Syncthing's P2P design is awesome.
Same software on all nodes. Central server is just a convention.
Syncthing in written in Go, which has fantastic performance (which is important when you have a lot of files)
Why not ownCloud / Nextcloud
- This would have been easier since there was already an app for ClearOS but
- WebDAV is not an ideal protocol. Tiki has tried to use for it for years, but not so great results (performance, reliability, etc)
- The server and clients are different code bases, which is bigger long term workload.