue to be a part of the process.