I know about the successful help being an alternative to apple/google. When I start degoogling (5 years ago) nextcloud was impressive. But I talk about my own experience. And nextcloud doesn’t work on their basics. Instead they’re following every hype with an alpha app which doesn’t get support when the hype ends (nextcloud social) for example.
Maybe they could fork owncloud again? Owncloud worked over years to get rid of php and released last year “infinity scale” its a single binary. You can run it nearly out of the box. And it is stable and fast. Nextcloud needs this, too.
The php part is something a newbie wouldn’t easy success with. The alternatives I recommend are all easy to install docker containers, which are simple to maintain and no worries about the next release could break everything.