2018 and 2019

2018 is over and 2019 starts. This is a great opportunity to look back, reflect and to try to look into the future. I predict that 2019 will be a very good year for privacy, open source and decentralized cloud software. Maybe even the mainstream breakthrough of federated and decentralized internet services!

Let me explain why:

The mainstream opinion about centralized services started to change in 2018 and I think this trend will continue in 2019. More and more people see the issue with large, centralized data silos that control more and more of our private lives, democratic processes and society as a whole. Some examples from 2018 where bad news hit the press include:

Nextcloud 14 and Video Verification

Today the Nextcloud community released Nextcloud 14. This release comes with a ton of improvements in the areas of User Experience, Accessibility, Speed, GDPR compliance, 2 Factor Authentication, Collaboration, Security and many other things. You can find an overview here

But there is one feature I want to highlight because I find it especially noteworthy and interesting. Some people ask us why we are doing more than the classic file sync and share. Why do we care about Calendar, Contacts, Email, Notes, RSS Reader, Deck, Chat, Video and audio calls and so on.

Nextcloud Talk is here

Today is a big day. The Nextcloud community is launching a new product and solution called Nextcloud Talk. It’s a full audio/video/chat communication solution which is self hosted, open source and super easy to use and run. This is the result of over 1.5 years of planing and development.

For a long time it was clear to me that the next step for a file sync and share solution like Nextcloud is to have communication and collaboration features build into the same platform. You want to have a group chat with the people you have a group file share with. You want to have a video call with the people while you are collaborative editing a document. You want to call a person directly from within Nextcloud to collaborate and discuss a shared file, a calendar invite, an email or anything else. And you want to do this using the same login, the same contacts and the same server infrastructure and webinterface.

Nextcloud gets End to End Encryption

Today is a special day for Nextcloud and me because Nextcloud gets a cool and important new capability. This is end to end encryption for file sync and share. Nextcloud supports server side encryption for a long time and all file transfer over the internet is encrypted with

TLS/SSL of course. But there is still the need for full end to end encryption to make sure that the data is secure in all scenarios. One

Is doing nothing evil?

Last weekend I attended the openSUSE conference in Nürnberg. This is a really nice conference. Awesome location, great people, and an overall very relaxed atmosphere. I gave a talk about Nextcloud Security and what we plan to do in the future to make hosting a Nextcloud instance even easier and more secure.

I attended the Saturday keynote which triggered a reaction on my side that I wanted to share. This is only my personal opinion and I’m sure a lot of people think differently. But I can’t help my self.