Maintaining Nextcloud

I've been maintaining a private nextcloud instance for years

More precicely, it'already my second nextcloud instance after losing a first one that I just couldn't get to work with the latest nc version any more after missing a few updates.

With all the enshittification going on on the web, I'd really like to provide a self-hosted nextcloud as a save data haven for my friends - but I can't.

Nextcloud has become so complex that to me it's completely luck weather my instance runs well. Example? Example.

I've had this problem for a while that Nextcloud logs me in correctly, but either direcly logs me out again or logs me out after the first click. Changing the browser would sometimes work, sometimes not. Inspection of the logs and requests didn't show any obvious problems. Maybe that the session cookie was set ~7 times in the response to /login.

At the end the solution seemed to be this: Setting the nextcloud starting page to files instead of the default (dashboard).

I have no faith left in nextcloud - even though it's still the best solution to my needs. I feel like I always need to be prepared to set it up from scratch and re-upload my files, because it broke in a seemingly undeterministic way. And so I can't share my nextcloud with my friends although it would be a good thing to do.