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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

#81

Post by ninalanyon »

Beijinger wrote: post #74

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.op…

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

You can use symbolic links to connect directories and file to multiple parents.

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

#82

Post by [deleted] »

number6 wrote: post #61
rukshn wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]

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

#83

Post by Terretta »

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).

Which git plugin do you like? And have you used the plugin from more than one machine to a repo more than one machine also syncs with?

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

#84

Post by mxuribe »

rmnclmnt wrote: post #60
mxuribe wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ah-ah, Ok, i can see that something like that could help. Thanks for the clarification!

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

#85

Post by cal85 »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #70
skeeter2020 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I find the opposite. Being forced to consider hierarchical categorisation leads to a more powerful system in practice. It helps me create a mental reference to the item being stored. And it often causes me to see a better way to form an item in the first place — eg maybe this note is really two notes, maybe this idea can actually just be discarded, etc. Or, on rare occasions, a new item doesn’t fit anywhere (but is important) so I need to tweak the hierarchy itself — and that’s a good thing, once in a while, as it can lead to creative insights about the domain as a whole.

I’ve found tagging systems usually become a kind of dark swamp where things go never to be seen again. The lack of structure means I have little memory of what’s gone into the system, so I end up with too much duplication of ideas and inconsistency of style (mess). All this makes it uninviting and difficult to ‘explore’, so I don’t use it much except as a dumping ground, and the swampiness compounds over time.

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

#86

Post by brunoqc »

elashri wrote: post #15
brunoqc wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not fully open source. It seems you need to pay to get the privilege to "Export PDF/Image with watermark". https://b3log.org/siyuan/en/pricing.html

It doesn't have to be free everything to qualify for open source. The source and licence are available. You can actually bypass payment if you want to do that as the source ia there.

Right but it's a bit unusual. I was expecting the "pro" features to be in a separate repo or something.

I don't think I would even bother to update a local patch on every releases. I'll just use another foss app without silly "pro" features.

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

#87

Post by heavensteeth »

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'll leave my imcomplete mind dump below for posterity but I'll make it known that while writing it, I did realise that what I've invented is a text editor.

----------------------------------

I had an idea for a deeply unix-y note taking software a while ago and I've continued to think it would actually work very well.

Notes could either be an sqlite database (nets you compression, performance, easy backups, etc.) or just text files on the filesystem (easy searching, less lock-in, whatever). The "editor" just creates a new temporary file and opens it in `$EDITOR`. You can optionally name it after, otherwise it's named the current date.

Want linking? Use a filesystem-aware editor. Want syntax highlighting? Use an editor with syntax highlighting. Want to sync your notes? Combine it with Syncthing. Want to search your notes? fzf.

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

#88

Post by exe34 »

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.…

org-roam gives you backlinks. directory of text files.

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

#89

Post by skydhash »

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.…

After using Bear.app and Things.app for a while, I've moved firmly in the file over app camp. Apps can be enjoyable to use until you don't have access to the app anymore (platform, longevity,...). Now I'm using Emacs with org files, but could just as well use any tools that favors files. Any novel use case I want, I can script it out in a moment, while still enjoying the benefits of viewing my information on most platforms.

> 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

The only thing you need is some kind of structure, like the wiki link format or org link format, and you could 'rgrep' the notes directory for a particular link (vim and emacs can put the result in a buffer).

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

#90

Post by Beijinger »

ninalanyon wrote: post #81
Beijinger wrote: post #74

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.op…

> Does not solve the fundamental problem of a file system that you also could file this under m->management->books You can use symbolic links to connect directories and file to multiple parents.

I know. But this is asking and would get messy very fast. And what if an item has 10 attributes?

John Doe has Birthday on December 12th would have at least 5 already.

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