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)
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 think the mistake is they titled it “The last note taking app you’ll ever need” instead of “The last note taking app I’lll ever need”
Yes, seriously. The article seems to talk mostly about their personal usecases, which is fine. This app is great and it works for them. But it won’t work for everybody and the title should probably respect that instead of having a grating title that evokes a knee jerk reaction.
Databases are annoying it is legitimately more difficult to export data from a database to another, than it is to copy markdown notes from one folder to another. In addition to that, there are also tools that process markdown and do cool stuff with, like pandoc, beamer, revealjs, etc, which can’t really be done with the more opaque database format.
Also this notetaking service only appears to work while online. Again, fine for them — but a dealbreaker for many people.
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)
An alternative to Syncthing is Resilio Sync. I use both, for different purposes.
Resilio is a battery eater on mobile, but it is a bit more consistent than Syncthing (though after 10+ years and probably terabytes of sync, it’s not like ST is problematic).
RS offers Selective Sync, so I don’t have to sync an entire folder, but can pick a file to sync “right now”. This is really useful for my media folder (~2.5 TB), since I don’t have that kind of free space on my phone. From anywhere I can fire up RS on my phone and grab whatever movie I want (or any file from my laptop, other phones etc, because all those files are synced to my server using Syncthing).
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
Yea, that’s a lot of ambiguity.
“Doesn’t work”. Well, yea, if you only install it on your phone - it’s a multi-device sync tool.
For Windows I recommend SyncTrayzor, for Linux and Mac it’s Syncthing, for iOS it’s Möbius.
I’ve installed it hundreds of times, the only time it hasn’t worked was between 2 Android devices of a specific version, and this is a documented thing.
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…
The Fork dev forked it years ago, well before the original dev stopped because of Play rules (which I really don’t get).
Anyway, I’ve used Fork for years now, it “just works”, plus moved all the config into each sync pair/folder.
Ok awesome, thank you. I’ll try it out. I was not aware of the discrepancy with the Play Store version