Let's Talk about Projects

It continues to be a work-in-progress. No need to wait 10 versions, but rather see how things change from version to version, or look on GIthub to see the commits being worked on. You can “subscribe” to issues and pull requests, which makes it easy to follow along with them and receive updates once any progression occurs.

That is what we’ve got. :person_shrugging:

Exactly how I treat any new announcement, and a principal reason for NextcloudPi Documentation being group sourced.

What about when there’s a project-level decision made by the core development team, then announce that fact early on in a hard-to-miss way, both on nextcloud.com and in this forum?

To my understanding, both the deprecation of the Projects feature, as well as the drop of support of 32-bit systems have been conscious decisions made months or even years ago, and yet apparently both were just rolled out and dumped on unsuspecting users without any explicit fanfare.

I am unfortunate enough to have been affected very profoundly by both changes, both caused considerable amount of headache, extra work and damage control to me.

And conduct of business like these make me (and I’m sure a lot of other people) become heavily doubtful about the openness, faithfulness and predictability of the Nextcloud project, as a whole.

I’m not sure this would be the goal here, what with the public communication encouraging everyone and their grandma to transition to NC from closed cloud platforms, on the premise of being open, private and dependable.

This discussion is definitely going off-topic, but that is cool since projects is deprecated. Might have to break this out into a new topic.

It isn’t happening afaik. It would certainly be ideal, but the reality is the nc team owes us absolutely nothing. Easy to feel resentful of something we are given with no assumed warranty or support.

Incorrect. It is all a series of changes, small and larger, which allow you to sometimes infer what will happen down the road. The only way to know is in testing, or by waiting to see what is discovered. The project depends on community testing. fyi, all major production instances do not follow the stable release schedule and instead conservatively upgrade after testing / multiple point versions.

This is exactly what happened.

Sure, makes complete sense. But, I have to point out:

  • Where are your backups? Roll back and revert.
  • Test updates before putting them into production, on a test instance of Nextcloud.
  • You should heavily reconsider why you are running your business on 32-bit hardware

Your call. I do agree with you that I also find it off-putting. Replacing projects is not something I have any interest in doing Also adds some burnout as I’m unable to find as much time to put to testing, finding and documenting all of these changes… it is a real drag because we receive no donations or financial support in the volunteer community groups, but I suppose I’ve spent too much time in testing Nextcloud relative to how often things change.

Sure, but no one is actually recommending your grandma self-host Nextcloud. If it is mission critical, you can use a hosting provider. There is no shame in it, especially if you do not have a turnkey backup system in order. But, that is separate from these sorts of changes… you are always free to use or discard Nextcloud if you find the changes too much to bear. Life goes on either way. I’d say, if you are unwilling to test changes on a demo instance or keep daily regular backups to external storage, do not self-host Nextcloud and use a hosted provider instead.

Cheers, and thanks for the thoughts.

No, they don’t “owe” us anything. It would just make sense. The official communication is clear: they want to make NC popular, they are advocating for everybody to transition, they make installing it a breeze. This - by the way, very welcome and valuable - effort is jeopardized by the lack of clear communication in these areas and predictability.

Convincing people to start using a platform, and then pulling the rug is a jerk move, even if it’s for free; and it doesn’t make sense, either.

Incorrect. The 32-bit support drop has been admitted on this very forum to have been a conscious decision years ago. And you yourself designated Projects as deprecated, which is by definition a result of a decision.

I mean, having to go into the trouble of reverting from backups isn’t headache in itself? Especially as opposed to being informed in advance that what trouble/change might be expected from an update, making the user able to make an informed decision, instead of damage control.

I usually actually do that, but on an empty test instance I had no chance to notice that the Projects feature disappeared. One can’t expect users to test every single system feature before every version upgrade, just to make sure the devs didn’t decide to pull something quietly.

I think I’m fully justified in running my family NC on a NAS appliance, which happpens to be 32-bit, but otherwise still perfectly suitable to serve the workload. I have a suspicion that a lot of people use NC this way.

And I’m sure that not running a business, just a family instance makes my time much less valuable, but thanks, no thanks.

Seriously argue with a language idiom? :roll_eyes:

It’s not that it’s mission critical. It’s just that the lack of useful communication (among the very loud marketing communication which is abundant) causes unnecessary problems and surprises, which is a perfect way to alienate users, which the team spends so much effort attracting with marketing. It’s not that it’s owed to anyone, it’s just shooting yourself in the foot, and doesn’t make sense.

I’m sure using a hosted provider, where I don’t even have control over version upgrade schedule, would solve the problem of certain, sometimes heavily used features just disappearing overnight. Oh wait…

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Exactly. I often see such comments in Open Source projects: WE don’t owe you anything, this is very arrogant towards us home users, and the message is “Don’t use us, this is no seroius project, please go back to Microsoft and Google - or pay us the 1000/month Enterprise subscription”

It’s not as black and white as you’re trying to present it by tearing this statement completely out of context. Although in my opinion it would be totally legitimate, even if it was. And you know what, Google and MS do such “jerk” moves, as you call them, all the time, and people still continue to pay for their services… https://killedbygoogle.com/

Nextcloud on the other hand, does listen to the community, and puts a lot of effort in making Nextcloud accessable, to as many people as possible, as for example here: 32-bit support (will continue) with Nextcloud 26

And let’s be honest: The project feature is probably not something that home users typically use, and there was no outcry when it was depracted, because most home users probably didn’t even notice it existed in the first place :wink:

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Projects held tremendous promise, because at some point it would be wonderful for all core apps to work together. Clearly, that day is not today. :smiley_cat:

Hopefully more thought went into the decision than just an assumption, because some of us clearly did use it heavily. :person_shrugging:

Anyways, I look forward to any future planning in regards to how nc apps can integrate and work together. If anyone wants to read or add some ideas on expansion of things like system tags between apps, join this discussion.

I’ve been using Projects extensively too, despite being “just” a mere mortal “home user”.

Unfortunately, there’s reason to suspect that decisions are based mostly on hearsay and assumptions. I did receive hints that point to the direction that even the Usage survey data is being discarded.

The fact that 32-bit support has been slated to be left to die out in Hub 3, and after outcry from myself and some other folks who depend on it it was reinstated in v25.0.2, is telling. Even more telling is that it was due to be dropped for good in v26, giving approximately a year’s worth of slack time for users to transition - and recently news emerged of even CI support of it being reinstated for future versions.

I’ll make sure to bring your feedback internally @mortee

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I don’t know the reason in this case… But the the reasons why features are no longer maintained or even get removed in OSS projects are often rather simple and pragmatic. Nobody had time to maintain the feature and there also were no volunteers who wanted to do it. And / or the way the feature was implemented no longer fits into the overall concept and will be replaced by a new feature / concept.

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NC is a profitable company with dozens of employees and partners. They hold huge rollout announcements with professionally prepared presentations, QA’s, marketing materials and all that stuff.

Just because the product is open-source doesn’t mean it’s anything like the fully community-based, haphazardly developed projects. Let’s not confuse things here.

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What does that have to do with anything? Are you paying for your Nextcloud instance? Do you have a support contract? Then contact Nextcloud GmbH and make use of your support contract. I am sure they will try to help you figure out a solution…

No, but with OSS projects there is a chance to participate, and as a last resort you can fork the product. That’s how Nextcloud was born, as a fork of OwnCloud. Anyways, In both cases, there is of course no obligation on the part of the manufacturer / developers to respond to your requests. But in my experience they do listen to the users, like they did when they re-indroduced 32 bit support.

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This in itself basically proves my point. Actually, even though Nextcloud GmbH doesn’t owe me shit, they started thinking about things after the 32-bit “scandal”, realized that they made the wrong move, and acted on it. I got my 32-bit support back (now even extended to v26 and indefinitely), and they are making a conscious effort to improve communication and prevent something like that to happen again.

Even though I’m just a humble home user who doesn’t take advantage of the enterprise support, I (and others who chimed in) were right in pointing out what didn’t make sense, and it made a difference.

Why do you have to dramatize everything?

Notthin wrong with that, but… :wink:

They didn’t re-introduce it because of the dramatic wording of forum participants, instead they did it because (just my assessment) 1.) it was feasible and 2.) there were still more users than they thought there were, and 3.) because they do want their product be accessible for as many people as possible.

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I’m not trying to be dramatic, I’m just taking account of events.

You are right in both 1, 2 and 3; but what made the team realize 1, and that the way it was done is in contradiction with 2 and 3, and made them ultimately act upon it, was that we made our concerns heard.

And I’m just trying to classify things and not necessarily rate them.

Anyways, If I had to guess, I’d say chances are high, that you have to adjust your workflow, because this function will probably not be continued in exactly the same way as it was. But who knows, if enough people come forward, maybe it will be continued. Of course it would be even better, if someone would volunteer and take things into her/his own hands… :wink:

I highly doubt the Projects feature would be brought back, even though I would really appreciate it, as with the Hub 3 upgrade, I did loose all the associations among my Deck cards, boards and files.

What I do want, what I’m advocating for, and what is apparently actually happening is for the NC team to improve processes.

And to debunk the miconception of the NC project as being a bunch of nerds volunteering on an owner-less piece of FOSS software. They are the providers of the German Federal Government’s whole cloud infrastructure, as you can read in the FAQ on the website! Such an organization must be held to totally different standards - but one can only popularize this if the company isn’t kept being pictured as the former.

You might as well just open an issue on GitHub instead of making politics here in the forum :wink:

Can we maybe return to this? If that is a viable alternative to the discountinued Projects feature, I’d like to hear about how it works, too.

@just, @samb92?

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This is the way! :slight_smile: