Features for the note taking app detailed in this guide include:
- Self-hosted
- Private
- Built to last
- Low maintenance
- Access in one place & from any device (Obsidian charges for this feature)
- Versioning
- Zero vendor lock-in
- Extendable (eg. passing text-embedded notes to AI)
Thanks for sharing OP. If I could find a selfhostable Notepad++ I’d be in high cotton. It ticks all the boxes I need.
Not saved as Markdown files, but in a database. I prefer editing my own files when I need to. I prefer Silverbullet.
And they claim “zero vendor lock-in”.
Exporting your content from whatever weird format they’re using in the DB isn’t exactly making the switch easy.
Yeah, especially for text files. Hard no.
Databases have their uses, but the trade off between obfuscating the data and making it harder for users to access has to be far more compelling. LogSeq is a really good example that you can do relatively complex note organization with cross references and tree structure without resorting to a database. Using a DB for something like this is user-hostile, smells of vendor lock-in, and seems lazy.
I already keep notes in markdown format but didn’t know of Silverbullet.
I reject Obsidian and Joplin because they’re based on electron but it looks like it’s not the case for Silverbullet. Don’t know if these even support markdown tbh.
I’ll need to look into it further, looks really nice!
Obsidian ticks all of these boxes and syncthing to sync notes is a 5 minute setup.
Plus it stores things in plaintext instead of a database format that vendor locks you in (despite the claim of “no vendor lock in”)
Ooooo yay another half-baked AI shoved into everything whatever possible.
Obsidian’s only downside is that it’s closed source, but this is a big downside for some people.
Yep and can be easily firewalled to mitigate trust
Man, you guys REALLY do not like AI here. lol Yeah, it’s a novelty for the average consumer. Sure, corporations try to wedge AI into everything, like an AI Rice Cooker. But we have to go there to figure out what it’s core usefulness is. Think of when corps were hit by the trendy cloud thing. They pushed entire operations to the cloud. Then we figured out that what can be run in the cloud, might not ought be in the cloud. So, after a while, we regrouped, and no one even gives ‘the cloud’ much thought anymore…it’s not special or trendy anymore.
It’s like every trendy technological gizmo that supposed to make your life sooo much easier. These are selling points for people who really don’t understand the real potential, and just want to make faceswaps, and bizarre pictures, or maybe music. I use AI when I’m mastering music tracks because I’m clinically deaf and some frequencies I just can’t hear. Works very well.
Your cloud example is exactly right and exactly what we want to NOT HAPPEN.
They shoved the cloud so much down our throats so that they can force you into monthly income-sucking unneeded subscriptions. That is it. That is the single reason everyone did it.
The result is now the average user has a much worse experience overall. One literally has to fight with Microsoft products to save things on their own computer. IoT and smart products literally won’t function without connections to their “cloud”. Phones come without SD card compatibility and with low flash memory to force you into cloud subscriptions. Now every damn piece of software is a way overpriced subscription that almost all originally started as “switching to cloud infrastructure” (fucking adobe creative cloud).
The “cloud” has had so many data breaches and people data have been stolen, siphoned off, lost due to bugs, and sold to earn even more cash on the side.
A huge portion of the general corporatization and bad enshittification of digital services and software in general can be attributed to “the cloud shoving down our throats” that you describe.
AI is looking to do the same thing except castrate peoples’ digital skills, critical thinking skills, transcription skills, and writing skills in order to siphon more and more of your income off in the form of AI subscriptions while they double dip and sell everything you ever say to it and triple dip in mining everything you say to it as R&D that you pay to do
Companies need to do the fucking R&D themselves with their revenue of a small country and stop forcing regular people to pay to be their alpha and beta testers and focus groups, and people gobble that boot up so hard because LLMs have a few small areas where they are slightly useful and can save 10 minutes per day and make them not have to critically think, so people will literally sell their data, their already small income, and their soul to save 10 minutes, and in 10 years the digital experience will be even more shitty and degraded than it got after “the cloud.”
Your usecase is the exact definition as using LLMs as accessibility and to actually better the user experience for certain people which is not the goal of any AI company or 99% of LLM integrations
TD;DR
Non-consentual cloud shoving has caused newer generations to think that paying corporations every month to save files is normal and that your data is not yours and always corporate property ™®©, along with the decimation of understanding simple file structures. You can actually talk to teachers and professors and they unanimously say that tech literacy has nosedived.
Now with the LLM shoving, they are trying to force the new generation to have to pay subscriptions to think, write, compose, draw, and get information by stripping them of those skills.
It took me far too long to figure out what note taking app this here is even talking about. Apparently it’s a homemade app named Directus?
Obsidian charges for sync, but you can totally do your own syncing with other means.
Man there’s a lot of the last note app you’ll ever need!
nano todo
I’ll take Joplin instead! It’s FOSS!
When i tried Joplin i was put off by a few issues:
- pretty sluggish UI on all platforms
- not plain markdown: all your files have .md extension but the content is definitely more JSON than MD :)
- synch is cumbersome unless you use sychthing or similar.
It was over 1 year ago,so.
Which is why I prefer Silberbullet
I tried Joplin for a while but dropped it, too simple. Also tried Trilum, which I liked more but it’s still a very young project.
Eventually, my Obsidian vault will go there, but not just yet.
Yes, Joplin achieves everything this proposal does and more.
Are there not already about a zillion of these?
Yes. Enjoy 30 minutes of unhinged (but logical and highly enjoyable) ranting about this, if you care to:
I love new ideas and optimism, but only your last point is the uniqueness… and it’s in parentheses??
Gotta step up the marketing game here
I don’t really get all the hate on the comments. Yes there are tons of note taking alternatives, and yet usually none ever works just perfectly for anybody. More choice is a good thing.
Yes it saves to a database, but it doesnt seems to be encrypted nor “proprietary” or “vendor lock-in” as the notes are, afterall, plain text and can be extracted from a database easily. Is it the best storage for text notes? not in my opinion, but that is not vendor lock-in.
My choice is silverbullet on web and Markor on Android, with Synchting in the back (yes, Synchting still works pretty fine on android thanks to the forked app).
I don’t really get all the hate on the comments.
Agreed. “Oh no! Not an ETL!” I wish more applications were backed by MySQL, MariaDB, Mongo, etc. Give me the option of encryption at rest, and when it’s time to change apps, I have granular control over everything.
On the other hand, the advantage of all the hate is everyone presenting their faves and providing their reasons. So …net win for the audience?
What is this SyncThing fork? Is it on F-Droid or something? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills because everyone praises SyncThing but it straight up does not work. I can get it to sync once, then the next day it will just not connect at all (Android 15 P9Pro/CachyOS)
The original android app has been discontinued by the dev for reasons. Another dev picked it up and keep publishing SyncThing fork on FDROID, at least, i get it from fdroid…
Ok awesome, thank you. I’ll try it out. I was not aware of the discrepancy with the Play Store version
I started using syncthing after reading all that praise on lemmy. It deserves all the praise it can get, it’s easy to setup and works perfectly.
what “crazy pills” are you taking?
syncthing-fork ☞ https://f-droid.org/packages/com.github.catfriend1.syncthingandroid
what “crazy pills” are you taking?
- Hear people praise SyncThing
- Open the Play Store by depressing the tip of my finger on its icon
- Search “SyncThing”
- Click on first result
- Press “Install”
- It doesn’t work
Looks like https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/home/ except that one is backed by two governments.
Vim + vimwiki is what I use, with session saving plugin. That is all I need. For syncing, I use either git or syncthing.
Nextcloud notes
micdrop
Awful app
Fair
I think you accidentally dropped your mic.
