Free web-files "cloud" solutions?

Development
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I was not aware that https://hubzilla.org (which evolved from Friendica to Red to Hubzilla) has also become an actual alternative to Nextcloud, a wiki, and a website CMS, besides to the social network forum things.

Due to the dev model, data handling, SSO features etc. it appears Hubzilla may even fit well within the freedombox vision. But I have no experience with it, has sombody gotten some experience?

Here is a quote from the project dev:

I don’t have any need or desire to use Facebook or Twitter. I don’t need Nextcloud or MediaGoblin or Drupal or Diaspora or GNU-Social or Mastodon or Wordpress. I’ve got all of the features from those applications that I want - right now, without needing those applications. I’ve got as much privacy as I want or need - up to top secret messages between top secret friends if I need that level of privacy. I can share photos from my photo albums and videos from my library with selected friends and only those selected friends. I’ve got 16 years of my online life literally in my pocket. Everything I need to keep from my online life over those years. I can spin it up on any server in the world at any time and have all my friends and all my content intact if the datacenter serving my stuff gets hit by a nuclear warhead. I can spin it up right now and keep it all synced between servers as I add new content - and switch to another server at any time; for just a few minutes or a few years. My server is my social network, even though I’m the only person with an account on it. My friends have their own servers and these all work together. It’s my personal cloud and my file sharing app. If I allow you to see my videos you can see them. If I don’t - you can’t and there’s nothing you can do about it. You don’t need a password on my machine to do this. You just be yourself and do your own thing, and if you can see them you’ll see them. I don’t see targeted ads. My dead friends don’t recommend products for me to buy (this actually happened to me once on Facebook). I don’t get spam from Twitter begging me to login and let them analyse me.

This is what we mean by “own your data”.

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The documentation seems to provide a more precise introduction about what it is than the homepage:
https://zotlabs.org/help/en/about/about#What_is_Hubzilla_

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There is a recent ITP, so it looks like someone is working on packaging it in Debian:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=950399

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Thanks, there is actually some packaging work to get that tried and tested network into debian to be seen at: https://salsa.debian.org/debian/hubzilla

And there seems to be another free “cloud” web frontend, similar to hubzilla, but based on the classic XMMP network. Still adding public publishing (blog/news), timelines, and video chats (compatible to recent conversations.im), and it’s already in debian: https://movim.eu/

Movim would also seems a good fit for XMPP on the freedombox (where hardware performance allows for actual publishing and not just the server and a JSXC webclient), but is lacking those hubzilla features that came with its years of experience.

Added:

A look at these hub/pod software projects showing their own public dev blog channels:
https://nl.movim.eu/?node/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim
https://zotlabs.org/channel/hubzilla

There seems to be some overlap with the Nextcloud thread (Status NextCloud as App?) and its features concerning internal drive filebrowsing, but I’m not sure how far this goes.

And it’s the same with the new pydio cells web interface posted there.

Hubzilla, without the current unfinished packaging state of these two, seems to be a typical PHP website installation (also possible on a freedombox: Installing and containing custom applications/software).

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Found the kind of feature table I was looking for:
https://zotlabs.org/page/zotlabs/comparison+hubzilla+zap

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I am always surprised that there are yet more well thought out projects, and some even already available in debian.

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I had made a request to add hubzilla to the FreedomBox wishlist and was informed about this old discussion. Sorry for bumping the topic. Just wanted to know if the packaging had progressed any further along.

I just manually installed hubzilla on Pioneer FreedomBox-HSK. Seems to work fine. Hardest part for me was getting around the FreedomBox layout of having one portal “www.mydomain.com/APP” with ProxyPass /APP to app servers on localhost.

My kludge was to just configure another vhost/subdomain “zot.mydomain.com” in /etc/apache2/sites-available/ and use certbot to get a letsencrypt SSL cert.

Then created simple-minded re-write rule in /etc/apache2/conf-availble/hubzilla.conf
to basically map www.mydomain.com/zot to zot.mydomain.com and vice versa.

Only bug I’m having is that under the hubzilla single-sign-on avatar there’s a “Take me home” option in the dropdown list which takes me to zot.mydomain.com/plinth which doesn’t exist. But I can backspace and replace with “/channel/username” and I’m back in hubzilla.

Probably a conflict between my rewrite rules and freedombox’s RedirectMatch
I’m not a developer nor apache2 guru. Also have never packaged anything for debian or Freedombox.

Hubzilla is just a standard LAMP webapp with git source.
So installation is just to first install git on FreedomBox. Then use git to clone source somewhere like /var/www/zot
then run .homeserver/zotserver-setup.sh with configuration options and let the script install mariadb, create hubzilla database and users, grab php-pecl, imagemagick, wget, curl, convert, etc.and whatever else it needs.

After which the user uses the browser to complete the setup and finally register a new user account with login/password.

The only real wrinkle in the setup is that new registrations must first be verified by sending an email via sendmail which will need to first be configured to use real login credentials with external smtp server like gmail. Alternatively, one can edit the .htconfig.php file before attempting the first registration and disable the email verification. If you mess up the email verification, the system obviously won’t let unverified bots create accounts and login. So the solution is to run a mysql commandline SQL to unset a flag for the user that needs to login without having been verified. Once logged in as administrator, one can enable the phpmailer plugin which might be simpler than configuring sendmail to send emails via relay like gmail.

I have another hubzilla account on a tower server. I will clone my identity from that server to this singleboard Pioneer FreedomBox-HSK to test its performance. If it performs well, I might then migrate my identity from main hubzilla server to this pocket computer or just keep the two accounts in sync for a while. My idea is to use this FreedomBox to run hubzilla for just myself/family and not scores of users. I expect it will be fast enough for my needs. Don’t anticipate it could handle scores or hundreds of users and connections.

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Hi, thank you for your findings. Still strugling with more basic issues here, but I bookmarked this advice, not sure if it can be of help:

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This finally looks like decent, easy to use web-frontend to server data, that can nicely work on top of the filesystem (and on top of syncthing and other sharing protocols).

And even on lower powered servers.

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Too bad…

At a further look Filestash could be seem a pseudo-selfhosting project. Only cloudy backends, dockered, and a filesystem backend is missing.

And a very unfortunate (in)ability to work together constructively with contributing individuals:

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Found they later published a more elaborated, explaining stance:

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Sounds pretty good to “webshare” some directory like /home.

And from https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/ewar9a/owncloud_or_nextcloud_or_something_else/fg2aq6h/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 :

When it comes to syncthing, I just release a new feature that integrate both together. It’s quite basic but once enable, your syncthing instance will be available by an admin (under /admin/syncthing).

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