Show HN: One year of bewCloud (a simpler Nextcloud alternative)

BrunoBernardino | 50 points

Thank you for working on this. As a long term user of Nextcloud, I appreciate alternatives. Nextcloud is a beast with a lot of features but most of the folks I know including me use it mostly for files so projects like these can be useful.

Most lightweight alternatives I found use some non standard format to store files instead of leaving it to the filesystem which keeps me away from using those. I am glad bewCloud is not doing that.

dallamaneni | a day ago

The following command from the README.md for the initial setup failed:

  docker compose run --rm website bash -c "cd /app && make migrate-db"
  make: *** No rule to make target 'migrate-db'.  Stop.
Instead I had to run this:

  docker compose run --rm -it website bash -c "cd /app && deno --allow-read --allow-env --allow-net migrate-db.ts"
noname120 | a day ago

Any and all activity in this domain is appreciated! I used to run Nextcloud for a few companies but.. it's just subpar and like OP rightly states the complexity inherited is out of this world.

dingdingdang | a day ago

> Since I'm not into reinventing the wheel, I don't think I'll work on bringing Contacts/CardDav or Calendar/CalDav back into it.

I initially ran Nextcloud in order to have a self-hosted Dropbox replacement but the shared calendar and excellent web UI eventually became the killer app for our family. We ended up not really using any other part of Nextcloud.

Unfortunately, Nextcloud revamped the calendar UI to the point that it's actively painful to use.

There are _lots_ of open-source Dropbox-like solutions for file sharing, but if I could find a good shared calendar solution _with a decent web UI_, then I could ditch Nextcloud from my self-hosted stack.

bityard | a day ago

The images load very slowly. Perhaps you could downsize them a little? The first one I clicked on was 3283x2015 pixels, way too large for something that occupies maybe a quarter of my screen.

heinrich5991 | a day ago

> Look no further than bewCloud – an innovative, open-source cloud solution crafted with TypeScript and Deno, using Fresh.

This looks interesting and is a space in which I'm definitely interested, but if you're targeting simplicity, I didn't think focusing on the programming tools is the right way to pitch your product.

jayemar | a day ago

Stating that one of the problems with Nextcloud is PHP does not inspire confidence.

greggh | a day ago

I'm yet to figure out why we keep chasing this notion that everything should be on the cloud.

StarOffice/LibreOffice was open sourced 25 years ago. It is still maintained and developed to this day. It can run on any operating system you need, and it uses the same data formats that any "cloud solution" will use as well.

It can not be a matter of "it doesn't have online multi-writer collaboration tools", because if that was such a killer feature, there would be at least a handful of companies developing plugins to support this - or even developed in the project itself.

It can not be a matter of "data always available online", because you could solve this with a virtual online drive that can be browsed and/or synced with your work computer.

The funny thing to me is that mobile-first people prefer to have an app for each separate task, while PC-first people would rather have everything inside a browser window.

rglullis | a day ago

Looks interesting, I'm curious how you settled on WebDAV? A decade ago I built a NextCloud alternative backend that also used WebDAV, and I'm not sure it's something I would ever touch again. Lots of clients say they support WebDAV but they all do slightly different things, and if you own the clients then there are probably simpler protocols.

mnutt | a day ago

Why do they keep using the word cloud for these kind of http file and application servers? There is nothing "cloudy" about them.

Only the actual managed services could reasonably be called cloud computing when they are hosted in an elastic and scalable infra.

prmoustache | a day ago

This looks great.

Another simple alternative to nextcloud is using syncthing with a server as a peer. If you want a web interface, you can point a web file manager like FileGator to the sync'd folder.

jszymborski | a day ago

"What's wrong with Nextcloud or ownCloud?

To start, their resource footprints (CPU, memory) are huge when idle."

I've recently imported something like 2TB into a NextCloud instance on a Debian system. It idles at 0% CPU and 2GB RAM.

I would not choose JavaScript over PHP on the server.

How are you testing security? Do you have a security background?

cess11 | a day ago

I'm curious about encryption with this or any similar service. My understanding with NextCloud is it can be set up with encryption such that the server cannot access the data.

plagiarist | a day ago