Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring: Built together, designed for the future

I love nextcloud and have been using it for years. However recently I've considered taking my instance offline or at least behind a VPN because even if only 10% is true of what AI folks are claiming about LLMs finding exploits left and right, it seems super risky to be hosting your private data on nextcloud.

How do you folks deal with these massively increased threats to self-hosted open source apps?

Nextcloud has the most confusing versioning of any software I have ever used.

Nextcloud Hub 26 is Nextcloud 34 and follows Nextcloud Hub 9 which is Nextcloud 33.

And I could be off on those exact numbers.

NextCloud Notes is frustratingly broken for offline use. The UI bricks itself with its own error messages when it can't phone home to the server. Even notes which are marked in the app as "Make available offline" don't work offline!

The iOS applications also are quite poor. For example the home screen widget has never shown me any of my favorited items even though it should, I have many favorited items, it is fully synced when I'm on my home network, yet it says "no favorites".

Considering the size of NextCloud and how long they've been around I wish they would fully complete more of their offerings before launching a dozen new ones.

Nextcloud is great, I self-host an instance at home. I mostly use the calendar, address book, and file sharing with links a la Google Drive. It's probably heavier and slower than it should be for what it does, but it works.

Just like Home Assistant, it is a "must have" tool for self-hosters.

This is a niche use, but I use the PhoneTrack app[1] with Nextcloud. It allows me to track my phone without relying on a third party service. It saved my ass already when I lost my phone in the park one night, and it's a nice way to track long hiking trips or road trips too as it saves the gpx and lets you export it:

https://github.com/julien-nc/phonetrack

I now use Nextcloud both for a family server and an academic lab. It has become such a daily part of my life, and I am really grateful for it. I just wish the network effects were stronger so I could benefit more from the federated features, and people didn't think it is so weird to get a Nextcloud link.

Lab use: https://git.medlab.host/MEDLab/Handbook/src/branch/main/docs...

Personal use: https://nathanschneider.info/2026/06/toward-a-durable-writin...

I left nextcloud because how slow it felt even on my beefy server. I switched to opencloud.eu, it might have less features but it's just what I needed

> Your apps are now available via focused waffle menu for centralized access to all your apps. It reduces distraction and uses the interface space efficiently as your your library grows.

"your your" typo aside, I remember when Nextcloud moved from a drop-down menu for the apps to listing them all out separately on the header bar, to make them more visible and reduce the clicks to switch apps. I guess they've changed their minds again; I look forward to when they change them back.

Upgraded yesterday, I only use a small amount of features (files, memories, calendar, tasks). It sucks that tasks isn't compatible yet (but I mostly use DAVx⁵/Tasks.org as front-end), and it sucks that the landing page still pulls close to 20MB or so, but besides that, nothing to report one way or another.

I love Nextcloud but I feel like they should really completely redo their UI. It just doesn't look like something from this decade.

Been using Nextcloud exclusively for probably 4 years now? Before that it was a mix of nextcloud + Google Drive. It works for me really well, I can grab my files through my vpn with any of my computers when I am not at home.

If I want to buy a small NAS that just runs Nextcloud and has a copy of my Google Photos library - what do I go with?

I don't have a ton of space so something that fits in the media center.

How is OpenCloud a serious competitor?

Maybe I'm alone but nextcloud has gone from being kinda flaky and annoying to really great the past few years.

Is nextcloud the good one and owncloud the inferior one?

Am I the only one who doesn’t trust Nextcloud because they use Vimeo instead of a privacy-respecting CDN to showcase videos of their project?

I run Nextcloud at home with 1.5TB of files and 2 users, on a reasonably sized server. It is painfully slow. Still better than OneDrive, but only just: synscing takes forever, never reaching a fraction of available bandwidth. Upload from my phone is flaky, often hangs and needs manual intervention. It is a battery drain. The whole experience with add-ons and the general UI feels like a 2010 PHP app.

I am grateful Nextcloud exists, but no app deserves a vibe coded Rust rewrite more than Nextcloud. Literally nothing to loose