So the last month or so I have started the slow transition of deGoogling and other efforts… its scary because I’ve been using Google for 20 years. But I have jumped into the deep end with NextCloud and I cannot believe this is free. My only wish is that it was easier so that everyone could do it. It’s pretty complicated but at the same time, so worth it to learn how!
If you have a web server and any experience managing hosted tools like Wordpress at all I highly recommend NextCloud. It’s free software (you’d pay for hosting though…) and can replace all your Google producs and more: Gmail, Calendar, Tasks, Meet, Docs/Drive, Photos, Keep, Contacts, Google forms, Doodlepoll, Docusign, and more. It’s even got a pretty cool self-hosted maps tool, but I haven’t really played with the viability of replacing Google Maps with that yet. It’s also got a self-hosted password manager, a recipe keeper and bookmarks manager if you want it (and more.)
Self hosing NextCloud has a steep learning curve if you’re a beginner, but you can do it. The support community is pretty responsive and engaged. If you don’t want to do it yourself, there are service providers who will host and support it for you with little effort from you, but that would remove the self-hosted data benefit (although most are data privacy centered).
Despite it getting a bit of a scattered mess, I still love Nextcloud as it can pretty much provide everything I want in a cloud service. Currently running via a yunohost setup because upgrading is way, way easier but I might migrate it to a truenas setup OR a docker container just because. The advantage of going truenas is that it is my main storage system with backup etc. but the disadvantage is if something goes wrong (I do have a backup to the backups ahem and it does have raidz1 so I should be resistant to some errors)
We shall see…