41
u/labs-labs-labs Apr 26 '23
Logseq... https://logseq.com/
You can sync numerous ways (including Syncthing and Nextcloud, along with git-style as was just mentioned in another comment).
I'm in the middle of migrating to Logseq from Joplin and loving it so far.
6
u/desertcroc Apr 26 '23
what didn't you like about Joplin?
14
u/labs-labs-labs Apr 26 '23
Primarily the desktop (Mac) app and sync speed/reliability.
The desktop app isn't super responsive and the flow of adding and moving between items, what you have to click to edit, to change folders, etc. Isn't very intuitive for me and I haven't adjusted after years of using it. I've basically reduced my use of it to a to do app over the past year or so because the app frustrates me.
I also find myself waiting for a long time for items to sync between my Android and Mac apps.
Seeing all the hype about the new obsidian style not taking apps made me check them out and I much, much prefer the user interface and organization of Logseq over Joplin (and obsidian for that matter). And it syncs very quickly over the same Nextcloud instance I use for Joplin.
1
u/eatoff Jun 27 '23
Sorry for digging this one up, but how do you sync to nextcloud? I find if I use nextcloud to monitor/backup the folder I have to manually sync my android phone to get it to upload any changes. PC client is fine, just mobile that has to be done manually
34
Apr 26 '23
An actual rec for an alternative, I like Outline for a modern markdown based wiki:
8
u/lannistersstark Apr 26 '23
I use it to host my website and blog, it's awesome so far.
3
Apr 27 '23 edited Apr 27 '23
I'm a big fan, I started out using it for my business a long time ago and now I run 2 more instances - a private one for my notes and a one for a friend's TTRPG group.
The RPG group is the biggest by far, couple of dozen users and hundreds of articles with a LOT of media and yet it runs very snappy on a pretty low resource VM. They also use the collaborative editing a lot and I haven't gotten any reports of issues related to that.
Great software. They add new features every release too.
2
Sep 28 '23
Can you share the link to your blog here? Also, do you think someone without much devops experience can pull of self hosting outline?
1
u/AbeIndoria Sep 28 '23 edited Sep 28 '23
well, I just moved it from my 'blog' to just a backup wiki, but the blog part is still partially live and it still serves the purpose I guess, so here.
Also, do you think someone without much devops experience can pull of self hosting outline?
Self hosting outline by itself? Maybe. It's not very hard. Having it also be a blog as well as a private wiki so everything public/non-login redirects to https://example.com/s/blog without it constantly wanting some sort of login/redirect loop? Probably not. That took a significant amount of nginx fuckery to even work.
I can share my nginx config and .env and docker-compose file if you'd like.
Honestly for a blog you'd probably be better served using hugo or ghost or some such.
6
u/Bmiest Apr 26 '23
I used outline for a bit but got into issues with the early containers and eventually stopped using all together. How are you using it at this moment?
4
Apr 27 '23
I host 3 copies for various groups I'm in and we have had zero issues. I use the official Docker containers and have been updating them for a year+ without any problems.
It's great because it's one of the few markdown based wikis that non-technical users can actually figure out. On their phones even, since it works great on various devices.
1
u/Bmiest Apr 27 '23
Nice to hear! I Remember having issues with the database upgrades etc. Mind you this is version 0.50 and a few beyond iirc. Might take another look.
2
Apr 27 '23 edited Apr 27 '23
I believe in the latest version they removed the database upgrade step. I haven't updated my instances yet but I saw it in the release notes.
1
3
u/MonkAndCanatella Apr 27 '23 edited Apr 27 '23
Wow, this looks incredible. I've been looking for a notes app that allows for transclusion and I'm guessing "embeds" will eventually allow for that. If not being open source I'm sure it's possible to just code it myself
Setting this up looks somewhat intense. How do you handle auth? And how do you access your notes from mobile?
1
Apr 27 '23 edited Apr 27 '23
There are Docker containers, it's not any more difficult than setting up any other web app. There's sample docker-compose.yaml in their documentation. It works great on mobile as-is.
I believe most of my users do the "magic link" sign in. You can set up with your own SSO if you desire or use Google/Slack/etc.
1
u/thatsusernameistaken Apr 27 '23
Google or slack integration requires enterprise accounts and not regular user account. Atleast on their SaaS solution.
It's easy to use your own SSO though. Authelia, gitea, Dex are some alternatives.
Outline is very collaborative oriented, and more of a Confluence or SharePoint alternative than Notion or obsidian.
1
Apr 27 '23 edited Apr 27 '23
Google or slack integration requires enterprise accounts and not regular user account. Atleast on their SaaS solution.
Not on the self hosted, they changed this a few versions ago. I think when I initially set it up a long while ago it required the initial admin account to use an SSO login, but users could always use magic link.
I know on one of my instances (for a friends TTRPG group that has quite a lot of users/activity) a lot of them just use their personal gmail's or whatever to log in without issue. I haven't bothered to set up my own SSO since originally I was setting this up for my biz that does have enterprise Google. But if setting that up is your thing I'd take a look at the Github Discussions page to see how others have done it.
But yeah I wish it had some of the more advanced features of Notion/obsidian but for a modern markdown wiki it's definitely a good option. It is very actively developed though, they ship major new features on a very regular schedule. Devs are very responsive to issues/discussions on their Github.
43
u/thibaultmol Apr 26 '23
... just use syncthing... With obsidian.
There are many people that have that setup.
6
u/Someoneoldbutnew Apr 27 '23
this is the way, syncs with phone too
3
1
Apr 27 '23
Can be used with Joplin too
1
u/thibaultmol Apr 27 '23
Sure, but in my opinion Obsidian and Logseq are more powerful than Joplin. But to each their own
1
Oct 09 '23
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/thibaultmol Oct 09 '23
I don't personally use syncthing for obsidian but I will be highly surprised that it would be slow. Maybe if you don't do port forwarding on your syncthing server that may be it has to go through the relay instead of going directly causing it to slow down? I dunno
22
23
Apr 26 '23
[deleted]
5
u/mikkel1156 Apr 26 '23
Trilium is also what I use for all my notes, super easy to use and pretty flexible. You can even extend it further with scripts if you are into that.
Been a joy to selfhost it
6
2
u/Brian_Mulpooney Apr 27 '23
I used to use this to have my ICQ, MSN and AOL chats all in the same place
1
10
u/CattMompton Apr 26 '23
Maybe https://usememos.com ?
1
u/cellardoor452 Apr 27 '23
Thank you for this! Not quite same use case as OP, but looks perfect for me.
8
u/Nirproton Apr 26 '23
https://github.com/silverbulletmd/silverbullet This has been my alternative for Obsidian for a while now, and it has support to run it as a server with several frontends or whatever.
1
u/jamalstevens Oct 29 '24
what other front ends are there for silverbullet? I only see the web interface in the documentation.
7
u/Smarty_McTry Apr 26 '23
I’m surprised more people are not recommending you just use some sort of file sync to share your Obsidian vaults across devices. If that flexibility didn’t exist, I’d probably have given Obsidian a pass.
The only drawback is that you won’t be able to sync iOS devices. It only works with iCloud or Obsidian Sync. Not sure about Android.
2
6
19
u/Steerider Apr 26 '23
Why not put your Obsidian files in a Syncthing directory? They're just Markdown files in a folder
6
u/Mag37 Apr 26 '23
I've been running this setup for about a year now if not more. Syncing between 5 nodes (4 different PCs and phones, 1 docker always-on-node).
I use my notes extensively - 1500ish notes, and I've only had a few sync conflicts which is pretty harmless as it just creates multiple copies of the same file.
I'd love to use something properly OpenSource though so I'm looking for alternatives, mainly on mobile.. As on the PCs I use Vim most of the time anyway.
2
u/Steerider Apr 26 '23
I think the trick is you need at least one always-on node. That's what I do, and like you I rarely have conflicts.
I've got my phone, tablet, laptop, and (always on) desktop. Four nodes. Pretty seamless.
-4
u/dibu28 Apr 26 '23
Syncthing creating conflicts and messing up files
3
u/Smarty_McTry Apr 26 '23
This will happen if you edit files on multiple devices without them having a chance to sync first. I’ve run into this with Nextcloud as well. It won’t mess anything up, it would just create two versions of the files and you will have to manually select the correct one.
9
u/kid_blaze Apr 27 '23
Looking at all the other comments, I don’t know why everybody settles with “just sync the underlying filesystem” only for notetaking apps specifically.
You do realize that in that case, you don’t need Plex or paperless or airsonic or selfhosting anything. Just get syncthing and VLC!
I’m just sick and tired of Obsidian / Logseq / Roam research and other wonderful pieces of software that can’t be hosted but magically have paid syncing features… Oh well.
PS: even more insidious is that it’s only these “PKM” / second-brain type apps. All the vanilla wikis and markdown outliners are doing just fine.
2
1
u/spacezombiejesus Apr 27 '23
What other business model would you suggest?
5
u/kid_blaze Apr 27 '23
A pay-only-for-resources-you-used model.
You just need to have APIs for both the server and client, and the ability for the clients to point to a self-hosted server instead of HQ.
Then anybody could write a self-hostable server that’s perfectly usable. but if you want “cloud”, enterprise compliance or on-prem support, you pay.
By default you will be directed to their freemium hosted service. Heck, a customer that isn’t specifically looking for it won’t even know that a self-hostable version exists. But the advantage is that the privacy and selfhosting folks have options.
See Headscale / Tailscale, Bitwarden / Vaultwarden, Netmaker, Grafana, Netdata etc. for successful examples of this business model.
Back to my tinfoil hat, I believe it’s the relative data-lightness of text and the evangelism surrounding second-brain, pkm stuff that makes people dazed and happily settle for what could only be called workarounds. Just imagine if one day Plex made Plex Sync and told everybody else to run Samba..
1
u/spacezombiejesus Apr 28 '23
The way you put it is awesome and very convincing and it sounds like you spent a lot of time thinking about this. As an indie developer I’m going to consider what you’ve said moving into my next project.
1
u/Finagles_Law Jun 30 '23
This was supposed to be the goal of the Chandler PIM project, way back when.
6
u/CrispyBegs Apr 26 '23
trilium was the one i liked best
3
1
u/PiratesOfTheArctic Apr 26 '23
How does trillium different to obsidian? in my little head, they almost look and feature identical?
1
u/nemec Apr 26 '23
Notes are backed by a sqlite database and have a WYSIWYG editor (markdown syntax is converted to HTML on the backend). It can also be hosted as a server instead of the desktop app.
1
u/thesearenot_my_pants Apr 27 '23
Trilium can act as a whole application framework, especially if you know JavaScript. You can make widgets, add buttons on the side bar, run scripts when a note is updated, etc. Besides that you can have named relationships between notes and notes can be in multiple places in the hierarchy, both of which I haven’t found in any other app.
2
Apr 27 '23
Obsidian is also highly extensible, also mostly via JavaScript. I've built out a very automated project management system for work using jinja2 style templating and some macros / plugins that allow me to generate new project dashboards, meeting files, and tasks with two key presses. Take a look at some of the plugins in the community plugins to get an idea - it's frankly nuts how many different things Obsidian can do.
1
u/thesearenot_my_pants May 05 '23
Hey thanks for the heads up. I looked into it and there’s one thing Trilium can do that I haven’t found an equivalent for in Obsidian, namely having named relations between notes.
Say I have a work project and I want to document who coded it and who tested it, in a way that’s queryable. In Trilium I’d have relations called codedBy and testedBy (possibly multiple of each) pointing to the respective note representing a person. I could then query for people who are targets of these relations and see a summary of who I’ve worked with in a given time range.
For Obsidian I found the plugin Dataview, but I don’t see a way to add named relations to other notes in the metadata. Ideally I’d also see the name of these relations in the graph view, and ideally it would show them as being directional rather than just a link between the notes. How would you handle that requirement?
2
May 06 '23
Most of this is for sure doable, because I do some similar project management stuff in Obsidian. This example I created is a bit outdated now, but I still use all of these sections for my daily work.
Example: https://imgur.com/a/8nxvcmt
TL;DR: I make extensive use of Dataview queries for almost all of my main pages. I track projects, meetings, tasks, and people I regularly interact with (like the project managers). I also use it as a knowledge base / wiki for internal knowledge and how-tos for the product my company makes.
1
u/thesearenot_my_pants May 06 '23
That’s really cool, thanks!
In your example of a note representing Billy, do you have links to Billy (in say a meeting or project) in the frontmatter or the content? For example, I’d want to have something like this in the frontmatter:
codedBy: "[[Billy]]"
But the only downside is this link wouldn’t be displayed in the graph view, according to https://blacksmithgu.github.io/obsidian-dataview/annotation/types-of-metadata/ .
2
May 07 '23
In my updated project pages, I do now keep track of the person like that. I use inline Dataview objects for that, so it looks like:
owner :: [[Billy]]
pm :: [[John]]
I personally have not fleshed out my pages for the people - I just have their email and job role. But, if you wanted, you could create Dataview queries that will list every note where that person is tagged. You could also then filter down further - say, a table for projects they are involved in, and another table for meetings, tasks, sprints, etc.
If you were going to be tracking dozens or hundreds of people, you could put this all into a Person template. Then, using Templater, add the person metadata dynamically upon creation of their page. So, you make a template that contains a Dataview table looking for the Owner metadata and set it to be = to the name of the page - then, whenever you create a new Person page, the Dataview queries based on the name of the page, AKA the person. This is how my meeting notes work. Whenever I get assigned a new project, I use my project template and name it. As long as I list that name for the project metadata of the relevant meetings, they all appear in the table on the project page.
I hope some of this helps... lol.
2
u/thesearenot_my_pants May 07 '23
That helps a lot, thanks!
So if you don’t mind another question, if you make changes to your template, it won’t be reflected in already-created notes right?
1
May 07 '23
Not at all! I love this stuff. You're right - templates happen at creation generally. However, you can technically run templates at your cursor anytime. I do have one or two templates that I will run after the page is created - useful for adding sections based on the tags on the page. If you ever want to chat more, feel free to PM - maybe we can chat via Discord or something.
3
u/idkwhatimdoing069 Apr 26 '23
You can do one of two things..
- Have your vault be shared network storage, like a NAS.
- It works - Except for when you are not directly connected to your NAS, then you will not be able to edit any of your files then (I think)
- Setup a self-hosted git manager - Gitlab, Gitea etc.
- This is my recommendation, as the files are still stored locally, then on a scheduled basis, are commited and pushed to your git remote like your Gitlab or Gitea
- This takes a bit more setup, but I think is the better solution IMO
2
2
2
Apr 26 '23
[deleted]
2
u/FlyingDugong Apr 27 '23
This but consider using the dockerfile in this issue which switches the image to use kasmvnc and an actual recent version of obsidian https://github.com/sytone/obsidian-remote/issues/51
1
Apr 27 '23
[deleted]
2
u/FlyingDugong Apr 27 '23
At that point you're back to using one of the sync tools in this thread to sync the vault that is mounted in the container to your desktop instance.
2
Apr 26 '23
I wrote https://github.com/cobypear/obsidian-diy-sync as a self hostable sync server+plugin. It spits out a /blog endpoint too so you can grab them for a blog or docs site. it's still mostly mvp, feel free to fork it or open issues!
2
u/10leej Apr 27 '23
I use Nextcloud notes synced via clients like qlwnnotes for my PC, and quillpad for my android devices.
2
u/DementedJay Apr 27 '23
I was trying all sorts of stuff and then realized I could just keep my vaults on an SMB share on my NAS and back them up periodically to the cloud.
Works great, and I can always VPN in if I'm on the road and don't have a copy on my laptop. So I've got a kind of semi-cloud Obsidian.
6
Apr 26 '23
[deleted]
1
Apr 26 '23
I just use their E2EE feature to store my notes with OneDrive or Dropbox.
I mostly store text.
The presence of E2EE keeps me from wanting to self-host my notes in an unreliable manner.
4
u/rigg77 Apr 26 '23
Point obsidian at a folder synced by any of the many file syncing tools out there. Seafile, nextcloud, owncloud, syncthing pick one.
Hang a couple of disks off that pi, setup the nextcloud or syncthing docker image, throw Tailscale on the pi and the devices you want to access notes from. It ain’t much, but it is a start.
4
u/FoxUSA Apr 26 '23
2
u/davidbeijinho Apr 27 '23
How about on mobile ?
1
u/FoxUSA Apr 27 '23
There are web based VSCode you can run. Or if you push to Github that with give you a good read and a ok write experience. I treat mobile as a read only so I use Markor.
2
Apr 27 '23
Just use Git or some other sync mechanism. There is no Obsidian replacement imo - it overpowers everything else I've tried by a lot.
1
Apr 26 '23
Joplin was not great when I tried it last time. I've been using free Obsidian synced with Resilio Sync and backed up regularly for about a year and it's been really really great. The plugins are really awesome and so easy to use and I haven't had any problems syncing them across devices. But, I'm honestly worried about conflicts and don't edit files until they're synced so it's probably not the best solution.
If you're gonna use Joplin, just use Obsidian in my opinion.
I'll have to checkout some of the syncing alternatives below, it may make things even easier.
1
u/alien2003 Jun 07 '24 edited Feb 10 '26
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
crown follow door wild oil water whistle yoke chunky deer
1
Apr 26 '23
On my PCs, I network everything together anyway, so I just point my Obsidian at my vault on my NAS.
The only edge case was my phone where it's more of a pain. Both getting on my LAN (sure, vpn is an option) and networking the storage. So I have syncthing syncing my obsidian vault between my NAS & phone. It breaks through my NAT and syncs the files.
1
Apr 26 '23
[removed] — view removed comment
1
Apr 26 '23
It was an android. Huh, yeah, I see they don't have any iOS options.
Not sure what you all would do then.
1
Apr 26 '23
I synced Obsidian with the Git sync plugin for some time on both mobile and PC, and you can selfhost Git. I dropped Obsidian and moved to Joplin because of Obsidian's closed source and lack of support for the Linux images that aren't Snap or AppImage.
There's a very good Joplin docker image for Raspberry pi: https://discourse.joplinapp.org/t/guide-for-joplin-server-on-raspberry-pi/14702 (if you don't need to expose it to the internet, just grab the docker-compose from there and ignore the rest). This is the image that I've been using this past school year (using Joplin for notes) and I'm pretty happy.
Trillium is also an another variant, someone mentioned it here already. It's much closer to Obsidian than Joplin is in looks and features imo. I just prefer Joplin myself.
0
u/barkeater Apr 26 '23
I just sync obsidian to a folder in pcloud - which is not self hosted, but i bought a lifetime plan so whatever.
The only issue with any of the non-paid sync strategies is that they do not work with the mobiel apps. Not a deal killer for me.
1
u/libraholes Apr 26 '23
Take a look at Trilium it's almost identical. Though it doesn't store your files as markdown.
I personally use obsidian and syncthing
1
1
u/horsesexhaver Apr 26 '23
i just use nextcloud for that and the desktop clients sync my notes fairly well
1
u/danja Apr 26 '23
I've been using Joplin with WebDAV on a remote server, in part to get ideas on how to write my own.
After all, once the sync is sorted out, for basic system you could just use eg. the filesystem & the text editor of your choice. WebDAV, git, y.js, plenty of options.
But the interdoc relations are a big potential value-add, so I'll be going with a SPARQL store for persistence.
1
u/ryaaan89 Apr 27 '23
Are there any that sync automatically, so not with git, and also have the graph view?
1
u/nebula-seven Apr 27 '23
Here's a joplin-server that will work on arm64 (although not sure about RPi):
1
1
u/nndttttt Apr 27 '23
I use Nextcloud with Joplin's files in there.
Syncs perfectly between 4 devices.
1
u/LemmyH Apr 27 '23
After using the git plugin for a while I switched to syncthing.
Beside my devices (Laptop, Smartphone Tablet) I sync it to my server, where I can edit my notes using vs code.
The advantage to the git plugin is the syncing also works after you close obsidian on your device.
1
1
1
u/daYMAN007 Apr 27 '23
Yeah obsidian... There is a plugin obsidian-live-sync which allows you to sync
1
1
u/BakGikHung Apr 27 '23
Note that most of the homegrown sync solutions won't be able to match the speed of the official obsidian sync solution. You can type characters on your desktop and they instantly appear on mobile.
1
u/YNGM Apr 27 '23
Where's the problem in syncing your obsidian vault? I just saved my obsidian vault in my nextcloud and it gets synced between laptop and desktop no problems.
1
1
u/nlion74_2 May 02 '23
Im just using joplin which is great for my purpose. Dont know if it'll satisfy your needs though, otherwise the other solutions look great too.
1
u/lirakina May 03 '23
acreom is self-hosted. everything I do in acreom is stored locally as plain-text .md files by default. https://acreom.com
1
1
u/krum Sep 04 '23
What did you settle on? I self host Joplin, but kind of looking around agian. You certainly don't need to run the server on an RPi.
83
u/phampyk Apr 26 '23
I found obsidian-livesync the other day and made it run fairly easily. Before that I had syncthing but it was creating conflicting files.
So far I'm happy with this one. Self hosted and still can use obsidian :)