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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

#71

Post by ruthmarx »

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 just use TexStudio. I don't use proper tex files, but it never complains unless I were to try and compile. But their navigation tree and tabbed interface for multiple files makes organizing things really nice.

I can have multiple instances at once, and it's all managed via files and my filesystem.

Eventually I want to build a web frontend to index and reference my data, but for now the above approach is working well.

Unlike Obsidian, TexStudio is open-source, which I consider a plus.

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

#72

Post by asdf147 »

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…

Why are you not using Obsidian itself? Anything wrong with it?

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

#73

Post by neodymiumphish »

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #30

What I miss from this type of apps, including notion, is the ability to "inherit" properties from databases. I would like, for example, to create a superdb with basic task properties (title, deadline) and then create subdatabases that add more project-specific properties. This, I'll be able to create a single view with all my tasks for the day in a single place, but also add all the info I need for individual tasks.…

Tana has had this for a long time with super tags, and Logseq has it (at least in the test builds of their DB version; I can’t speak to the traditional MD-based version) in their sub-tagging functionality.

I agree that it would be great across the board, though!

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

#74

Post by Beijinger »

I use folders for my data. a-z. This is the basic directory structure. b->books->management for example.

Does not solve the fundamental problem of a file system that you also could file this under m->management->books

I use recoll to index and find things. https://www.recoll.org/ And yes, I have a 20 TB HDD. Quite a bit of data and media. If someone knows how to make an encrypte mirror of my drive with https://www.opendrive.com/ I would be interested. No incremental backups, if possible I would like to access it like a drive.

For my notes I just use light speed fast nvpy with simplenote.com to synchronized with several computes. https://github.com/cpbotha/nvpy

My notes don't follow the a-z approach but have regular headlines. I use nvpy as a mixture between a to do list and a knowledge database. For to do I have recently thought of using paper cards for kanban, but I am not sure. Suggestions welcome.

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

#75

Post by echelon »

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

Obsidian has a free git plugin.

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

#76

Post by sbt567 »

janwillemb wrote: post #32
coldblues wrote: post #29

I keep seeing these note-taking tools pop up again and again. I am heavily invested into Logseq already and the new database version is coming out soon. Unless these tools provide import and export utilities to convert your notes between the most popular applications like Logseq and Obsidian, only new users will use them and people with very few notes who can put in the time to move.

Creating a note taking, personal productivity app is an elaborate but common procrastination technique for developers.

After forcing myself to learn and adapt to some note-taking system, I too didn't find it useful for me yet. But i keep pushing myself through because I still believe that there must be some value that I could take from taking notes. Just I didn't find a system that suits me well...? One thing that i find the real benefit/value from all this learn and adapt is "writing as a way to think" (is it by feynmann?). When doing complicated work, writing really help to ease your cognitive load and help you find the gaps in your line of thought. But, I couldn't find a suitable method when dealing with general/every day note-taking. I still have that "graveyard for thought" problem when writing general notes

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

#77

Post by veidr »

Tomte wrote: post #55
veidr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True, but it seems very obvious that if you add a bunch of plugin dependencies (or even one), you are deliberately choosing to forego "standard" Markdown (there's actually no such thing, but roughly speaking).

That's why they're plugins.

I do use the Excalidraw plugin, but nothing much else, and that is why I have an easy time making my Obsidian notes web-accessible (currently, via SilverBullet, but any tool that makes markdown web-editable will work — as long as you don't go nuts with plugins, that is).

Having said that, I think the reason Obsidian "failed" — to the extent that Notion and some others have massively more adoption amongst organizations larger than me and my gray beard – is that they failed to combine their (super awesome) files-and-folders approach with a web editable solution.

They thought - obviously wrongly, in hindsight — that web accessible would be enough.

It's not. It's the 10%, Notion etc cover the 90% (but with fairly bad tradeoffs, they have export and it works, but you can't easily interop with your data where it lives).

But I've had such an easy time making my Obsidian web-editable that I suspect in a few minutes (or months) Obsidian will be like heyyyyy... edit yo vault via web yo — and for free! and then we will all be like woo Obsidian boo Notion!!

But we'll see

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

#78

Post by pglevy »

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?

This is what I do with my Obsidian repo. Feels like best of both worlds to me. I have my files in open format in my repo. And I use Obsidian primarily for the editing experience. If I want to quickly capture a thought on my phone, I use the GitHub app to create an issue in that repo and process it later.

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

#80

Post by elashri »

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 :-)

I want to add a niche example. The famous Thunderbird addon owl for exchange (https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/owl-f...) where you can open the source of the addon and change the licence checks to always return true.
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