Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Siyuan: Privacy-first, self-hosted personal knowledge management software

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 160 posts

Re: Siyuan: Privacy-first, self-hosted personal knowledge management software

#51

Post by rukshn »

hajimuz wrote: post #45
rukshn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also installed it on my computer to give it a try, but then as you mentioned I could not find who are behind it other than it's based in China. So decided to just keep with Obsidian

They open sourced it and you can self hosted. I mean, does it even matter where they are from? Why it’s automatically suspicious when you know the authors are Chinese.

True the origin does not matter, but it would be better to have more transparency about the contributors even if it's an open source tool. Because you can still get injected with a malicious code when an update is pushed.

But I agree we should not categorize according to geolocation, but more transparency would be better irrespective of the location in any project.

Re: Siyuan: Privacy-first, self-hosted personal knowledge management software

#52

Post by jraph »

oefrha wrote: post #42
jraph wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company does exactly this intentionally for everything we sell at our extension store. Everything under LGPL, license checks that you could bypass with not much effort. It allows selling actually free software and can work well if you do this well.

Yeah I know this is a fairly well-trodden model recommended by FSF (okay, maybe I shouldn’t have called it kinda strange). I’m not confident it works out in most cases, though. So I’m wondering if it’s intentional in this case.

> I know this is a fairly well-trodden model

Actually, if you have other examples of this happening in the wild, I'd be quite interested.

The other widespread example I have in mind (which seems to work well) is WordPress extensions with premium features, but I've not encountered this too often neither.

Edit: thanks all for your examples :-)

Re: Siyuan: Privacy-first, self-hosted personal knowledge management software

#53

Post by McSido »

ghgr wrote: post #43

I can also recommend Trilium Notes [1], which I have been happily using for years. It's currently in "maintenance mode", which I personally see as a feature (no risk of bloatware). Self-hosted, great webapp, optional native clients and works offline. https://github.com/zadam/trilium

As another fan of Trilium Notes for years, I just want to add that there is now also an active community fork continuing the work on the tool.

https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes

Re: Siyuan: Privacy-first, self-hosted personal knowledge management software

#54

Post by veidr »

colordrops wrote: post #19
kelsolaar wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it a big plus, genuine question? You do not need Obsidian to use your Markdown written content and are not vendor locked in as such.

That's like saying "you do not need oracle to use your bytes on disk". I may be mistaken but doesn't obsidian provide a ton of functionality on top of markdown?

No, just a little bit. Your docs remain 98% compatible with other Markdown editors. The functionality is mainly around a.) better UI for editing Markdown, b.) plugin ecosystem (optional), c.) paid sync (optional, and achievable otherwise e.g. SyncThing, your own rsync script, etc), and d.) optional (and very bad) "publish-as-a-website" feature.

Re: Siyuan: Privacy-first, self-hosted personal knowledge management software

#55

Post by Tomte »

veidr wrote: post #54
colordrops wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying "you do not need oracle to use your bytes on disk". I may be mistaken but doesn't obsidian provide a ton of functionality on top of markdown?

No, just a little bit. Your docs remain 98% compatible with other Markdown editors. The functionality is mainly around a.) better UI for editing Markdown, b.) plugin ecosystem (optional), c.) paid sync (optional, and achievable otherwise e.g. SyncThing, your own rsync script, etc), and d.) optional (and very bad) "publish-as-a-website" feature.

If you only use standard Markdown. But the advocacy often focuses on DataView and a thousand other features that are simply not available without Obsidian.

Re: Siyuan: Privacy-first, self-hosted personal knowledge management software

#56

Post by sunshine-o »

Looks cool, but as I have been on this knowledge management / productivity journey like everybody. Here are my findings:

If you are reasonably comfortable with computers / Unix.

- You need to first rely on a directory structures, filenames, plaintext, lists and maybe markdown. Stick with a "File over app", Unix approach.

- Try to sort things with universal concepts: locations, things, people, events, metrics, howtos. A bit like the 5Ws approach.

- Leverage good Unix tools: unix commands, make/justfiles, (rip)grep, git, fzf, etc.

- Do not try to solve the problem through the Web. Because you will end up trying to solve web problems instead of basic knowledge management and productivity issues.

- The smartphone/touchscreen is a major problem, but as with the Web do not try to solve it. Use your file manager or even fzf in termux can be adapted to be reasonably usable on a touchscreen.

Something I have been wondering about is the "backlink" feature. It would be cool to link items/notes together through references. What I would be looking for is a Unix tools that can scan my text files for references to other files in the hierarchy.

Re: Siyuan: Privacy-first, self-hosted personal knowledge management software

#57

Post by mxuribe »

adhamsalama wrote: post #27
la_fayette wrote: post #17

I am using markdown files in a private GitHub repo for personal knowledge management. For me this works just fine... Is there any feature you think I might miss from tools like these?

Graph view, backlinks and databases.

I see the value in backlinks (I assume you mean backlinks between said markdown files, right?), and graphview might come in handy once in a while...but am not seeing the value brought by databases here? Unless the db becomes part of a top/management layer for said files, which adds other things like maybe possibly faster search or easier query of content (that is, easier than find/grep, etc.)? Not knocking if DBs can be used, with all apologies, am genuinely curious how DBs could help here? (Context is that if this person is using simple markdown files in folders/repos, then they probably don't need/want more than that and typical file management tools)

Re: Siyuan: Privacy-first, self-hosted personal knowledge management software

#58

Post by aldonius »

jraph wrote: post #52
oefrha wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I know this is a fairly well-trodden model recommended by FSF (okay, maybe I shouldn’t have called it kinda strange). I’m not confident it works out in most cases, though. So I’m wondering if it’s intentional in this case.

> I know this is a fairly well-trodden model Actually, if you have other examples of this happening in the wild, I'd be quite interested. The other widespread example I have in mind (which seems to work well) is WordPress extensions with premium features, but I've not encountered this too often neither. Edit: thanks all for your examples :-)

The Ardour DAW is kinda like this. Downloads of prebuilt images through the website are paid, but you can download and build yourself from source. (Most Linux users probably have free access via distro package manager anyway.)

Re: Siyuan: Privacy-first, self-hosted personal knowledge management software

#59

Post by rmnclmnt »

jraph wrote: post #52
oefrha wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I know this is a fairly well-trodden model recommended by FSF (okay, maybe I shouldn’t have called it kinda strange). I’m not confident it works out in most cases, though. So I’m wondering if it’s intentional in this case.

> I know this is a fairly well-trodden model Actually, if you have other examples of this happening in the wild, I'd be quite interested. The other widespread example I have in mind (which seems to work well) is WordPress extensions with premium features, but I've not encountered this too often neither. Edit: thanks all for your examples :-)

If I remember correctly, other examples of OSS code with premium addons and license check, on the top of my head: Bitwarden, Metabase, EmailEngine

Re: Siyuan: Privacy-first, self-hosted personal knowledge management software

#60

Post by rmnclmnt »

mxuribe wrote: post #57
adhamsalama wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Graph view, backlinks and databases.

I see the value in backlinks (I assume you mean backlinks between said markdown files, right?), and graphview might come in handy once in a while...but am not seeing the value brought by databases here? Unless the db becomes part of a top/management layer for said files, which adds other things like maybe possibly faster search or easier query of content (that is, easier than find/grep, etc.)? Not knocking if DBs can…

When people mean DBs in these note taking tools, they are usually referring to the Notion like databases: a lightweight Airtable-like table allowing a few data manipulations and analysis. Basically a CSV file with a nice UI on top if you will
Post reply on HN