An easy online home for you and your friends
Getting Together
If you love the convenience of online productivity tools but you're wary of giving up your privacy, set up your own Nextcloud virtual private server.
Recent years have seen a growing interest in leaving proprietary, life-sucking social media for healthier, less-invasive alternatives such as Mastodon and friendica. That's great, but social media is not the only thing we do online. What about sharing documents and communicating with colleagues? Is it possible to work online without walled gardens like Dropbox or Google Drive?
This two-part tutorial presents an easy open source solution for online collaboration and file sharing. Nextcloud [1] is a free application that bundles in a user-friendly interface (Figure 1), online storage, webmail, collaborative editing of office documents, instant messaging, videoconferencing, and more. Nextcloud's online file manager supports previews of many file types and includes a WYSIWYG Markdown editor. All the other services you configure in Nextcloud are accessible from the top toolbar and available through mobile platforms with the official Nextcloud app.
This article explains how to install Nextcloud on any Linux web server and how to set up and use its primary functions. Next month, I will describe some lesser-known extensions to make Nextcloud even more useful.
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