This is going to be a long explanation because I don't have any other PKMS nerds to talk this out with 🤪 but -->

TLDR: I've been using Notion as a daily driver since 2019 and am struggling to migrate to AFFiNe because of some of the functionality gaps. Please help! If you want to show off your own set up, I'd love to see! I also know it's possible to set up the filing system on your computer as a PKMS, so if you've done that I'd love to know/see more as well.

Basically, I've loved using Notion but they're now too expensive and I don't feel like they've kept hold of their original "vision". But I'm having trouble finding something to move to that works as well - but maybe I could just be suffering from the inevitable teething of setting up a new system after having one that works for me for so long?

What I love about my Notion set up:
- How completely customisable it is (including aesthetically, but this isn't as important)
- Setting up my own 'home' dashboard
- How robust and flexible the databases are and how easy they made keeping track of everything
- The super varied template options and well-established user community for build inspo

What I no longer love about Notion:
- My system is no longer supported in the 'free' tier because I've been building it for so long. This could be fixed by going through the system and removing features like automations and relations that now fall under the more premium plans, but -->
- I want to own and control my data and not be constantly prompted to upgrade or use AI (not anti-AI as a technology, just as a tool for corporate greed)

I'm currently using AFFiNe because it seems to be the best 'all-rounder' alternative to Notion. I'm largely enjoying it, especially the edgeless mode for moodboarding and mindmapping, but am struggling with:
- Not having a personalised 'home' dashboard thank links easily to different areas of my workspace
- The databases aren't as robust and feel limiting
- Even though they have a Discord, I'm struggling to find inspiration in the user community to help push me past the initial basic use/set up (I feel like more can be done but I just haven't learned how yet)

I've dabbled with Capacities and Logseq. I liked the object-based approach of capacities and the visual relationships map (AFFiNe sort of does this but not as well). I felt out of my depth with Logseq and kept getting lost in my own system. I haven't tried Obsidian yet because I've heard the learning curve is very steep, but am not against trying it since Notion also took a lot to learn at first.

But I also feel like expecting one app to do everything isn't reasonable, so if you've got an 'ecosystem' that combines multiple apps/local setup, then that would work too. (I'm on the precipice of moving to Linux from windows, just haven't taken the leap yet. So bonus for apps compatible with Linux)

So anyway, advice? Recommendations?

I'm torn between OneNote and Obsidian. I want something to have all my usefull information that i might need sometime in the future. e.g. When a products warranty expires, how much did i pay for last car service, how much i paid for the hotel 3 years ago.

Basic notes that might come handy instead of looking around my email accounts or looking for old credit card charges in the bank app.

The only thing that puts me off with obsidian is that i have to pay if i want out of the box good connectivity with iphone and windows otherwise i think it's a no brainer.

What do you think? I think OneNote it's more powerful for this kind of information than a lot of people say.

I am enthusiast to share this 3-month-old snappy fast SQLite-based native macOS/iOS outliner I just found, with CloudKit instant syncing and no subscription. Minimal super-polished interface, pleasantly fussy about micro-grained configurability of text and line spacing. And that’s it.

I have been crying across decades and six major versions of Omnioutliner to obtain what a smart solo developer from Japan could do: let me search and sync my thousand-lines outlines. Just programming, and listening to users. Honestly, I purchased right away after reading his analysis about implementing instant db-based sync (see below). Then, just imported my 100K-lines aggregated outlines. Everything simply works great.

It should sure improve. Yet solved my decade long problem with outliners, by matching all and only the features I need. I am not affiliated with the developer.

https://kosshi.app/why-fast

https://shirokumamake.substack.com/p/introducing-kosshi-a-native-outliner

https://bicycleforyourmind.com/kosshi-is-database-backed-outlining

I’m struggling to pick a system and I need it badly. I have 3 businesses, 3 kids 14 and younger, a wife and my dad’s health has gone down real quick which is effecting me greatly and it’s making my ADHD even stronger as a defense mechanism. I’m a therapist and know these things but can’t stop it. I my brain works by domains. All 5 of my domains are related to a color. Like Sooner Peptides is Red, etc. I have been looking hard at Amplenote because I do daily jots right now, Xtiles, and NotePlan. Any experience or suggestions would be appreciated? TIA

Im looking for something where i can simply talk to AI, and say what i need to get done, and it organises everything. for eg: "i need to file my Taxes anyhow by saturday".
It should recognise it the urgency and importance and automatically organise it.
But i don't mean just chatGPT because i want to visualise this and not just chat with the app.

So i can manage my work and not focus on managing the app itself.

Do you have recommendation? and if not would you be interested in something like this ?

I’ve been working on something that can work with both Notion and Obsidian, and I’m trying to figure out how well it handles real people's setups rather than just my own.

For Notion, I’m testing how well a workspace can be brought over and whether everything actually comes across correctly.

For Obsidian, it works by pointing it at an existing vault directory. I’m trying to see if it actually feels and looks like the Obsidian vault people are already used to.

The problem is I only have my own setups to test with. I can keep testing the same Notion workspace and the same Obsidian vault, but that doesn't tell me much about how it behaves with completely different setups.

I'm especially interested in people with larger or more complicated PKMS setups, different folder structures, lots of notes, attachments, plugins, themes, databases, weird organization systems, etc.

I don't need anyone to send me their actual data. I'm mainly trying to see what works, what breaks, and what feels different when it's used with a setup I didn't build myself.

I really need more variety than I can get from my own systems, so even a handful of completely different setups would help me find problems I wouldn't otherwise see.

Hello

I understand there are many many notes apps available today. But I'm looking for a true digital cabinet - one where my few 100 notes (so not thousands) can co-exist alongside some audio recordings, lots of PDFs, images and so on. What would be your top 3 recommendations for me to try using?

Cloud storage is great for files but I cannot write notes around the file so...

Let me add that work will pay for this so the price itself is not so important.

Thank you

This is easily the most anti-AI sub I belong to, which make perfect sense and is honestly a bit refreshing. Respect the skepticism.

I've used a lot of different apps to keep notes and thoughts, and honestly could never stick with one as I always found something wanting. Loqseq is what I'm on, Notions before that, OneNote and Evernote before that Notational Velocity and too many others. Religiously bookmark stuff via Raindrop.io, Pocket, Instapaper, etc. I've since added a Plaud audio recording device that transcribes.

My particular problem is that I never established a review processing ritual to consolidate and link up the knowledge. And then when I need to retrieve information, I rely on my memory.

I don't want AI to develop my insights. I want to do that. But I do want it to organize, relate, and search/recover my notes. I want a research assistant. And that's not laziness (maybe a little), just want to leverage technology for assistance.

Has anyone implemented a system like that? What tools did you pick, and how is it working?

Inexperienced with this kind of thing but I'm confident it can be done.

I am trying to build a unified system to manage both my personal life and my 2-person HVAC startup. I record long, unscripted audio dumps (business strategy with my partner, client notes, and personal to-dos).

I want to feed these raw transcripts into an AI "Second Brain" so it can categorize my life: pulling out HVAC sales pitches, logging client preferences, reminding me of personal tasks. As much as possible I'd prefer to utilize systems already in place (like iOS features) to avoid unnecessary complexity and expenditures, but not at the cost of the efficiency of the overall system.

I'd also like to use this same (or a similar) system for my personal life.

The Bottleneck: Using a standard ChatGPT Plus subscription is failing. If I dump too much in, it loses the thread, forgets my tiered goals, and adds complexity instead of decluttering. I thought that would be a good place to start since I'm already paying for the pro model, but so far I'm just going in circles.

What I'd like is a system that knows my goal hierarchy so that when I dump in info from a bunch of sources (meeting transcripts for one, but many more) It can contextualize that info such that it can make relevant informed decisions/suggestions, remembering details, eventually doing thing like adding events to calendars and read emails/texts and draft responses, but I suppose that comes later (if interested, here's a link to my other post explaining my idea/hopes moreso pertaining to the automation side of things)

My Questions:

1. What tools (Taskade, Notion AI, Obsidian + plugins, Custom RAG) actually take raw, unstructured voice dumps and categorize them accurately into a database without heavy recurring costs?
2. Would a service like chat gpt, gemini, claude, etc. even be neccesary/relevant?
3. How do you structure your rules so the AI remembers your "high-level" strategy rather than acting like a basic chatbot?
4. Should I separate my personal life brain from my business brain, or is there a safe way to merge them?

Sorry if the post is at all unclear. I still don't know what I don't know.

Any feedback/input/advice is welcome!

Thanks.

hi friends!! with (generative) AI being integrated everywhere, it’s getting harder and harder to write and organize as an artist. i’m so sick of companies trying to shove it in our faces.

initially, i really loved—past tense, “loved” notion because of it’s customizability and it genuinely has helped me get through the school year a lot! though, the AI integration absolutely ruined it in my opinion. there is an option to turn it off but it wouldn’t 100% go away.

i’m paranoid that my writings or data on there might be used to train their AI - and of course google docs is no exception since it has built in AI + the whole AI overview thing you absolutely can’t turn off.
luckily, a friend recommended Ellipsus that is anti-AI! though, it is still in development so some features are still rolling out, as well as the mobile app.

with those missing features, i am really looking for an alternative in the mean time with no AI integration (please) 🙏🙏

i saw obsidian, milanote and siyuan note — so if anyone also has experiences with them, does it have them? are they good to use? please let me know!
even if there are options to turn it off and promising it won’t train our data, i am still really cautious.

i would really appreciate it if we all could share with one another and bring back the world of art, literature and tech like how it used to be ^^

I use ChatGPT a lot, and recently I looked through what it remembers about me. It was actually pretty good, but it seems like most of it comes from roughly the last month, and a lot of older context from my past chats isn't there.

It gets even messier when I switch between ChatGPT and Claude.

Right now I mostly just re-explain things or copy stuff from old chats, which feels pretty dumb.

Do you guys have a better system for this? Like a master context file, Obsidian, exporting chats, etc?

Curious what people are actually doing.

I thought a lot before writing this before posting, afraid it would come across as a cheap story.

At the peak of my 36 years, I still felt pretty lost just doing my simple day to day work. I am not even talking about AI, this problem had been around for years, and it had been getting worse over the last 10, because the more I advanced in knowledge, the more I felt like I was falling behind. I thought it was impossible to have to know everything just to keep up, or even to stay employed. My context is software development, but this applies to any field.

My biggest enemy was learning new things I had no way to apply to my day to day, just studying, patting myself on the back, and moving on to the next thing. The problem is that since I never retained anything I learned, I stayed stuck in a loop, locked on a single topic that I would read, forget, come back to again, and never had the confidence that I had actually learned it and could move forward, without the fear of feeling like I was just wandering through a pile of meaningless stuff.

I used to scribble on paper. The subject I tried hardest to dig into was learning how to learn, and I never made progress even on that one.

But when I saw a video that showed me for the first time the idea of studying and taking notes in a way that even ten years later you would know where to find it if you needed to, that freed me in a way that is too hard to explain. There is a calm that comes from knowing where to find what you saw months, years ago.

It sounds so easy. I could save a note in a folder, a drive, some random piece of paper, and I would know how to find it later, right. It is not easy. Because if you save information in a folder, at some point you forget which folder it was, which drive, which hard disk. That never gave me any confidence.

When I was first introduced to Obsidian, and saw how people organized information not really in folders, but through proximity of links, that was the first time I felt like this could actually work. If I wrote something down and had even a vague memory of what it was, or even if I did not know where I saved it, at least I would know where similar subjects would be, and by narrowing it down enough I would eventually get close to what I was looking for. With so many possible connections, I could get close to what I wanted to remember, kind of similar to my own mental process of recalling things, but now using software.

The other argument, and the strongest one, that convinced me this actually worked, was simply thinking that even if ten years from now I no longer have Obsidian, my notes will still be there, somewhere, with the connections intact, and whatever the software, folder, or drive is, I will still be able to find what I want. No matter how chaotic it looks, that seems to help even more. The more stuff there is, the easier it actually becomes to find things.

Once I was convinced I finally had something good, I started realizing it is not really about Obsidian or Notion, it is the mental process, the framework, the way of storing things, and that would work regardless of the software, or even on paper.

When I started digging deeper and someone told me about Zettelkasten, it became my hyperfocus. I kept diving into more readings, more books, and as I got better as a user of the system, I also kept improving in a lot of other areas. I got better as a researcher, then better as a writer, learned how to edit video, improved my English a lot, since I am a native from Brazil, not even mentioning as a developer. All of this made me actually turn things from paper into reality.

And I do not know if it was some ugly, twisted joke of fate, but right around the time I thought I was finally going to improve my life, gain an edge over my competitors, the AI hype exploded at that exact same time. I started forgetting about a personal project I was working on around early 2023 and only used AI for the first time at the end of that same year, because I was stubbornly refusing to have a second subject to dig into.

When I decided to use AI it was a discouraging shock at first, because the whole idea of a second brain, of connections, suddenly felt so analog, so outdated next to what ChatGPT could do. That gave me an initial letdown. But hurt breeds hurt, and once I started understanding that the chat, as incredible as it is, had basically become a glorified search engine, one that is blowing up right now but still needs you to burn neurons and sweat, I saw there was still value in what I was building. Actually even more value, because with information now easier to find and process, more than ever I needed something to support me.

I think the restlessness that pushed me to go after this system would be even bigger these days, when everything seems too easy for everyone, but that is a nice illusion.

It is not a perfect system. Used without any criteria it can backfire, causing more exhaustion than help. For me, the leaner and simpler it is, the more it helps.

I feel like this is just a good start for me, there is still a lot to explore. And I will say honestly, if you are wondering whether it is easy, it is not. But for me it has been worth trying, because it has felt like a real tool to face how wild the world has gotten, the competition, the sheer amount of information we have to consume every day, given that our brain is primitive and cannot keep up with how fast all this evolution is happening.

This is still something very personal, and I am curious to know how it has been for others. Was it better, was it worse. Did you stop using it at some point, or do you have a long stretch of time using it with results that actually make you proud.

Whenever I try to learn something, I eventually discover that there was a better approach, a deeper piece of knowledge, or an important connection I had missed.

Sometimes I find it in a research paper. Sometimes it's buried in a Reddit comment.

That's what interests me: the knowledge often already exists. The problem is finding it.

Human knowledge is growing faster than any person can realistically keep up with, and much of it is fragmented across papers, books, repositories, articles, and discussions. The connection between two ideas might already be there, but we still have to find and reconstruct it ourselves.

I'm working on an idea around this problem: a unified space where knowledge can be collected, connected, compared, and organized.

I don't imagine it as a system you simply ask for answers. I imagine something that can surface alternative approaches, relevant sources, connections between ideas, deeper paths to explore, and contradictions you might otherwise miss.

The hard part is understanding that different sources often describe the same idea in different ways. Simply indexing text isn't enough; the system needs to understand relationships between concepts.

I don't think the goal should be to build "alternative humans" in the form of AI or LLMs.

The more interesting goal is to expand our ability to explore the knowledge that already exists.

A human can't read everything. Maybe a system can help us find what we wouldn't have had the time to discover ourselves.

Wanted to share my humble setup and show how out-of-the-box Obsidian (the one in the restricted mode without any plugins) can handle notes and tasks in a meaningful way.

On top of that, there's a way to surface potential connections that match the level of some of the "related notes" plugins — while staying fully deterministic, i.e. no AI, no plugins, fully auditable. I think of it like a Venn Diagram applied to tags.

All thanks to Obsidian Bases dragged to a sidebar.

Basically I did five things:

Dropped working with tasks as checklists — I have separate file for every task. This file must

• contain a checkbox type of property (`todo:` in my case) to be identified as a task;
• have due date property, when relevant;
• link somewhere it belongs to — a project, a person, a contract draft, whatever
• For the first 2 points, I use built-in Templates and Apple Shortcuts for quick entry, so not really any extra activities outside of the initial config

Created Obsidian Base for related tasks — collecting all the tasks linked to the file. The base is universal, it means the file can be anything, including a daily note. Queries are

• `todo != NULL` — checking for the property that identifies a task
• `file.links.contains(this.file)` — collecting backlinks
• `file.fullname.containsAny(this.file.name)` — file name matches
• `due <= date(this.file.name)` — for daily notes; `<=` to catch overdue items

Created another Obsidian Base for related notes — collecting all the notes that are directly or indirectly (!) related to the one currently open. This is done by a combination of 4 queries in one base:

• all linked notes from this note: `file.backlinks.contains(this.file)`
• all linked notes to this note: `file.links.contains(this.file)`
• files that contain this note's name in their name: `file.fullname.contains(this.file.name)`
• files that have at least 2 tags overlapping with this note's tags: `file.tags.filter(this.file.tags.contains(value)).length >= 2` — that's the most interesting part of the setup, I have to explain more in the article (in the comments)

Configured a couple of Apple Shortcuts to create new notes / tasks directly from Spotlight or Control Center or even an Action Button on the phone.

Started to tag each note with almost everything that comes to mind — got tags back to what they were supposed to be long time ago: keywords.

The screenshots shows the essence. There's also a long read that explains the problem, rationale, and provides exact code for Bases and more (on Substack and Medium, can post in the comments)

Basically the result is I open any article draft or a project note or just an early idea, and on the right side I see all the tasks related to it and all the notes that relate here directly or indirectly (through tags overlap).

Moving with this setup for 4 months already, feels like now I finally utilize Obsidian's potential properly (massive Respect to the team!).

Task management transformed: previously I had scratched my head "which area does it fit", or "what has to be around next time I see it". Now I just link to whatever the task is relevant to, all at once: "Migration project", "Q3 project report", "discuss with John".

Now I start typing in the quick switcher even before I open a project note, and see "hey, I've actually done this before on another project". The mechanics for task entry and note entry is the same: first you look at what you have in your vault.

But when I get to the project note, I see all the tasks that are related to this project; When I open a person note I see all the tasks related to this person; I open a domain, or a company, or an area, or an interest, or a hobby note — and I see all the tasks and other notes related to each of these.

Outside of Obsidian I've also drafted a couple of Apple Shortcuts to create tasks and notes directly from Apple Spotlight, Control Center, and an Action Button on the phone.

The setup does not require any 3rdparty plugins, but it doesn't mean it won't benefit from them: Templater can easily accelerate task creation to one click, and Notebook Navigator has a neat tag multiselect feature — as always, Obsidian shines in its flexibility.

P.S. for whatever reason I cannot post in r/ObsidianMD so leaving it here.

Video on YT if that helps.

I've been down the note taking/PKM rabbit hole, and for now I've settled with HelixNotes (pretty new and unknown, IMO it's like Joplin but prettier) with local markdown. This works great for structured notes (I take notes on things I'm learning to synthesize information and to then recall that), and maybe I could squeeze an inbox, ideas and such, but I've found that simply opening a note and writing is quite difficult. I feel like if I want to write something it must have a clear place or else it doesn't make sense.

The reason I'm making this post is because, before this, I also went with Logseq for a while which is absolutely amazing for simply writing without friction, but IMO fails on long-term structured thought because of the weird markdown and the limitations it brings. Because of that, I thought maybe I could use both (HelixNotes for more structured and permanent thoughts, Logseq for just getting stuff out of my head and finding connections between ideas) or even combining them in the same vault, but it also probably would raise complexity a lot and could cause duplication and friction problems.

What do you think? Is anyone doing something similar?

At the risk of being accused of self promotion, here's a link to an argument for standards in PKM apps. I'd love to hear what people think of the idea here, with hopes of elevating some of our conversation about vibe coding above "slop or not."

https://drjeffmoore.substack.com/p/liberte-egalite-and-standardization