Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Community Communications Systems [was Equal Access [was Dropbox Limit Solution

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

> On May 16, 2022, at 9:58 PM, Henning Mortensen <hmortensen [at] gmail.com> 
> wrote:
> 

Thank you for posting this history. I’m sure other communities will recognize 
the pattern of services becoming insufficient. One reason to develop a 
comprehensive software for cohousing communities is so new communities can 
start off right and not have to go through this. A good software will also help 
them get organized.

> Our fourth system, the system which I would like to implement but which
> people are not willing to learn, is a hosted NextCloud system which you can
> self host or pay to have hosted. This pulls your data back under your own
> control and ownership. When you store your data in cloud services like box,
> google, dropbox and others, you do not own the data, they do.

And they can change the terms of agreement, even close down at anytime. The may 
or may not provide fair warning but even if they do, you have to be able to 
export your information in a format that can be imported somewhere else. 

A few years ago there was a photography storage site that was very popular with 
photographers. The photographers could post links to their photos on other 
sites where the photographs would appear. One day all of them got up and 
discovered over morning coffee that all those links were no longer working. 
These are people who are making a living and supporting families with those 
links.

The provider had decided that if you wanted to link to photos, you had to pay 
$400, immediately. Since none of the links were now working, there was no new 
income. Unless you had a spare $400 sitting in the bank, you had no business.

Unless the stuff is under your control, it isn’t safe.

NextCloud
> stores data on your servers, either physical or rented in the cloud and
> therefore you retain ownership. NextCloud has unix based storage which
> means you can limit security down to the individual file and an owning
> group or individual.  Nextcloud has a calendaring option which allows use
> of multiple calendars. It also has many apps. Some of my favourites are a
> personal recipe book that keeps your recipes organized, a world internet
> radio tuner, weather apps, photo organizer etc. If you can think of it,
> likely someone else has already created an app to do it. Nextcloud is open
> source and has an active community supporting it. Your data is secured with
> encryption and you are managing your own system.

This is their website. It looks very interesting. Their headline is “Regain 
Control."

https://nextcloud.com/

I haven’t explored it yet to see what people would have to learn but I suspect 
that for many communities having your own server would be a problem. And 
expensive.

Exploring all the options would take time — is there a demo site somewhere?

> I run it as a virtual machine on our internal server

Our TechPod people maintain all our switches and routers and cables but refuse 
to maintain a server. Our last super tech moved to California but we still call 
him. With video calls, he walks them through things. But he also travels. Once 
he was hiking in the Alps, but they did connect with his basecamp. That evening 
he phoned in they all huddled in the basement and fixed things.

> << ignore this next paragraph if you are not techy>>.Our internal server is a 
> Dell Poweredge r410 which can be purchased on Ebay
> for $300-$1000 depending on storage and memory. This server cost many
> thousands when it was new. It is now past its supported life

Can you post this to the list I just started for the techy stuff. There are 
people there who would understand it and welcome it. It seems very expensive.

communityrootcellar+subscribe [at] groups.io

> Future exploration includes VPN services, PiHole to strip out
> advertisements, and a community hosted Plex server.  I miss the exploration
> part of my former IT career, I just don't miss the politics. Anyone doing
> similar stuff that wants to share ideas?

There are definitely people on Root Cellar who have information. What I’m 
hoping is that we can eventually set up a system or a handbook that explains to 
communities what they could do with these abilities — and what they are. 

I consider myself pretty well informed but Pihole and Plex are new to me.

Sharon
----
Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org