Honestly, I’m not really excited about the past couple of major Nextcloud releases.
Mainly because there’s still one big issue for small-scale Nextcloud servers: performance.
Mainly the web UI is still too slow for me to properly use, which is why I don’t use it at all (unless I have to update an app).
It’s a bit disappointing that they’re mainly focused on the large enterprise customers instead of small hobbyists like me, but it’s still understandable; after all, their income is mainly from the enterprise customers, not from selfhosters.
I also don’t really like how they’ve jumped on the AI hypetrain instead of improving performance. But once again, I guess this generates more income for them than focusing on other things like improving performance.
I use it to manage my documents, backup my photos from my phone to my server and access all my files from any other device. Basically Nextcloud is my replacement for OneDrive.
Additionally, I have used it in the past to collaborate on various group projects which require documents. For example, I had to make a presentation with some other people and I could create a PowerPoint in Nextcloud, send a share link to others and then we could edit the PowerPoint in realtime with Nextcloud + Collabora, which is pretty cool. It’s the only FOSS alternative (at least as far as I’m aware of) that can compete with Microsoft 365 / Google Workspaces.