 Welcome to the Next Cloud podcast. Let's talk about digital sovereignty. Hi, and welcome back to another episode of the Next Cloud podcast. My name is Marius Kvabek. I'm a video producer for the Next Cloud marketing team, so I manage audio and video productions here at Next Cloud. Beginning with this episode, we've decided to take the podcast back in-house, but I would like to say a huge thank you to Ingo Ebel, who has been hosting this podcast since its first episode. I've got big shoes to fill. The format of this show is going to stay mostly the same, though. It will still be interview-based where I talk to interesting partners, developers and other people from the community. We are aiming for 12 episodes per year, so one episode every month. Also, beginning with this episode, we're going to have chapter markers from now on. That means if you're listening to this from your podcast app, or if your podcast app supports it obviously, or if you're watching this on YouTube or listening to it from the website, there will be a section somewhere where you can select different topics and time codes to listen to those specifically. To bring this podcast back, I've decided to sit down with Next Cloud founder and CEO Frank Kaliček to talk about what has been happening in Next Cloud in 2022 and our big plans for 2023. Hope you enjoy. Hey Frank, thanks for joining us. Happy 2023. I guess we can still say that, even though we are recording this in the midst of January. How is the new year going to be treating you so far? First of all, thanks a lot for having me. I'm really happy to be on this podcast again. How is the year treating me? I don't know. I had a nice sort of vacation over the holidays and it's over. From that regard, it's not so good to be back at work. You're back at the cold and rainy Berlin, as I can see. Yeah, exactly. No, but it's just joking. Everything is good. Everything is fine. Great. We also talked to have you on the show again because since we're relaunching the podcast, it's great. We thought we could maybe do a bit of catching up with what has happened in 2022 with Next Cloud and a bit of an article about the planning with Next Cloud in the upcoming year. We wanted to start by the first major thing that happened in 2022 was that Next Cloud joined the Open Forum Europe for an open and competitive digital ecosystem. As we titled it back then. Do you remember that? Can you still say something about that? Yeah, it is interesting. The Open Forum Europe is like a lobbying organization under European level. Of course, everybody, including me, when they're here, lobby organization. This is bad. Who likes lobbying? They're actually lobbying for open source and open standards and other things like that. I know them for a long, long time. Ten years, I think. I don't know. I'm also like a fellow of this organization for a while, which means I sometimes give talks and sometimes invite it to talk with politicians on the European level to convince them to do good decisions and not bad decisions. Sometimes work, sometimes not. Yeah, and we just, as Next Cloud decided to support their work a little bit more. So we had an official supporting member paying them some money so they can fight for more open source under European commission level. Yeah, that's definitely important. We will circle back to that specific topic over the course of this podcast if I'm looking at the list right now. We'll definitely come back to that. Another thing we did in 2022 was we did a collaboration with the European Commission, a hackathon titled the Next Cloud Hackathon, where we invited people and teams from all over the world to contribute to Next Cloud and to improve the Next Cloud ecosystem. And we had a huge success with that. We had over 60 participants from 33 different countries and a bunch of the submissions we got from there were actually being upstreamed in Next Cloud. I think the winner of the second prize, which was a team from Malaysia, Spain and Greece, they contributed the org chat feature for our contact app, which we just debuted in Next.hub3. How do you feel about these like European-sponsored hackathons or hackathons in general, Frank? This was one of those moments where I really, I don't know, I have to remind myself how popular Next Cloud is nowadays, because I mean, I started all of it many, many years ago and I still have this mindset, this is just a few friends doing some open source hacking together and then big stuff like that happens, that actually the European Commission approached us and said, hey, what you're doing is cool and can we support this somehow and can we do this hackathon and sponsor it and advertise it and so on. Then, I don't know, sometimes I don't know, baffled or really surprised that big organization like the European Commission think that putting something into Next Cloud is a good investment, which obviously it is, right, money, public code. Absolutely. But it still was very surprising and then of course, as you said, it was then also surprising how successful it was at the end where we got a ton of people and different teams participated and yeah, you said it already, that one of the cool features of the latest of the last release from us, Next Cloud 3, this org chart feature actually is also a result of this hackathon where some people got together and thought about and that's a cool idea. Every organization has some kind of structure, people who are responsible for different areas and this information is often somehow stored in the directory like in LDAP or Active Directory and yeah, this feature basically reads the information from the directory and then graphically shows like an organizational chart of the organization and that's really super cool. That's a super cool innovative feature and that's the result of this hackathon. So yeah, really, really, really nice experience, I have to say. Definitely. I was a bit more involved during that process. I think we were running that together with the European Commission I believe the span of four weeks or something like that and not to go over all of these submissions but a particularly nice thing I've noticed was like some of the teams and I believe it was even the previously mentioned team that worked on the org chart feature. They were like done ahead of time before like some of the milestones and then I started helping out other teams. So this, even though it was, I mean obviously this was all about bringing people together and contributing to a common goal but even with those settings it was a bit of a competition since there was a price involved but even that way and even with that in mind they helped out other teams and that they also helped like onboard like local teams or local hacker groups and introduced them to next-line steps so we're still seeing effects and positive outcomes from that. So this is awesome. I hope we can do this again at some point. Yeah, definitely. And it was, I was invited by an event hosted by the European Commission like a few, two months ago in Brussels and also at this event like people came to me and said, yeah, actually it's great and like we helped to fund this hackathon and because they thought it's a cool idea and yeah, it was really, it's really totally surprising that so many people the European Commission are supporting us. Of course it is like a bit, I mean it's the message and our mission of NextCloud that we are supporting digital sovereignty to keep the data under control, GDPR compliance and so on working together with the GaiaX project which is another European project to have more cloud infrastructure hosted in Europe so it's of course totally aligned with what we are doing but as I said, still surprising that yeah, we have so many fans everywhere. This is going to be good as the time as any to say that all of the topics that we're going to talk about today are also going to be linked below in the show notes for almost all the topics we have fully written articles on our blog that we will link to so if you want to look in any of those topics deeper then feel free to look into the show notes. Another thing I want to mention is of course our awesome community because NextCloud has a company here which does a lot of things that some people think that the company does everything but it's not true. Actually we have several thousands of contributors contributing to the core of NextCloud alone and this is not even counting app developers or translators or other people who help to push Next.Forward it's just people who contribute to the core of NextCloud alone so NextCloud is a really, really big community and everybody can be part of it and that's something that for me also very important first it's also part of our values that we are an open, welcoming, inclusive place where everybody can be part of and we are actually also actively investing to make this even easier so just in the last few months for example we've relaunched our website developer website where all the documentation is listed, the APIs and how to set up a development environment and how to upload your app to the app store we have and many other things that are needed to get started and we also worked on producing some videos so we have a bunch of videos actually now how to write your first app how to set up your environment and everything so if you prefer to watch videos instead of reading a text then this also exists now I think we really, really want to be a super welcoming place and if you want to contribute something to NextCloud then have a look it's easy you don't have to directly start with writing super complicated things or features we have a lot of starter topics also in GitHub marked where really everybody can do something small to push NextCloud forward so yeah just an invitation for everybody to have a look and join the NextCloud community and also of course then come to the next conference where you can meet the people in person there are more tutorials you can directly ask people how can we do this or that we are really a nice group of people I can say and just consider to contribute absolutely and we're going to link to all of those resources in the show notes in May 2022 we released Next.Tap 24 or Next.Tap 2 which has had its main focus on user migration and improvements to Office and Talk I don't think we're going to get too much into all of the features but I wanted to particularly highlight the migration feature we've introduced that allows you to basically export all of your settings data that you have on your Next.Cloud wherever it is so if it's also on the Raspberry Pi or somewhere at the Next.Cloud partner and put it back in of what I did I was using Next.Cloud all in one on the Raspberry Pi and later this that year I decided to use that setting to migrate over to one of our partners since I couldn't host after I was moving boring networking details but actually with that even that still gives you the chance to go the way back at some point since I now have resolved my network issue I'm going to actually move that back inside and start self hosting Next.Cloud again so that was a particularly nice thing to see and there were also a bunch of improvements that made it easier to migrate from other solutions like Google Drive and Dropbox and stuff so what do you think about all of these migration features? I'm actually happy that you picked that feature that I wanted to talk about because that is like a very important one because we have to go back a little bit to Next.Cloud what we actually want to achieve to give people back the control over the data and the communication and if you have a Raspberry Pi where everything is stored or some other like home device then everything is easy right you have to your data there in your box in your closet or whatever that's good but not everybody really wants to run like a server at home so a lot of people actually use Next.Cloud at a service provider because we have lots of companies that offer Next.Cloud hosting but then of course the question is okay why exactly is this better than like I don't know giving you data to Microsoft or Google and the answer is of course that because Next.Cloud is open source you can host it yourself just described perfectly you can like host it at home go to a service provider, host your company university, your school I don't know and then also you should have the freedom to move your data around between them because if you don't like one location anymore you can move to a different one and this is then the freedom that you get with Next.Cloud because if you would be locked in by a service provider and there's no way to get your data out and no way to move to a different service provider well it would be the same negative experience than what you have with Dropbox or Microsoft Google and the others so actually this feature to migrate your data from one Next.Cloud server to another Next.Cloud server is like super important to what we want to achieve that's like something we worked on like for a while actually many many years ago I think there was the first attempt to implement that feature but it was not how it should be and then few years later we basically did it again and now in the right way and that's the feature we released with this version so you can migrate your data and move it to another instance as you want but I think also to be a little bit honest here not only just share marketing messages this feature also has a bit of a problem I also want to point this out because if you have data that is shared with other people then the migration might not be that easy let's say you have a shared folder with other people, you have a chat channel with other people, you have a shared calendar with other people then if you then export your data and move to a different server then this is obviously this connection is lost so that's a bit of something that you need to realize we have for some areas we have federation features like federated sharing between different servers and then in later version maybe we can convert internal shares to federated shares and maybe in the future local talk chat rooms to federated chat rooms but that's not done yet so at the moment you might lose the connection to other people when you move away and other people can share their data instance we've also seen lots of movements in the EU around Microsoft 365 in terms of GDPR compliance and many European countries and companies and schools and the educational sector saying that you actually shouldn't use Microsoft 365 because it's not compliant with GDPR this isn't as surprising to us as it was presented back then it's kind of new just from the beginning and that's kind of also what Next. stands for because some of the stuff that we offer there are these bigger cloud providers just don't offer but we haven't particularly seen many countries following this advice do you have any thoughts on that? oh gosh that's a huge topic I can talk about it for hours yeah I mean there are obviously many many many problems with with the business practices of Microsoft here I mean we just discussed like the login, the vendor login and this is of course like super bad and super strong here with Microsoft there's basically absolutely no way if you don't like Microsoft anymore to ever move away from it because well there's no APIs to export your data I mean you can export your files obviously but if you want to export I don't know your teams or SharePoint or other complicated data there's no real way to do that and even if you could then there is no other software where you can import it and of course there's no way to take the Microsoft software and run it like on premise and for example your Raspberry Pi as you just described so this is where you have the complete login so basically whenever you start to use Microsoft then you're done so you will stick there forever or you lose everything that's the alternative so there are lots of problems there and also another big problem is obviously the GDPR compliance that is not there because of the cloud and the US it means that US based law enforcement other agencies are full access to the data in housing center in Europe or outside the US and you have a contractor I don't know the local European subsidiary of Microsoft and you think that this is obviously following European laws but because of cloud act it's actually not so this whole thing is not GDPR compliant as was decided by the highest European court that this is a GDPR violation there is another problem and many many other things business practices like for example giving away free accounts to schools during the pandemic and now they are getting all the invoices now because now it's no longer free but there is no way to move away because they cannot get the data out so there are lots and lots and lots of problems with Microsoft proprietary software you cannot really look inside you don't know who has access to the data you cannot really innovate on top of it because again it's no one is allowed to see the software many many problems and I'm actually happy to see that more and more organizations and institutions all over Europe are recognizing that and warning giving out warnings against the usage of Microsoft products so I'm slightly optimistic that more people realize that and of course there is like more and didn't even mention so far the whole bundling and untrust topic let's get to that later as I said I can talk about it for hours so Microsoft is really that's really not good it's like if you compare this to food then it's basically fast food it's like something that is nice and convenient and cheap at the beginning but it really makes people sick and not healthy anymore and I don't know if you want to have a proper food industry proper food that we can consume then I think you also want to have a proper IT world and I think you don't want to have Microsoft or Google in there proper open source tools that's just healthier and our reasons to be optimistic I mean the French Ministry of Education recently just banned all the free versions of Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace in schools Denmark even went so far as to for one school district to recall and ban all Google Chromebooks and even their Government Data Protection Agency advises against that use and also two states in Germany made similar rulings and I think what we are hoping for especially in this year is that we start seeing actions around that instead of recommendations related to that actually is an initiative that I believe not started in 2022 but I think late 2021 but has gained some attraction in the last year was our antitrust complaint about Microsoft business practices can you maybe give a bit of a recap what has happened there and what recent update there is this specific topic is about bundling practices we have to explain a little bit what this means I also learned more about antitrust laws and product bundling lately more than I wanted to learn but that's how it is so there is actually in most countries all major countries all over the world there are antitrust laws antitrust laws mean that if an organization or company is gaining so much like market share influence, market dominance that are basically monopolist in some area this by itself is not yet the problem and I personally think it is a problem but not from the law perspective this is fine, people can be dominant but what they are not allowed to do is to use this dominant position to then like increase the dominance in other areas basically I mean it's like an example is Microsoft Office I just want to use a different example but yeah let's live directly of course chapter Microsoft I think the example is clear enough I mean one thing you can always say is like the browser of the wars of the 90s some of the listeners are probably too young to remember that but maybe you can summarize it a bit Microsoft already with Windows was the dominant operating system at the time so most people really used Microsoft on the computers Microsoft Windows and then this new invention came around called the internet and then everybody needed a browser and there were actually some different organization offering a browser some like as free and open source as mosaic browser but later the Netscape tried to build a business around that and they were successful for a while but then Microsoft decided like hey let's just include a free browser in our operating system and their bundled internet explorer and then basically Netscape was dead because they couldn't charge any money anymore because the other thing was giving way for free and this was basically an example where Microsoft used that dominant position in this Windows to just like become the dominant browser in the world because then everybody's using internet explorer not because it's good it was always bad but because it was there it was just pre-installed everywhere and then there were some antitrust complaints and lawsuits against that and at the end Microsoft lost or there was some compromise and they needed to implement this browser selection screen so if you then click on the browser you first ask hey do you want to use this browser or that browser like I don't know Firefox or Mozilla or Opera or all these browsers that exist at the time and this was then basically the outcome and yeah it's actually super surprising that Microsoft even they lost this as a case they're just doing it again they just ignore it and they're like okay we're just violating the law but who cares just do it again and nowadays if you install or if you run Windows 10 or Windows 11 for the first time it immediately get like popups like hey and here's your new OneDrive account and your Raspberry installed and I think if you run Windows 11 Pro then it's mandatory to get a Microsoft account and then you're automatically already logged in basically if you just log into your desktop you're already logged into OneDrive and Teams. Teams is of course also in your taskbar and you're just with one click you're automatically in there so this is also why Teams and OneDrive like got a huge market share not because the software is good actually bad but yeah it's just pre-installed and they're getting one market from one market into the next and this is not correct this is not good this is hurting business hurting innovation hurting privacy and this is why we sent in an official complaint about this business practice to the European Commission but also to the German authorities and yeah we are actually still in conversations I cannot say too much but I have a meeting in Brussels in a few days to discuss that so let's see how it goes it's definitely taken seriously by the European Commission and the other thing that happened is that we are not doing this alone but we have a coalition where a lot of other organizations who support us basically together are basically supporting this good cause and are complaining against Microsoft so it's a bigger group and I personally was blown away by the overall interest in that so we got covered by all major newspapers like hundreds all over the world actually yeah so a lot of people care about that and now it's the discussions are ongoing I cannot say too much but yeah I hope that there will be some interesting movements and announcements soon one thing we can briefly touch on since it has been reported about is didn't they at some point try to offer incentives for you to change your mind about that complained and to maybe withdraw the name next lot of that what happened there yeah this was interesting because when this happened and the press wrote about it then I suddenly got a lot of contact requests from Microsoft people who wanted to talk and I just ignored them because there's nothing to talk or should I talk about but at some point I really was because of the personal recommendation actually talked with some people in Seattle Redmond and then the conversation there first they first tried the usual marketing trick where they're like hey Microsoft is nice now we are so nice we are releasing Visual Studio code it's so cool and we also have GitHub and so nice and you're also contributing some drivers to the Linux kernel so we're such a nice company now which is not completely true they realize that it's not falling for that and then that started to discuss like yeah maybe there's some kind of deal something we can do maybe some donations or some free promotion or some logo on some website or something but then they realized that this is also not working and after that they started to contact other companies and organizations in our coalition what then favors like hey we can sponsor the next conference we can offer you some something if they basically leave our coalition I was really shocked by that I have to say they're really trying to solve it with money now which I think is not going to work I think they gave up by now but what's happening now is of course solving this politics by saying yeah it's just needed and there's no real alternative to Microsoft so if you don't really want Microsoft then you're falling behind with digitalization and so on which was not true but yeah very interesting to have this kind of conversations we've also introduced in 2022 an advisory board regarding the next load office where we started talking to more companies and what their needs and requirements are can you maybe elaborate on that a bit yeah definitely I actually get this question surprisingly often what this is this is an advisory board and so on so the background is the following that we as next load as discussed before we of course have the vision to alternative to Microsoft and Google products especially Microsoft and of course we do that there are a lot of areas where this is also relatively straightforward I mean the whole thinking part of next load files pretty clear how it should work chat video calling this is all relatively straightforward but the thing is that we really want to replace Microsoft products in an organization and it can be public administration by the way this was sort of the focus here but it's the same for companies then you're also dealing with existing documents that are floating around in the organization and they are usually most of the time done with Microsoft Office so we have Word, Excel, PowerPoint files and so on really this is millions of billions probably files like that floating around in these organizations and they are all created and done over the last 20 years and if you really want to replace Microsoft with next cloud then it is absolutely important essential that all these documents that just work flawlessly with next cloud because if someone opens a document and just I don't know the spreadsheet calculates wrongly or just the layout is broken then people will not be happy and this is why this whole document compatibility and just have all the functionality around Office is like super important and there are also some documents that are crazy for example some of you might know that in Microsoft Office documents you can really do a lot of crazy stuff you can have like embedded macros OLE objects like with the basic script you can call external things it's really quite you could call it powerful you can also call it yeah not crazy and all of that just has to work somehow and yeah of course we are working together with our main partner with his colabra colabra online there are also major contributors to Libre Office so there is a ton of experience here that exists with import filters and proper document rendering but still we really want to talk with the actual users of next cloud Office so we created this advisory board where we invited like the IT experts from all these different organizations and normally we have people from the Swedish government German government French government now Switzerland too and yeah also inviting and talking with other people and yeah they come together we meet from time to time in person but also regular calls and they just tell us what's important is not working, what should be better what's priority for them and so we know what we need to improve and need to fix in what order so that's basically just input from the let's say office power users out there I believe one of those features that came out of those talks was the custom or the option to upload custom and or proprietary fonts for next cloud office which brings us to the next topic which would be next cloud 3 or most recent release that we announced during next cloud conference but I would like to start with next cloud 3. From looking back at least 5 years of most recent releases this was easily one of the most features that we put out that was also very well received as such we put so many things and the highlights only being like our brand new design, next cloud personal we got photos 2.0 with a built in editor we got a bunch of AI in there now for face recognition that runs locally on the next load so you don't even have to use bad proprietary providers for that so there are so many things can you pick a highlight of any of those things from hub 3 do you remember I think it would be fair to pick a highlight as you said there are so many different things I mean it's I mean it's really from the design you started with that the design is really we did a fresh up it's more colorful now looks more modern just more personal so that's why it's called next cloud personal which is I think really nice it's also one of the very few redesigns where I think I don't know if I saw a single negative comment about it seems to be liked by everybody from our internal there are a lot of store community customers everybody so that's quite a nice thing then a lot of things that is useful for like home users it's a photos app we had a photos app before but it was really lacking important features and now basically this one release invested so much time into it that it is really really powerful and basically feature complete now it's really from faster performance with a nice grid view with this album view where you can organize the photos in different albums there can be different albums also with a public link where people can only upload or only view or something in between and then we have the editor where you can edit like your photos very nicely in the browser and then we have the new machine learning features where you can do face recognition object recognition and so on so this is really super super useful now then of course we have lots of those more enterprise features like I don't know that this org chart feature we already mentioned in the contacts app or just like performance and usability improvement in mail calendar lots of improvements in next load talk we have this permission system which really a lot more detailed where if you're running like a school or university and you really want to moderate who can talk who can present the screen and so on there's a pulse feature super popular you can do pulse directly in the chat we have the new widgets we have this nice widget previews for different links and assets you can post into a chat channel also super super popular lots of improvement next load text and collectives and then in office as we already mentioned we also have this feature with local editing so you can really smoothly edit some documents in the browser or with one click switch to the local editor like if you have a local labor office you want to use or for the shop or some other proprietary software because you need to work with a proprietary format and you couldn't do that and with another click just switch back into the browser so there really is so many different things I think it's a very nice release but I have to say because you're not stopping we are already into deep development of the next release and so far I have to say it looks I don't know if it has to say it's the same size but it will be another huge step forward so we are not stopping absolutely and that's definitely going to become a topic for a later episode for Hub 3 it was really hard to pick favorites and kind of unfair to ask for but if I would have to choose one I would also say the next load personal or brand new design that was also like from the ground up built to work better with screen readers and so many more accessibility features that were built in and different different light and dark modes and the font for people with dyslexia and all of those good things so from a usability point of view I think I would pick next up personal design should we pivot over to the conference which is very presented this release oh yes I believe at of September I believe at 1st of October I believe it was we run after two years of virtual conferences or no conference at all our first in-person conference again our next conference event updated in Berlin will be invited hundreds of contributors customers people interested in open source and we had like a huge line up of speakers from all over the world around those topics not only tied to next load but also to open source accessibility how can we keep making our products better be the better solution against proprietary solutions so there was so many things and I'm going to ask the unfair question again Frank do you have any highlights to pick from those yeah I mean for me it's if I think back about the history how this all started that's the most amazing thing from my perspective because as you might know when I started with that next load at the time still under a different name but still same people same ideas then yeah at the beginning was only me but then quickly we had some people were contributing code and then at some point I messaged them and said hey why don't you come over here at Stuttgart I had a small office at the time and I hey we just like eat for a weekend and just we talk and heck a bit and then five people showed up and then we had this basically first conference was just like six people including me and we just improved things a lot and hacked together for a weekend and then it was so much fun that we decided that we want to do this again and next time I think 10 people showed up and then 15 people and then at some point was like okay we need a bigger location and then we had like already taking University of Berlin as an early user and they said yeah no problem we can host you and then we actually went did a conference or the meeting in their location like for many years and then just was going to whatever 30 people, 50 people, 100 people and so on and then of course with so many people it's not just like few people come together and hack on things but then let's have a talk like a real program and have a social event or party in the evening and have some food there and music and all the things and a program and a website and registration forms and all that stuff and they really turned into into a real conference that we had that problem that problem not really problem but that lots of different people showed up for example also business people and I said like yeah they just came there but yeah we were to use it in our company and then all the people sitting there in black t-shirts are hacking on code and like I don't know I don't know what you want I'm writing code here and then yeah we had to organize that and then nowadays we have like actually parallel events for the business users where they can do their business talks and then the other event a real conference where it's real about fundraising and having fun and yeah kept on growing and I don't have the latest number how many people we had like last year but like I don't know 250 something like that maybe even more I believe a bit more but I also don't have the exact number on top of my head yeah but it was really really big it was a really big nice conference and of course nowadays we moved to a better location where we have a real events based there hacking areas food and a big room for the talks and live video streaming thanks to you Marius so really really nice event it's really yeah mind-blowing yeah speaking of those videos and the live streams I will actually link to the playlist of all the talks lightning talks and panel sessions that resulted in video content I will link to that playlist on YouTube click on it in the show notes obviously there were so many things happening in parallel not only the talks of the hack sessions we had workshops and everything there and community people coming together to work on more projects or actually people meeting for the first time in person that have been contributing to the next lot in small teams for years now so that was really a good event to bring people together and we had so many which is why I am linking to those videos so many great talks about topics not only about next lot but also about the larger open source ecosystem and I can only recommend giving those a watch all of our efforts are in and around next lot haven't gone unnoticed once again we won the cloud computing insider awards I believe for the fourth or fifth year in a row something like that do you remember that we participated like for five years or six years but the first prize we actually won like the third year in a row could you describe why that award might be more important than maybe others or what the metrics were how was that decided of who would get granted that award yeah as I am in general not such a big fan of awards I have to say and there are lots and lots of awards and I don't know it's not really clear who wins why and there are even some awards that you can pay to win so I am overall not a big fan of awards but this award is I think a bit like interesting because first of all it's not decided by a jury but it's actually by voting of yeah everybody can go to the website register and vote so it's sort of yeah coming from the community and also it is the people who go to this website are usually like IT people so this is these are basically IT people all over lots of different areas I don't know from server hard to operating systems, storage systems I don't know lots of different categories and of course you vote also for other categories usually so yeah and we won the first prize like for the third year in a row so this means that yeah people who reach this website I mean mostly German speaking to be fair but still in this bubble we are like the most popular solution in this whole cloud collaboration space and the third place actually was won by Dropbox so we are first one Dropbox far behind us and even further behind us is Google and Microsoft so that's really yeah really nice I think that the majority of IT people like here in Central Europe think that next cloud is so much better than all these commercial competitors this yeah made me happy a bit proud about what the next cloud community together achieved and obviously we couldn't do a recap of 2022 without talking about Twitter at this point we saw at the end of 2022 Twitter being inquired by Elon Musk and him taking the company private and him making a bunch of I think it's fair to say questionable decisions about the product and its features and also about terms of content moderation and policies do you have any thoughts on that how many hours do we have right? yeah but I don't think we need to repeat everything that happened I'm sure all listeners to this podcast are up to date what's happening in Twitter and at the end I don't want to talk too much about actually all terrible things, terrible decisions by Elon Musk that we all know that but I think what's more interesting to talk about is that what this actually shows what problems of the tech industry are actually visible here and what we all should do or can do maybe yeah what we all can do to hopefully avoid that in the future so the problem here is obviously that one person is in complete control of this social media platform so it's an extreme power concentration on one person and it's not only like the company itself of course tons of employees were fired and the ones were still there I'm sure like suffering a little bit under the current new management so of course there it's not good for them but of course in the case of the social media platform like Twitter all the users also have a problem here and Twitter is such an important tool for political discussions, for influencing elections many other things and if just one person is in full control of that that's really, really a big problem also why we are talking about Twitter all the time anyways because otherwise yeah it's just another online service, not a cloud platform which goes down who cares but it is really so influential I mean I don't know we just saw the latest things that happen in Brazil with riots and of course a few days before Elon Musk fired all the content moderation people who could actually moderate some fake news so this is like super, super dangerous and there are other companies I mean we know that Facebook for example which also includes WhatsApp and Instagram are also basically controlled by Mark Zuckerberg alone because he has the majority of the voting rights so that's a problem with other tech companies Google Microsoft and so on this power concentration is a real problem and I think what we can learn from that is that we as technology people should really think what we can do from a architecture, software perspective to avoid that and one obvious answer is of course I mean no one here is surprised I guess that decentralization is something that's really important and it's really makes me very very happy to see how popular Mastodon nowadays get with an approach which is of course a lot better so the code is 100% open source for Mastodon everybody can look into it can see how it works there are no secrets I don't know ranking rules in there that not everybody knows now it's completely transparent everybody sees it of course you can host it yourself decentralized again very similar to NexCloud again NexCloud is also open source you can also host it yourself you can also federate it so very similar values between Mastodon and NexCloud NexCloud is mostly for collaboration communication and Mastodon is a social network yes that such key technology should be open source and decentralized and not controlled by a single person that's like very similar and that this is working it's working so far for Mastodon I think it's very very promising because a lot of people will look at that and think this is also how an internet platform can run we don't have advertising business and we don't have gigantic venture capital shareholders and I don't know other things we just have a bunch of technology people write nice code and then suddenly have something that's useful for millions of users so that's really good another important thing to learn here is of course open standards because a lot of people think that yeah Mastodon it's just Mastodon but it's actually the correct term is like the fattyverse here because you don't really have to use Mastodon to be part of it the only thing that you need to do is to use some software that speaks the same language the same API the same standard activity pub in this case and yeah there are lots of other like software products around like video for example or yeah lots of different social media tools and speaking the same language and we can all connect to that next slide is also participating there we have something called next slide social which is also an implementation of activity pub so we also have the opportunity to post like messages into the fattyverse or receive messages there if you want to share I don't know your vacation photo album you can do this then with one click and I think this is something that more and more software should do just connect to this network or speaking the same API that's from my perspective the future and personally I'm also a bit happy because I was actually a member of the W3C social working group at a time when activity pub was created so I wouldn't say that I really actively influenced it I was other people driving it but I was in the room so I'm happy to happy that I was in the room and talked with the important people and witnessed basically the creation of activity pub and yeah it makes me very happy to see this becoming so successful now something to learn from the tasks chaos definitely can you outline our idea about next-load social a bit more what we're planning to do there because you already touched on that we were working on a new iteration of this feature of this app how could that work, what could we expect what are we working on right now yeah so when we did the first version of next-load social a while ago some people criticized us what is the next cloud do you want to become a social network just to be clear we're not becoming a social network next cloud has a completely different mission and vision and also there's also no need to invent another social network because that's exactly what masterton is doing but what is the cool thing as I just tried to say with an open standard is that you can implement it everywhere and then everybody can participate so there are some things in next cloud that has a bit of a social networking character for example if you're in your organization the next load is used for in a school or university or company or your soccer club or I don't know something then you can of course share files chat with people like video calls and so on but there's also maybe the need that you can share like status messages hey I'm going for lunch now and I don't know here's like I don't know the cool movie I saw on the weekend or something so this is not really becoming a full social network it's more like for like an internal social network basically there's even a term for that enterprise social networks which is exactly that like internal social networks basically and that's something that I mean there's a solution from Microsoft, Google and others and of course we also want to do something there but we want to do it like in a good way again using this standard for even for the internal stuff and then of course there is then the idea that you can connect it with the rest of the failures because maybe there are messages that you also want to share to other people outside the organization or you want to show status messages from certain people from the outside also going in or for the sharing part as I said if you want to share your I don't know vacation video or photo album or whatever with your social network then this kind of integration can be cool that this sharing is possible with one click so there is a bit of there is a bit of opportunity here like a tiny bit of an overlap between next loader and social network that you must have done if you can compare it with email too all right it's like there are full email services I don't know Gmail or something like that where you can have a full email inbox folders reading mail sending mail everything you want but email is also supported in other software and for example your router can send you an email if there is a new software update available or something like that so it also implements SMTP to send mails or your I don't know your fridge sending your mail if the meat goes bad I don't know if this is the thing but theoretically so yeah and you all participate in this network called SMTP or mail and the same thing can happen with activity pub that's what we try to do you should probably also stress the fact that since this was semi prompted by the happenings over at Twitter if you are already participating in the Fediverse and you're on a specific method and instance and you disagree with some of the choices that that instance makes or you want to switch to a self-hosted solution or maybe to a next load social there is that migration path and that interoperability there which also aligns with all values at next load so that's that this is exactly meant to and such things as we are seeing right now unfolding at Twitter exactly alright that pretty much brings us to the end of our 2022 recap maybe we try to give a bit of an outlook of what's going to happen to next load and around next load in 2023 Frank can you tease anything that we can might expect in the next release the following year what do you think no I was afraid of that no no no I'm kidding so it's I'm saying no because we usually have the policy or the rule that we don't really want to pre-announce things so I don't know there's maybe a personal thing for me but I hate it when people pre-announce things and then you get excited and then maybe that never happened or they are super delayed or they are like folks are differently than what you expect and I don't know you have all this hype and there's nothing there so I don't really like this pre-announcement so in next load we usually talk about things once they are available I think it's just nicer somehow but maybe there are some things I can say because they are so advanced in the development that it's basically sort of confirmed that would be great so let me think what can I say I mean there's one thing that there's one thing I don't know if it's the number one feature request in next load talk or the number two I don't know one of the absolutely top feature requests we get like all the time is that it would be great to have some sort of a desktop client right because as you know we have obviously the web UI the website then we have mobile apps for iOS and Android we also have it integrated into the next load desktop client so you get them nice notifications and you can directly reply to messages in the desktop client but people still are asking for like a full yeah full desktop client full application that you can run for chatting and video calling locally for Mac Widows Linux and yeah I mean we worked on that for a really really long time and but I think now I can say that this is most likely going to happen because we are so yeah we are so far that a lot of big questions are solved so maybe I can tease that at some point I'm not saying that this is really for the next release by the way but I think I can tease a little bit that there will be a talk desktop client it's making good progress yeah just today as we're recording this I was fortunate enough to see like an internal demo of that and I'm really looking forward to what's going to come out of that but yeah maybe not for the next release but it is in the cards for something to happen that brings us to the end of this 2022 recap and Frank I'd like to thank you very much for taking the time thanks a lot for having me and I will talk to you soon thank you bye bye and there we have it our first episode of 2023 thank you very much again to Frank for taking the time and please let us know what your highlights of next load were in 2022 or what feature we've introduced that you particularly liked and make sure to leave us your feedback and suggestions for the podcast we will be back in February with another episode and in the meantime I would like to point you to our blog and our social media channels to keep up to date with what's happening in and around next lot thank you very much for listening and we'll be back soon