A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| SFTP | Secure File Transfer Protocol for encrypted file transfer, over SSH |
| SMB | Server Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native |
| SSH | Secure Shell for remote terminal access |
[Thread #69 for this comm, first seen 7th Feb 2026, 09:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Why are files unusable outside of Nextcloud? Consider using the External Storage plugin.
Imo there are two types of file servers: smart clouds with offline and smart selective on-demand sync on brand-specific clients, groupware support, conflict resolution, and enterprisy plugins (Nextcloud, Opencloud, Seafile, etc); and dumb clouds with protocol-based file transfers and filesystem-tree/userperms instant compliance (copyparty, sftpgo, etc)
Of the first one, only Opencloud has a native-looking filesystem (PosixFS) and does it without dependency on a db. It supports smart sync for Windows (via the same API OneDrive uses). Linux smart sync is sadly nonexistent due to lack of protocols, and whatever other software do (e.g. using an .owncloud placeholder file) is highly experimental.
Of the second type, you'd get all the standardizations and speed but no bidirectional sync nor offlineness - again this is honestly an advanced undertaking requiring academic understanding of distributed systems and whatnot. On Linux you may try emulating some aspects of it via a half-smart client like rclone with VFS, but the UX to store files offline is still not there.
Knowing these constraints I'd tier my storage into 2 parts: the daily files like notes and recent photos stored in one of the smart sync solution, ready for download and later offline use; and anything unnecessary (Jellyfin media, archives, ) to be in a dumb SMB share/SFTP mount.
If all you really need is SMB, then try Tailscale so you can access your computers as if you were local, from anywhere.
You can access all Nextcloud files over WebDAV. That is natively supported by many file browsers, including explorer.exe on Windows.
And you can choose in the Linux client what folders to sync.
What the Linux client (in contrast to the Windows client) does not support is having virtual files in a folder and only downloading files on demand.
Apart from that, have you looked at Opencloud?
On Windows, Nextcloud seems to tap into some Windows function to provide files on demand. Is there any Linux cloud file service that can do it?
Nextcloud implements webdav, which you can use rclone to mount as a remote.
Also many distros have an online account option which does the same thing
In my experience it's not quite the same. Using webdav through the distro account seems that it's fully online. And folder access or file access contacts the server.
The virtual file experience is more of a hybrid. All the folders actually exist on disk, as well as shells for every file. If you try to open a virtual file, in the background Windows will seamlessly download it for you. At that point the file is actually on your disk. This way regularly accessed files on on your hard drive and seldom accessed ones are not, saving local hard drive space while providing an experience almost like if all the files were actually on your drive.
You could probably do this with FUSE. Guess nobody cared to make that yet.
It exists and I've tried it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davfs2
Thing is, when an app thinks a directory is on a local disk, it does things which do not scale well over a network. e.g. reading every file in the directory to make thumbnails.
Seafile has fuse for accessing it as a folder.
What the Linux client (in contrast to the Windows client) does not support is having virtual files in a folder and only downloading files on demand.
This is specifically what I want.
And...somehow I missed opencloud in all of my searching? I think I may have mentally combined it with OwnCloud/OCIS. It looks promising. Diving into the docs, now.
Opencloud is a fork of the new Owncloud, I think. Similar to how Nextcloud was forked from the old Owncloud.
It's actually funny and sad at the same time. Nextcloud used to be just simple and only focused around file hosting..
I think you're remembering Owncloud, not Nextcloud. Owncloud was all about file sync and would often break/remove other modules on upgrade. Nextcloud forked off and included calendar/contacts/etc. by default.
I'm curious what you mean by files being unusable outside Nextcloud? Are you using server-side encryption?
Edit: to sync only selected folders, there should be a Choose what to sync button. Or you can skip the initial sync config and set per-folder sync afterwards from settings.
This confused me at first with Nextcloud also. What I think OP means is that by default the Nextcloud stores the files shared in a database, not the server's local filesystem. My first question when I setup Nextcloud was literally, "Ok, now that I've set things up and got the mobile app accessing it, how the heck to I access those files when I ssh into the server running Nextcloud. You can share directories from the server's filesystem with Nextcloud. But it's not obvious at first how to do that, especially if you're running Nextcloud from a docker container. If you're used to the way Dropbox works and (almost) the way OneDrive works, this distinction can be confusing and frustrating. It still frustrates me, because it complicates access control over those files and I practically never have a need for the files stored in Nextcloud's default places. I'm not sharing the Nextcloud instance or the server with anyone else and I want to access files from the CLI always, so I don't have any use for Nextcloud's defaults.
Nextcloud Linux client has an option to selectively sync folders no?
Yes.
It does in the version I am using
There’s opencloud which seems to be exactly what you’re looking for – a files-only lightweight alternative for nextcloud. When I was looking for the post on hacker news I also ran across karadav which seems like it might be a nice hybrid between the DAVs suggested by other users and your existing nextcloud install.
Opencloud is a fork from Owncloud Infinite Scale just as nextcloud was a fork from the old Owncloud version.
Apparently much much simpler and more performant than nextcloud in almost every way. It also has a secure file sharing link feature.
They are also based in Germany.
I am about to spin up opencloud behind traefik and authelia hopefully this week or weekend.
Thanks for clearing that up!
i was also going to suggest opencloud as an option - i'm looking to move my setup from nextcloud to opencloud when i have the time to migrate
Pretty sure you should have the ability to choose what to sync, either from the server, or the client. Seems kind of dumb for it to automatically assume you have the space on the client device to sync EVERYTHING.
I thought the same thing, but I've spent a good chunk of time looking at every button in the linux client, and it's just options of "sync: y/n", with an initial choice of "do not sync if folder size is 500MB+". And the files/folders not synced do not show up locally. The windows client lets you see everything, but only download when you open or pick "save locally". But not on Linux.
Docs say you can choose what to sync, and disable syncing entirely where you don't want it: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/user_manual/en/desktop/usage.html
There should be a nearly identical menu to the Windows version that lets you select or deselect folders.
Click on your account > settings. And then it will show the list of folders available to sync.
You can select which files you sync. I have a couple of folders that sync everywhere, and some are only synced on one machine.
I use Syncthing and Resilio Sync for this stuff.
Both of them sync according to rules you define.
I sync my mobile devices to home this way, and access the folders on the server via SMB shares (which are unrelated to ST or Resilio).
No web interface required, as you just use whatever network sharing you want at home.
What "extra steps" are you running into with SyncThing? Its really flexible (especially Syncthing-Fork for Android). Maybe it or Resilio can be configured to do what you need.
For example,, I use the Selective Sync feature in Resilio so that I can access any file at home whenever I want without using a VPN.
I found that the resilio mobile app would use up a lot of battery at night (sometimes about 10% an hour).
Syncthing was better for that, but would sometimes just stop updating on a phone. I would check and it would have not been syncing for weeks and be signed out of the web UI.
I've replaced my nextcloud install with copyparty... Nextcloud went tits up for me after a reboot, the database kept complaining about illegal characters. I have no idea how to solve it, after restoring a backup proved fruitless. So I dropped it. I already had a test instance of copyparty running, I just incorporated the nextcloud data folder to it.
The only thing I miss is the cookbook. But I have the json files, I think I'll cobble together a json interpreter for the files so that I can copy the recipes into some other application.
The only thing from your list that copyparty can't do is keep files offline. It doesn't use a sync-ing client.
It's not free but it's awesome and cheap. Setup a WebDAV share and join it using "Mountainduck.io". It connects to everything like SMB but I find WebDAV's multichannel is more performant in the long run. Checks notes Win/Mac only sorry.
I'm searching too. Seafile keeps popping up, but I haven't looked at it yet.
Seafile apparently obfuscates the files, which is not great. If it dies, or they pull some weird shutdown shenanigans, what happens to my files? Nexcloud, at least, is readable and organized, if (in my opinion) weird.
Damn I didn't know that. Crossing that of my list for sure.