@Avron Thanks for sharing your views.
With the points in the list I just wanted to put together what I think could be considered as useful for about every installation. The features are mostly there, but I got the impression there tend to be long pending issues that impair the use for almost everyone, like the missing xmpp file upload. There seem to be way more issues as would have to be expected, if the freedombox software were to be used in practice by the people and foundation behind freedombox. (As common basic issues supposedly would be in their way, too, and could get ironed out quickly.)
Global email sending: Yes exactly, as you said, that feature would definitely need to support forwarding from an external domain, relay servers or a VPN, to really be useful for “everyone” in practice, without requiring a full (v)server install in a data center. (Email server progress? - #22 by NickA)
GNU Jami: Running a node on a server would be useful to always have a “rendevous point” available (24x7 for conferences), for central client administration (JAMS), and pointing apps to a self-hosted dht proxy (mobile devices) as well as own STUN/TURN server.
Syncthing: It should already sync over the internet just fine, even faster and more efficient then nextcloud. What I think is missing with freedombox+syncthing is self-hosting the discovery and relay server. The more general issue is implementing a filesystem access concept (filebrowser webinterface like FileStash, and also using the filesystem when pointing other apps, e.g. to email attachments etc., with seamlessly integrated group access permissions )
- Default user (/home) shares and out-of-the-box collaboration
- brush-up-groupdirs.sh ($518) · Snippets · FreedomBox / FreedomBox · GitLab
Installing and ultimately having to integrate a third-party app platform like Nextcloud on top of freedombox would be all the less desirable and not necessary anymore, then (with a web-based file access solution and apps configured to make good use of the common /home filesystem tree on the freedombox).
Calendar/Contacts: Do you have them in an integrated web(mail) frontend, e.g. to browse your feedombox files and send a document to a contact?
ikiwi: Serving just a static site (publicly) should be much more secure than running a dynamic CMS site (on a basicly only distro-administered freedombox server, no matter if on a low-power home or more performant in-house or data-center server. And ikiwiki wasn’t very simple or intuitive to use or comming with a nice and usable default configuration. Besides, the freedombox.org site is already using Lektor, but it has not been implemented as a freedombox package (website: Static website generator (#1323) · Issues · FreedomBox / FreedomBox · GitLab).