Could you pay them to host it for you?
Yeah, I totally get what you mean, I am kind of expecting that aswell, but at least I know, that other scouts groups in the area already have a nextcloud and it is actively beeing used, so I have some hopes in that regard. But yeah, getting them to use something like Matrix is probably pretty unrealistic.
possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 2 weeks ago
Good luck, though. I believe first-hand experience with living a self-determined life - including online services - aligns nicely with scout ideals. And trying to convey the media-literacy that allows people to make informed choices.
And I can see some benefits with having documents available to everyone, templates and collaborate on the paperwork...
Glad to hear other groups in the area have success with Nextcloud... Another idea would be to somehow unite and share the hosting bill for a slightly bigger Nextcloud... But I still think my old laptop idea might be promising... depending on the network situation in the building and whether you can make port forwards and all the things that need to be done.
atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Since it’s a public instance you’d want to be sure to keep it pretty up-to-date with new system patches and the latest stable versions of Nextcloud. If you’re comfortable with automating updates with ansible, k8s, docker-compose, etc. then it’s not a big deal. If you’re ssh’ing to a server to manually update things then it’s going to be a lot of overhead and likely forgotten.
Old hardware may also bring its own issues and you’ll need backups especially since old hardware (especially consumer-grade stuff) can fail very unexpectedly. And providing support for users is a whole… other thing…
I like the idea of starting with the “old laptop in a basement” approach as a way to get things going to see if the service provides benefit then look to migrate to a more stable platform in the future.
BennyTheExplorer@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yeah, I guess the plan would be (if we decide to use an old labtop) to have a similar backup system to my home server, so one daily incremental backup with something like borgbackup to a newly bought external hard drive and automated updates using watchtower (I heard major nextcloud upgrades can be tricky though, so I an not shure if it would be a good idea to automate those). I guess it would still suck if the laptop unexpectedly failed and we would have to scramble to find new hardware though, how long would you expect an old laptop to last as a server?
atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Could last years? Or months? Depends on a lot of factors. Fans may not like running 24x7, memory could fail, etc.
AbidanYre@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
How is the other group doing it? Could you leverage any of what they’re using?