Okay, an ultra‑preliminary report:
I've done nothing more than the very glimmerings of the beginnings of poking around, but things look good so far. In fact, they look very promising:
- The offerings are rich and diverse. The core items are e-mail and cloud storage of course, but this is augmented with a basketful of community goods like a minimal encrypted pastebin, an encrypted collaborative office suite, a metasearch agglomerator, an e-mail file upload service, a collaborative project management board, a Jitsi server, a community driven alternate to Git, the VoIP platform Mumble, XMPP chat, community whiteboarding including an editor and a spreadsheet, and not least a forum, though this last does not appear to be too active. If this sounds like an embarrassment of riches, well, it is.
- They have a slick Android app on F-Droid that interfaces with all of the above. It's just a front end so you do need to set up further apps (like Nextcloud, Mumble, Jitsi, etc) but this is only to be expected.
- System is reasonably responsive, although I had a bit of a wait logging into the cloud storage the first time. Subsequent login was fine. I'm new to Nextcloud, so will need to spend some time getting familiar with the apps, options and settings. Apparently, Nextcloud allows one to chain with other cloud instances, which is both amazingly powerful and very scary. I would not do that without a far better understanding of the security risks.
- Free account includes 1GB of e-mail and 2GB of cloud which is tight, but you can buy more at very reasonable rates. However, there are caps and they are quite low. It's a community run initiative, so their limited resources are directed at broadness of reach rather than massive capacity.
- E-mail offers encrypted IMAP and SMTP along with CardDAV and CalDAV hooks for your preferred email/calendar client. I tested both sending and receiving from all four of my other e-mail providers and succeeded, though with some delay in one of them. None are Microsoft, so I can't speak to the issue raised by 1fallen.
- Documentation is reasonable but not extensive. So far, I've run into nothing that can't be solved with a modicum of search-Fu. They are inviting volunteers in the documentation department, especially those with multi‑language skills.
Altogether, I must admit to being seriously impressed—at least on initial walk‑through. Only time will tell as to reliability and security. I don't intend on relying on this for critical use—at least not yet—and data sanctity/privacy remains a big unknown. More research is still needed.
But for a "free" offering, this basket of goods seems almost too good to be true. Is that in itself suspicious? Or have I become needlessly paranoid in my old age?
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