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

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

#61

Post by number6 »

rukshn wrote: post #51
hajimuz wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's this D and Vanessa - I think this might be Nicknames. But I don't see how they should be more transparent.

They also have a forum and they answer quite quickly

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

#62

Post by number6 »

dammaj wrote: post #47
sourraspberry wrote: post #31

I've been using this for a couple of years on my home-server. It's an Obsidian knock-off. It's pretty janky and the documentation is lacking. It's open-source which is nice... But the company behind it is ??? I don't know. They are Chinese but I couldn't find much about them. I use it because I can self-host it, it has most of the features Obsidian has, and I can use it in a web-browser from anywhere - which is the b…

I assume you want to self host in order to sync locally, right? If that's the case, you can use Obsidian with git plugin and you get sync + versioning (all what git offers).

Sync is premium since some versions. Before it was free, you had only to provide a S3 bucket or a webdav location

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

#63

Post by number6 »

tcper wrote: post #22
gwelson wrote: post #2

This looks nice but nearly identical to Obsidian. How does it differ from Obsidian's features?

Obsidian sync feature is paid service, this project you can setup your own service

Also you need a license for anything work related. Since I code in my work time and my free time I can't separate this clearly. To be compliant I would need a license

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

#64

Post by SamPatt »

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.

The plugins are no small thing though. I replaced Anki with a spaced repetition plugin, now my notes can be flashcards and I don't need to maintain two separate apps.

Also the UI for search and navigation is much better than just a collection of Markdown files. I rolled my own note system using Markdown before this. Obsidian is way better.

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

#65

Post by SamPatt »

tcper wrote: post #22
gwelson wrote: post #2

This looks nice but nearly identical to Obsidian. How does it differ from Obsidian's features?

Obsidian sync feature is paid service, this project you can setup your own service

I use Syncthing with Obsidian. Free and open source.

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

#66

Post by echelon »

sunshine-o wrote: post #56

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.…

Obsidian lets you live on top of the filesystem structure using markdown files, and it gives you links, tags, topic clouds, and more.

If you use it with reasonable conventions, you can compile and deploy a web version with ghost or zola or something automatically run in CI.

It's backed up, synced, and comes with desktop and mobile apps. It has vim key bindings and git plugins.

It's a pretty sweet system that works nicely with Unix, and it adapts to multiple navigational and organizational paradigms.

I've tried a lot of things, and nothing has ever come close to Obsidian.

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

#67

Post by skeeter2020 »

sunshine-o wrote: post #56

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.…

I've been experimenting with Flatnotes (https://github.com/Dullage/flatnotes) for a while and really like the design. No notebooks or even folders, just a single directory with markdown files and decent search & tagging. It feels a lot like what happened to email when we gave up all the up-front structuring with deep hierarchies and just said index it and we'll find it when we need to.

The project is just "good enough" for what I need, and aside from tiny bugs whenever I find a gap I can either work around it or live without. Constraints are a powerful motivator for both creativity and getting stuff done.

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

#68

Post by WillAdams »

sunshine-o wrote: post #56

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.…

For a long while I was trying to keep text notes in a structured set of directories, Tombo.exe made that a lot easier/nicer to use:

https://openhub.net/p/p_7697

sadly, it looks to have dropped off the 'net.

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

#69

Post by TheGeminon »

bflesch wrote: post #46
oefrha wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Took me like a minute to find out who are behind it. Committers on GitHub project point to two profiles: - https://github.com/88250 - https://github.com/Vanessa219 The first profile has a README (zh-CN, easily translated) introducing themselves as a married couple as well as their career trajectory leading to their current company. Googling the company name leads me to https://www.tianyancha.com/company/3153162387 sh…

The link you posted gives me "According to relevant legal regulations, access is temporarily not supported in your current location." and "If your device or the Wi-Fi environment you are in is using a VPN service, please disable it and try again." I'm not using any VPN. Normal internet from Germany

It is also unavailable from Canada.

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

#70

Post by zelphirkalt »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #67
sunshine-o wrote: post #56

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.…

I've been experimenting with Flatnotes ( https://github.com/Dullage/flatnotes ) for a while and really like the design. No notebooks or even folders, just a single directory with markdown files and decent search & tagging. It feels a lot like what happened to email when we gave up all the up-front structuring with deep hierarchies and just said index it and we'll find it when we need to. The project is just "good eno…

Tagging is a strictly more powerful tool than hierarchies, at least with same amount tags vs directories/categories, because an item can be tagged using multiple different tags, but can only be in one directory, unless you create duplicates or symlinks or whatever.
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