I switched from Nextcloud to Syncthing a while ago. ST is a plain file syncing program, like Dropbox, but distributed P2P (you can have a server running it as an always-on node). I sync the Camera & Screenshots folder on my phone to my computer & server. If you have multiple phones add the folder on each phone. It's bidirectional so photos you take or files you add will show up on all devices. It works much better than Nextcloud, and admin/maintenance/setup are all much easier.
For calendar & contacts sync I use Radicale. Syncthing with a regular shared folder + camera folder + screenshots folder combined with Radicale covers everything that I used Nextcloud for.
However this is all on your devices, there's no web interface to access your files from other devices.
>It's bidirectional so photos you take or files you add will show up on all devices.
My camera devices are set to send only and while my receving devices are a tight knit send/receive group they're all set to the advanced option of "ignore deletes".
Makes it a bit of a pain to delete the file off of 3 servers, but now my laptop and my smartphone don't sync with each other and someone can't delete media off of my portable device in an attempt to destroy it if it's already been synced.
> However this is all on your devices, there's no web interface to access your files from other devices.
I tried Syncthing and it worked really well and it was fast. But I definitely want to have a webui, like Nextcloud, that's why this is sadly not an alternative for me.
(Though I use syncthing now for other stuff, where I don't need web access)
If your main use case for a web UI is browsing photos, have you considered a self-hosted photo gallery like PhotoPrism, Immich, or Lychee?
I'm in a similar boat, where I use NextCloud but really wish there was a better option (especially for mobile photo sync). Syncthing + Photoprism is currently at the top of my list of possible viable alternatives.
PhotoPrism could have been an alternative, but the FOSS variant does only have admin accounts, and does not allow to have "normal" users.
I also tried Immich, but it just didn't work well.
I think I didn't try out lychee, but I took a look at the demo site, and it seemed a bit to minimal for me.
Though I'll definitely keep an eye at these galleries, as I don't think Nextcloud will improve their UX in this regard.
Syncthing seems to be by far the best solution for synchronising files, I just wish there a gallery that would suit my needs. If I was proficient in frontend development I'd already have created one.
Since this is about privacy, do note that syncthing relies on a discovery server to find peers on the internet. You should probably run your own public discovery server if you care about privacy and want to seriously use it outside of your home network.
For calendar & contacts sync I use Radicale. Syncthing with a regular shared folder + camera folder + screenshots folder combined with Radicale covers everything that I used Nextcloud for.
However this is all on your devices, there's no web interface to access your files from other devices.