Use of ownCloud for SyncServerII/Neebla: Issues

[crspybits]

Recently, I took another look at using ownCloud for SyncServerII/Neebla. My goal with this is to push the concept of individual ownership of data further. Currently two cloud storage solutions are provided by SyncServerII/Neebla -- Google Drive and Dropbox. With both of these, while it is the individual users cloud storage in Google Drive or Dropbox that is used, the data is still hosted on someone else's servers (i.e., Google or Dropbox).

If a user could host their own cloud storage, with something like ownCloud, this would be more completely self-ownership of data.

Looking into this again, I tried an install of ownCloud on my home iMac. That would be a necessary first step for an end user making use of ownCloud and Neebla should I incorporate ownCloud.

There are several steps to this installation, and I picked what ought to have been the simplest install method (there are others, e.g., using Docker, but I doubt they are simpler):

1. Install the VirtualBox application. This has a few pieces too and itself isn't fully simple.
2. Install the ownCloud appliance. This is definitely not simple. There are choices to be made that I'm not sure I got right. Plus, my install got only to 90% before stalling. I'm not sure what I'd do next.
3. A user would need to next install an OAuth plugin, or more likely the OIDC plugin that ownCloud is transitioning to. With OIDC, there seemed to be multiple additional steps with additional plugins/components required.
4. I suspect some kind of reverse proxy setup like ngrok would also be needed. At the end of all this install process, SyncServerII and Neebla would need access to a URL which would resolve to this personal install of ownCloud, through HTTPS/SSL. I don't think this is provided out of the box by ownCloud.
5. After all this, to create an account on Neebla, I think several pieces of info would be required. At least a username, password, and URL to the ownCloud server. And perhaps more. Perhaps a key/secret for the ownCloud server. I'm not fully sure how a user would input that additional data to a mobile app.

I only made it to part way through step 2 before giving up. Even if step 2 would have been successful I'm not sure how many Neebla end users would be willing to go even that far. I'm not sure who ownCloud with OAuth or OIDC is targeted at, but it doesn't seem to be a casual end user.

I'm going to give up on this for now. Perhaps something will change and a simpler self-owned cloud storage service will become available. Syncthing looks simpler and interesting, but I see no API which SyncServerII could use to access those files.