I am using NC 25.0.2 today I received the following notification: “This is the unsupported community build of Nextcloud. Given the size of this instance, performance, reliability and scalability cannot be guaranteed. Push notifications are limited to avoid overloading our free service. Learn more about the benefits of Nextcloud Enterprise at https://nextcloud.com/enterprise.”
I haven’t received this notification before, why it came now and how to fix it, I don’t need the Enterprise version
no changes were made to the configuration either, user authorization via ldap.
What is meant by >500 users in total registered or currently authorized >500?
Anyways… NC Inc decided that they’d push their fairuse policy a bit more. So they think an instance with 500+ users isn’t really a homeinstance anymore but a somehow professional used one. And they want professionals to sign a supportcontract for being sure for them to receive the best support they can get with their big instances. owners of such big instances might have a different need for support than the common homeuser.
So this is why they now hint towards their fairuse policiy more clearly.
If you feel that this isn’t valid for your instance you’d need to get in touch with NC GmbH to get your own quote.
As far as I know this was introduced with the release of Nextcloud 24 or 25. Either way, this is not something we can really help with here, because this forum is meant for home and small business users that do not host anywhere close to 500 users on their instances. I would recommend you to contact the Nextcloud GmbH in order to get more detailed and accurate information on this topic.
I believe that each of us begrudges Nexcloud GmbH every paying customer. The work they do is really good.
But that doesn’t change the fact that the software is licensed under GNU AGPLv3, which means that anyone can use the unmodified software unlimitedly.
The error messages due to exceeding the fair user policy are inconsistent, sometimes they write about an unsupported community edition, sometimes they explain in more detail that the proxy for push notifications to mobile devices is only offered for private instances up to 500 users. All messages, in part including a link to the contact form of the GmbH’s sales department, are shown to all users, which is unsatisfactory on several levels.
organisations that are not private, but use the Community Edition, are assumed in this way that they are using the Nextcloud GmbH proxy, although they are not allowed to do so. In fact, we admins currently have no choice at all: the server push-notifications.nextcloud.com is simply used, that is hard-coded. If there are (actually) more than 1000 “seen users”, this function is no longer used and the confusing messages are displayed instead. If I don’t have programmers in my organisation, I can only live with the messages (and confused users) or have to contract.
All instances within the EU are probably affected by the fact that the proxy exists. If you have data of your users processed by a third party, you have to conclude a commissioned data processing agreement with this third party according to Art. 28 GDPR. And even the mere routing of data to a specific end device is in the end processing. Most Nextcloud operators probably don’t even know that the push notifications on their mobile phones are not generated by an app polling in the background or sent directly from their Nextcloud server to the mobile phone. The fact that the Nextcloud GmbH proxy is used is described neither in the user guide nor in the admin guide. Even the privacy terms of Nextcloud GmbH Privacy - Nextcloud explicitly state that the apps communicate directly with their own Nextcloud server:
“Our apps only communicate with your own Nextcloud server and do not send any data to us. […] Only a header with a subject is sent via Google, but in encrypted form, and the rest of the content is retrieved directly from your Nextcloud server and not sent through Google. […]”
If you have less than 1000 seen users or a support contract, you may not even know that Nextcloud GmbH operates this proxy server and may therefore already have an incomplete privacy policy in place.
Otherwise you can just ignore the message.