Would there be any interest in implementing a single-user version of Nextcloud that is targeted at public hosting providers? By way of analogy, Nextcloud is to Google G Suite as Nextcloud “single-user” is to Google’s free services for consumers. Users would be the only user in their account, would use the same domain provided by the hosting service, but would otherwise have the same capabilities available with a standard Nextcloud deployment.
This sort of configuration would target consumers wanting to shift away from privacy-abusing consumer offerings provided by big tech companies. It would also simplify the deployment for hosting providers because users would actually all be sharing the same instance of Nextcloud in the background. This wouldn’t need to be a separate version of Nextcloud and could be enabled by adding a flag to the config.
During the lockdown in the US, I hacked together a PoC that is mostly functional. It’s been a few months, so I would have to clean up the code a bit before posting it to a public repo. If anyone is interested, it would be great to have a little feedback and assistance. I’m actually thinking about becoming a hosting provider using this sort of model, but it would be nice to have someone more knowledgeable of the inner workings of Nextcloud to take a look at my work.
Sorry, but because of compatibility to the normal Nextcloud (update path) i think there is no main difference to a normal installation possible. Because Nextcloud is a modular system (apps) perhaps there could be an installation with only a few necessary apps and in a special mode (“single-user”) the number of apps can further reduce. Ask perhaps the developers.
From what I can tell, there would only need to be some minor modifications to NC to allow it to operate in “single-user” mode. It wouldn’t disrupt compatibility or the upgrade path but could actually be part of the core system (if there is enough interest, of course).
Right - I just thought I would ask here first since forums are more informal, and I didn’t want to clutter up the bug reports and discussions between the devs. I suppose it may be worth a shot.
