HOMER vs Nextcloud Talk

Three tags landed the same day from different branches. The 25.0.0 alpha is where the work is: classified conversations, announcements and channels, an owner role with promote and demote, global message search across the conversation list, conversation preservation that restricts deletion and purging, a setting limiting who can start calls, an upload editor with image compression, combined file-share messages, and a multi-speaker call view. It requires Nextcloud 35. The 23.0.10 and 22.0.17 releases are lockstep backports carrying the same two external-call fixes — iframe permissions and room-creation hardening — under a large volume of dependency bumps.

Talk is growing the structure that distinguishes a team chat product from a call tool: channels and announcements rather than only conversations, an ownership tier above moderation, and search that spans the whole list instead of one room. Running alongside it is a governance layer — classification, preservation against deletion, and restricting call initiation to named groups — which reads as organizations needing retention and access answers before they will replace a commercial platform. The stable branches meanwhile receive nothing but fixes, so all directional work is gated behind the Nextcloud 35 requirement.

The 25.0 line should proceed through further alphas and betas before a final, with the channels and classification work the most likely to change shape under testing. Whether the external-call hardening being backported twice reflects a deeper issue is not something these notes make clear.