On September 19–20, the Nextcloud Conference 2026 celebrated ten years since the project was founded. I was there, like I have been at almost every conference since 2016, and this year felt like a good moment to look back at what that decade actually looked like from the seat of a community volunteer, not a developer.

I didn't come to Nextcloud as a developer, and I still don't write code for the project. I'm not sure that detail matters much anymore, but it mattered a lot when I started, so it's worth saying up front: everything below was built by someone who joined a mailing list, not a codebase.

2016: A project with no product yet

I joined the Nextcloud community in 2016, the same year the project was announced. There was no polished product to point to yet, mostly a fork, a name, and a lot of people arguing, in a good way, about what the software should become. What I remember most from that period isn't a feature or a release date. It's the feeling of designing something out loud, in public, before it existed. We weren't reacting to a roadmap someone else had written. We were the ones sketching it.

It's worth explaining why that specific moment mattered so much, because it's easy to romanticize "the early days" of any project after the fact. The reason it mattered is practical, not sentimental: when a project has no product yet, the only thing it has is the people arguing about what it should be. Whoever shows up to that argument ends up shaping the outcome, whether or not they ever touch the source code. I showed up mostly on lists and forums, asking questions and translating…