Nextcloud 25 released to stable

Continuing the discussion from Nextcloud Office release solves document compatibility, overhauls knowledge management:

Nextcloud 25 is available in the stable branch as 25.0.0.0 as of now. Probably available across the usual, gradual rollout.

  • aka Hub 3

FIXED Deck error - Resolved by release of app 1.8.0 to appstore.

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4 posts were split to a new topic: "It seems like you are running a 32-bit PHP version. Nextcloud needs 64-bit to run well. Please upgrade your OS and PHP to 64-bit!suppo

Just upgraded. 25 broke my theme settings. Had to reset them.

New release, unfortunately most apps not compatible (yet). That’s the usual wating game after a new NC release.

However, what’s that message in the admin UI:

That looks like there is some kind of limitation on bigger instances…

Took a look at the source and found a line in lib/private/Notification/Manager.php (see https://github.com/nextcloud/server/blob/v25.0.0/lib/private/Notification/Manager.php#L308): Here’s a check for a valid subscription or less than 500 “seen” users, otherwise this is not a “fair use of free push service”.

Questions:

  • What’s the “unsupported community build of Nextcloud”?
  • What are these “push notifications” (web, mobile, both - NC Talk also affected)?
  • What means “limited”? Is there kind of a rate limit
    • with delayed delivery?
    • “hard” rate limit
    • no notifications at all?
  • What’s that “free service”? Can this be self hosted not to “overload the free service”?

I wasn’t able to find any official statement/documentation on this.

I mean, that looks fishy, just like NC is trying to force bigger instances into a subscription: “If you have no subscription, we reduce the features”. With NC 25 it’s some kind of “free push notification service”, but what comes next? Some apps are only available for subscribers?
If I remember correctly, this was exactly the reason for the fork from ownCloud years ago…

So, a lot of questions, hope that these can be clarified by an official satement.

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Looking into the git-blame it looks like 2 months ago they moved from blocking instances with over 5000 users to rate-limiting instances with over 500 users: Fix wording of undeliverable push notifications · nextcloud/server@85eb3b2 · GitHub

I feel like I read at some point they were using google’s Firebase for cloud push but can’t find confirmation for that, if so it’s usually non-trivial to swap that out due to how clients interact with it. I do know that if you use the F-droid built Nextcloud applications on Android Push notifications are disabled. You still end up with polled notifications which isn’t that bad (except with NC Talk, it’s unusable).

I feel that’s it’s fair that they rate-limit free push notifications for larger user-bases, after all it’s costing them money, I’ll note RocketChat does the same thing so you could see this as a “standard” way of encouraging community use while avoiding burdensome costs.

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Afaik this has been discussed before (not sure whether I saw that discussion on GitHub or on the forums) Anyways, @dugite-code has summed up the problem well as far as I can tell with my limited knowledge. Also, as far as I understand it, in Nextcloud 25 only the message about the “Rate Limit” is new, whereas before it just didn’t always work reliably. Now the users at least know what to expect. :wink:

Yep, afaik pretty much all bigger opensource projects that are using Google’s Firebase for cloud push notifications are facing this issue…

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That exsplains why I was almost choking on my morning coffee when I loggedin this morning. Updates to look-and-feel aswell. Have not discovered any bugs so far, but I will play around with it.

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Thank you for Nextcloud 25. Even though many are happy about the new features of Nextcloud 25. Those who work productively with their Nextcloud should perhaps wait a little longer. I always do that - not only with Nextcloud.

You do not have to use the release on the first day of the new release. Most Windows users don’t do that either on Windows 10/11 :wink: You wait until the software has aged a little.

Ok. Of course, I’ve had it on my test system for a few weeks now. I was so curious :wink:

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Do you guys know if it will fix the print problem in office ?

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OK, there’s a quote from Nextcloud GmbH regarding this, but as I can see it, it’s simply wrong.
The limit is 500 and it’s also in the Zip release.

They also say that no access to the notification services is possible.

Really confused about this.

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Thanks a lot for NC25. Upgrading from 24.0.6 to 25.0.0 based on the official docker images works smooth. Most of as incompatible marked apps - important for me is fulltext-search with elastic - works also atm. Great work!

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I’d love to read documentation on this. Have you found any?

That’s the problem: I wasn’t able to find any official documentation. Just stumbled upon the message from the screenshot in a test instance and took a look at the source code to find out what’s going on.

I’m just curious: Today NC disables or limits access to the notification service, but what comes next? Subscriber-only apps? Max. number of users without subscription? This could lead into the wrong direction imho.

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You are grossly overreacting. They are offering push notifications when before they offered none. Limiting it to 500 whatever per Nextcloud server seems more than reasonable, because they don’t have to offer anything.

I agree that I’d like to see some clear documentation on it.

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With no official information, we can only guess what’s going on.

But when there are no notifications at all in some circumstances, this would be a pretty hard cut.
Notifications is not a new feature, this was part of the very first version of NC (and OC before).

I don’t want be be gross here, I’m really sorry if it came across that way.
But providing no information at all about such a change is not the best way. Imho this should be openly communicated before putting it into a release.

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An issue / ticket about this:

There’s no movement regarding this… Is that the beginning of the end for the community version, many developers invested their time and now Nextcloud GmbH showing this message:

Right now the answer from Nextcloud GmbH is: disable the whole notification app (if I understood correctly) but still we get this message on the login page (first thing a new user sees - many questions like unsupported - that’s not true, it’s supported by the community and all People · Nextcloud · GitHub)

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Let’s make this right please, super simple: just show this message for the Administrator

I think also that is not ok. It is ok to deny Nextcloud GmbH services e.g. push services. But the form of messages to users of a predominantly freely developed software is not okay. I think Nextcloud must change it.

Work around until it is not changed:
Maybe you can change the code Manager.php. Search isFairUse . Maybe you must search other parts of the software or e.g. delegateHasValidSubscription- Funny it says 1000 instead of 500. But i am not a programmer either. Maybe it is the wrong part of the software.

Is this allowed? I think yes. That Nextcloud GmbH does not allow free push services for more than xxx users is ok and I also understand that. But also the software is AGPL and i can change the software if i deactivate the push service from Nextcloud, too.

Nevertheless, I support it of course when customers get a license from Nextcloud GmbH.

Fwiw I see no controversy here because if someone has over 500 users on a personal installation… please set up your own push notification service if you have that level of power.

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@just Absolutely! But there is no way of doing that or I am wrong? Or maybe you mean forking the codebase and remove isFairUseOfFreePushService + change the push notification implementation?

Still the solution is super simple: just show this message to the Administrator