I had really good luck with Seafile[0]. It's not a full groupware solution, just primarily a really good file syncing/Dropbox solution.

Upsides are everything worked reliably for me, it was much faster, does chunk-level deduplication and some other things, has native apps for everything, is supported by rclone, has a fuse mount option, supports mounting as a "virtual drive" on Windows, supports publicly sharing files, shared "drives", end-to-end encryption, and practically everything else I'd want out of "file syncing solution".

The only thing I didn't like about it is that it stores all of your data as, essentially, opaque chunks on disk that are pieced together using the data in the database. This is how it achieves the performance, deduplication, and other things I _liked_. However it made me a little nervous that I would have a tough time extracting my data if anything went horribly wrong. I took backups. Nothing ever went horribly wrong over 4 or 5 years of running it. I only stopped because I shelved a lot of my self-hosting for a bit.

[0]: https://www.seafile.com/en/home/

> Running consensus transcontinentally is very painful

You don’t necessarily have to do that, you can keep your quorum nodes (lets assume we are talking about etcd) far enough apart to be in separate failure domains (fires, power loss, natural disasters) but close enough that network latency isn’t unbearably high between the replicas.

I have seen the following scheme work for millions of workloads:

1. Etcd quorum across 3 close, but independent regions

2. On startup, the app registers itself under a prefix that all other app replicas register

3. All clients to that app issue etcd watches for that prefix and almost instantly will be notified when there is a change. This is baked as a plugin within grpc clients.

4. A custom grpc resolver is used to do lookups by service name

https://a.aliexpress.com/_EuPD4j8

It can deliver 50 watts entirely to 1 port, unlike most others where they mean 25 watts per port.

$5.50 with free shipping.

So it's less like gold which is fungible and a more natural form of money.

Diamonds feel more like an NFT...

This will never take off. One, there is no money in Ed.Tech. There is no money in Ed.Tech. There is no money in Ed.Tech. What little money there is goes to the obvious stuff like student records databases. Anything that requires an ongoing subscription fee is dead in the water. The only reason those stupid smartboards took off is because they make school boards look cool, they are a one time cost, and can be paid for with bonds (because they are a one time cost). Teachers don't want them (projectors and document cameras are good, though). Ed.Tech is a wasteland of failed startups. Part of the problem is also that classic "the people with the purchasing power are not the people who will be using the product" problem.

Two, everyone outside of education thinks "well has anyone just tried sitting down with the kids and talking to them/explaining it to them?" Yes, obviously. The problem isn't that they are lazy, snot-nosed kids (that's a problem well within an experienced teacher's skill set to solve). The problem is what is the AI going to do with the kid says "fuck you" to the AI because they haven't eaten since lunch the previous day (school is the only place they get regular meals), or they don't even know what to ask because they are basically 4 grades behind in math, or the wifi is dead for the 8th time that month because the school board will never pay for infrastructure.

Three, what if the AI is just wrong and starts confusing the student? Even GPT-4 fabricates things all the time. Sure it can generally put words in grammatically correct order and is passible for writing no one is going to read anyway (like marketing emails). But the moment it requires actual domain knowledge all these AI models completely fall down because, again, they don't actually understand anything, they just are really good at guessing what word comes next.