Apologies if this has been posted here before (rule 4), but my search turned out empty, hence I felt it was okay to ask.
TL;DR: As the title suggests, I am looking for recommendations for software for real time collaboration in a spreadsheet-like manner. I myself would prefer Proton Sheets (I already have a paid plan), but I wanted to hear people’s experiences with it, and what alternatives there are.
Some people/strangers and I, in my neighbourhood, have come together to start a volunteering group for building a workshop that the community can make use of. In relation to this, we need a simple way to track different things, tasks, and who’s doing what and when. Think of inventory, shifts, etc. The group mentioned they would be happy with Google Sheets, but as someone who left the Google ecosystem years ago, I am not keen on going back, and would really like a great alternative that is as easy to use.
The group is a healthy mix of young technically competent people, professional carpenters, and older people not so great at using computers, thus it is important that its easy to sign up and use.
I realise the solution does not need to be a spreadsheet-like service, but that was something the group seemed to agree to be easy enough to use. I would be grateful if anyone here had a better solution though.
Perhaps I just need to suck it up, and create a new Google email for only this, but since we will not be using any enterprise plan or similar, my guess is that our data will be fed to an LLM for training. It also involves my private life, so I would really like to avoid this.
nextcloud
Thank you!:)
I must live under a rock - I’ve never heard of this before. Do you suggest I just set this up on my PC at home and just have it running all the time?
I don’t have a homelab or similar, and in this economy not really the money to fork out for AI-caused inflated hardware prices for building one
This question tells me you should probably look into a hosted version: https://nextcloud.com/providers/
Don’t listen to people telling you to self host, they’re nerds who want you to pick up a second unpaid job.
There are nicer ways to say that.
The hosted nextcloud solutions are not cheap. The base plan for librebit is 79EUR per month. After 3 months you’ve paid off a mini PC.
Yes, its more work, and a huge learning curve, but if the goal is to save money, paying 79EUR per month is insane, unless you need the SLA.
I agree that self hosting may not be the right path for OP, but there are valid tangible reasons to do it beyond “self hosting is fun”.
Yes. I’m one of those nerds and I sense when I have someone in front of me who doesn’t seem to be. Self hosting is a huge obligation if you’re expected to guarantee uptime to a group of users who personally can hit you in the face.
There’s way cheaper options than librebit. I had a Nextcloud for 10€ a month with 10 users and 100GB or something at some point. My wife paid 5,39€/m for herself with 1TB.
It would be far more beneficial to host it at a datacenter, maybe a VPS, so it can operate 24/7, as they have 24/7 uninterruptable power supplies, maintenance, crew, temperature control, etc… You can also allow nextcloud themselves to host it for you, if you don’t want the extra trouble of maintenance.
I am in a similar position, due to praxis. But nobody in my area wants me to colocate racks of servers to mutual aid our needs.
I need a place to install fiber optics to.
Makes sense. I also really like that I don’t become an access point. Say if I move some day, there would need to be someone to take over.
Do you have experience using Nextcloud’s servers for this? Do you think it would be something the average Joe could handle in case of me not being able to do it?
I do have some experience with it, though I prefer other avenues for decentralized collaboration tooling. No, my curse of knowledge of what an “average joe” does and knows is exponentially changing😔. I can’t tell what “average” is anymore. So I cannot trust what an “avg. joe” is capable of, any longer.
You only need your PC on when others are using the spreadsheet.
Keep an eye out for mini PCs on second hand market places, they can be found for a couple hundred dollars or less, and are perfect for running something like this 24/7. Youll want a fairly decent internet connection though.
You can get free VMs on oracle cloud. Yes, Oracle are a bunch of cunts, but free is free, and you can get a free ARM VM with plenty of RAM that should be adequate for nextcloud.
Make sure you setup https properly.