I got into the idea of selfhosting my photos, and wanted facial recognition to search them. I also wanted a selfhosted chat server. Nextcloud came as the obvious choice that did both. After days of tinkering and fixing errors in the log one by one, everything worked except the facial recognition which said everything was fine but the faces just didn't get recognised. Also the mobile experience for Memories wasn't the best. Then luckily I came across immich and it was up and running in about 5-6 mins of configuration max, and it has better facial recognition than the main big commercial option. Insane. For chat I got a synapse server with coturn which also took about 15 mins of docker composing and setting configurations/accounts to my liking.

(I still think Nextcloud is cool but it's overkill and loaded with too many features I don't need + installation is a task & documentation/online support communities are scattered between the various methods of installation)