Comment on A sovereign Microsoft 365 alternative: Nextcloud and IONOS join forces - Nextcloud

• Creat@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Your analogy doesn’t make any sense, so I assume you really don’t know. So let me explain:

  If you buy a 4wd, it’s always a 4wd, usually that means s relatively large vehicle. You might be able to turn it to 2wd, but it doesn’t make the car smaller. If you just needed a tiny car in all (or most cases), you can’t push a button to make it smaller. You always drive around the extra equipment to possibly make it 4wd.

  Nextcloud is plugin based. Assuming this isn’t locked away on an instance like this, you can literally push a button and make that whole functionality go away everywhere. You can fully remove that ‘clutter’, if that’s of no use to you. They are offering it always, as it adds no additional effort on the hosters side: they don’t need to add gear boxes or whatever to make it have calendar & contacts. If you don’t want/need it, turn it off and it’s gone.

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  • null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Like any analogy, it doesn’t perfectly map to the complex issue being analogised (?), but it’s not as absurd as you’re making out.

    The architecture for plugin support is not free. Even if no plugins are active the platform is built to support all the extra nonsense.

    lighttpd is the leanest webdav implementation i can think of. Obviously it doesn’t have sync and sharing and permissions, but it’s an interesting point of reference demonstrating how over engineered nextcloud really is.

    If you’re a fan, and want all of this stuff bundled together then fine, have at it. As I said up top, I am using it but I dislike it immensely.

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    • Creat@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      As far as analogies go, is pet far off. It doesn’t hold even for basic behaviors of the two cases, let alone complex ones. A better analogy would be that you buy a (small) car that always happens to come with an included, free trailer for more cargo capacity. You can of course take it off and have a small car. And it’s also as magic trailer that doesn’t take up any space at all when not in use.

      I’m actually not a fan, an am also using it somewhat reluctantly personally, though self hosted. I’ve had my issues with it, but an still using it because it solves some issues that are much harder to solve without it. I’m not using the contacts/calendar functionality.

      But your original statement was that you couldn’t understand who would need calendar and contacts (in their file sharing app). There’s enough I object to in this statement that I wrote my comment. First of, in this context, specifically in their article/blog/whatever, it’s about nextcloud as a whole, not the fact that it can do file sharing. That’s what it evolved from, but not all it is any more, more better or worse. Secondly, it’s about an advertised alternative to O365, which includes the very common and almost universal requirement for teams (be it a company, family, …) to have events (=calendar) like schedule meetings with people (=contacts). Even if you work with just like 5 people you are probably gonna need that. There you probably want to share files, but probably more so it’s about the office functionality and collaborative, simultaneous editing of files. Obviously replacing Word, PowerPoint, Excel. And yes, Outlook (calendar,& contacts, also email).

      This isn’t meant for individuals who need a few GB to store some files. It’s for teams of some description that need office like, cloud based tools.

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      • null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Good lord. I’m not having a debate about the adequacy of an analogy. Well done.

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• Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Pretty much every car today IS AWD - a better version of plain old 4WD. So even your analogy doesn’t work.

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  • null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Oh please. AWD is not “better” 4WD. 2 different things for completely different purposes.

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