the terms of usage really confuse me on this. there it says:

For the avoidance of doubt, the use of OBSIDIAN for the exercise of your own trade or profession for which you are compensated compensation (e.g. teamwork with colleagues, writing work reports, etc.) does not qualify as Personal Use.

Of course they can’t enforce or control anything if you sync using your own infrastructure so its safe to ignore (for now) but that doesn’t feel great either.

looks very interesting! i was looking for something like obsidian a couple of years ago and i ended up with dokuwiki because its simple, customizable and F(L)OSS. dokuwiki works well enough for me but its somewhat clumsy and doesn’t really work offline.

maybe i am missing something, but i read that you can only use it in non-commercial settings without a license. this introduces an issue for me: not because i want to use it commercially without paying developers, but because from a solarpunk perspective i would like to avoid that dichotomy (commercial vs. non-commercial) altogether.

would love to hear your thoughts on this.

i am always happy to see people setting up their own instance - nextcloud or not - so cheers to that 🙌

its also a good idea to try alternatives to find what suits your needs (and the needs of other users who you share your instance with). no system is perfect and knowing a systems’ issues is important if you are responsible for maintaining it.

i think a diverse landscape of open source project is also important so i am happy to see the link posted by poVoc. good to see that people put effort in making distributed hosting even better.

having said all that i do also want to share a more positive view on nextcloud with you. i genuinely think that nextcloud is a great system. it is easy to install and to maintain. it integrates well enough with most standard applications that people want to use. and if it doesn’t, a work around is usually two clicks away - thanks to the giant user community. in all the years that i have used it (in various contexts) it has rarely let me down. in my opinion it has reached a point (in terms of usability and stability) at which it becomes a great alternative to big tech platforms. importantly: also for organizations which still need to be convinced that free (libre) projects are a “good enough”. to me this last point is especially important - migrating an organization away from big tech can be stressful. relying on nextcloud as a fairly stable system which is used by a huge community lowers my level of stress.

nextcloud is not perfect but it allows me to provide whats needed to those i care about without causing me nightmares :)