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Show HN: A note-taking web app that won't ever betray you

noteto.me

61–70 of 79 posts

Re: Show HN: A note-taking web app that won't ever betray you

#62
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! One of the goals of Edsu is that it's simple enough that you can "telnet" in and just talk directly to the server like you can with HTTP or SMTP. It can seem like a trivial feature, but I've found that being able to speak a subset of a protocol from any language after just an hour or two of duct-tape hacking ends up being a big unsung feature. And itgoon has it right - this was the most useful thing I could t…

Edsu seems to have some similarities to https://remotestorage.io . Can someone summarize the main differences?

From a quick look through remoteStorage, it looks to me like it's is focused on storage (and so appropriately named!), while Edsu is more explicitly a foundation for applications.

One place this shows up is that Edsu has a permissions model where other people can read and interact with what you've stored (within very tightly defined parameters), which is the basis for writing multi-user apps like, say, a distributed Reddit or Slack.

They both have the same model regarding the ownership of data though. The biggest difference there is that Edsu uses a Merkle tree as the storage, like IPFS and git, which has a lot of consequences in terms of how it gets used.

Re: Show HN: A note-taking web app that won't ever betray you

#63

Doesn’t save for me. After signing up and getting edclave address, signing in an granting access, changing the text and reloading doesn’t save. Nor does changing and navigating away and back - always get the “erase me..” text. iOS safari

Sorry about that, and thanks for the bug report! I haven't been able to test with an iOS device yet - I'll get on that.

Re: Show HN: A note-taking web app that won't ever betray you

#64

It's not really clear to me how the data is stored. Is it confined to the Edsu server I use akin to Diaspora and applications connect to it? How do I migrate my data or switch providers? Is it lost if the server or my localStorage goes down?

Thanks for your interest!

It is indeed stored on an Edsu server. The data format is trivial and completely specified, so switching providers should be straightforward (an Edsu app to do the data transfer would be easy to write, and I plan on writing one). If you're using your own domain (which is encouraged), from there you'd just update an A record to complete the transition, if not, you'd set up a transparent redirect on your old host to keep all your old links/permissions alive.

It's pretty old school in that if your provider loses a server and they're not doing replication/backups then there can be data loss. If they are, then a failover should work fine, with minimal loss and no corruption (the important stuff is atomic).

With localStorage, how it's used is up to the app (generally it'd only be used for keeping a token and maybe a block cache), so I wouldn't expect a loss of that to matter in most cases.

Re: Show HN: A note-taking web app that won't ever betray you

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Oh man, sorry, this ended up being an essay!) Take, for instance, statically-hosted HTTP: if I'm, say, hosting at AWS and I want to switch to Netlify, it's trivial - I just change the place I upload my files to and switch the DNS. To me that's a complete success in decentralization - there's no hassle, no compatibility problems, no one other than me even knows that I've made the change. So I don't see it as federate…

Hey, great stuff here. Well stated, kindly argued. I really look forward to what you build now, 6months, 2 years+ from now. :)

Very nice of you to say. Thanks for your interest, and best of luck :)

Re: Show HN: A note-taking web app that won't ever betray you

#67

It's not really clear to me how the data is stored. Is it confined to the Edsu server I use akin to Diaspora and applications connect to it? How do I migrate my data or switch providers? Is it lost if the server or my localStorage goes down?

Thanks for your interest! It is indeed stored on an Edsu server. The data format is trivial and completely specified, so switching providers should be straightforward (an Edsu app to do the data transfer would be easy to write, and I plan on writing one). If you're using your own domain (which is encouraged), from there you'd just update an A record to complete the transition, if not, you'd set up a transparent redir…

Thanks for the helpful reply! I brought up local storage because people were talking about some kind of sync and it sounded like the browser's storage would be used

Re: Show HN: A note-taking web app that won't ever betray you

#68
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just use a CRDT

That's what I'm suggesting, but I'm pointing out the fact that CRDTs are generally append only data structures and it's possible to run into space issues with them eventually for some users.

A lot of CRDTs are append-only.

But not all! Quite a few that are state-based, auto-compacting, space-saving, small & efficient!

More info in a discussion on this: https://twitter.com/marknadal/status/1008610024875122688

Re: Show HN: A note-taking web app that won't ever betray you

#69
post #16

I actually found that using special directory for notes and git and grep is actually convenient. The only thing I'm missing is fuzzy search features of grep, like build on word2vec models.

fzf can probably help you with fuzzy searching.

Re: Show HN: A note-taking web app that won't ever betray you

#70
post #24
post #16

I actually found that using special directory for notes and git and grep is actually convenient. The only thing I'm missing is fuzzy search features of grep, like build on word2vec models.

Can we call this the Dropbox syndrome where people boasts they have a better solution with combination of cli tools instead of a service?

I prefer the 'combo of CLI tools' to a service where ever possible because those solutions are almost always simpler, easier to understand, portable, and easier to maintain.
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