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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

#101

Post by jazzyjackson »

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…

Logseq is floss(gnu license, closurescript) and almost perfect for me but it's totally mysterious to me what's stopping it from serving a web interface that serves files on the web server. It's an electron app with an HTTP API but for some reason the web demo only opens files clientside with filesystem API

Anyway, one of these days I'll fork it and make it work for me. I also have a perverted desire to change the serialization format from markdown to XML so I can manipulate the graph with other tools that talk xpath, xquery, basex.

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

#102

Post by jraph »

elashri wrote: post #80
jraph wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I believe making paid open source code to handle interoperability with something inherently closed / paid (if not outright expensive) is a good approach. Would be users are already used to pay for a related provider anyway, and it's not like the features are so useful without the functionalities of the other provider.

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

#103

Post by phforms »

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…

It seems like they borrowed heavily from Notion, Obsidian and RemNote, as far as I can tell (wouldn’t call it a knock-off though, since there are sooo many apps in this space that you don’t really know who came up with what anymore). But the app doesn’t feel janky to me at first glance, it definitely feels more responsive than Notion and less “slippy” than RemNote. Although it is quite noisy with all the tooltips popping up immediately.

My first impression is that they really wanted to include everything (even RemNote-like spaced-repetition flashcards, Notion-like Databases and of course there has to be AI too) and it seems like they did a pretty decent job at that. I also appreciate that there are so many export options, even for Org-Mode (preserving internal links, images, code-blocks, etc.).

I like that it provides a solid, feature-rich alternative to all the cloud-first, closed-source apps in this space. But it may be too distracting/overwhelming for my use-cases with all the advanced layout capabilities and features though. Tana is a similar all-in-one solution that is really well done (and more innovative than this one), but I always seem to gravitate toward more focussed apps.

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

#104

Post by withinboredom »

packetlost wrote: post #91
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.…

This is exactly the conclusion I came to. I still use Obsidian for a lot of things, but I've developed my own task management software that uses plain text files and fzf for everything: https://codeberg.org/ngp/tsk It has worked great for me! That being said, sync and mobile usage is still a bit of a sore spot with it. It works beautifully with Termux, but I wish there was some way to slap a basic UI on top of a CLI…

If you want some windows-forms-esq app development, I highly recommend checking out Flutter Flow. It isn’t exactly cheap, but I’ve used it for some basic personal apps.

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

#105

Post by sroerick »

org-roam is pretty good. I came from Obsidian and wanted to build out some extra personal features for Bible notes.

I made the switch to org-roam because i wanted to use elisp to develop instead of JS obsidian plugins.

It took me a while to get over the learning curve but I’m very happy with it

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

#106

Post by packetlost »

withinboredom wrote: post #104
packetlost wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the conclusion I came to. I still use Obsidian for a lot of things, but I've developed my own task management software that uses plain text files and fzf for everything: https://codeberg.org/ngp/tsk It has worked great for me! That being said, sync and mobile usage is still a bit of a sore spot with it. It works beautifully with Termux, but I wish there was some way to slap a basic UI on top of a CLI…

If you want some windows-forms-esq app development, I highly recommend checking out Flutter Flow. It isn’t exactly cheap, but I’ve used it for some basic personal apps.

I kinda doubt FlutterFlow would meet my needs, it looks like it's primarily build on web technologies which is a nonstarter for this.

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

#107

Post by ankitrgadiya »

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 have gone through the whole journey similar to you as well. It is so frustrating to keep searching for that perfect app only to find that every other app lacks something or the other. For the last year or so, I've settled on just plain markdown and the directory structure for hierarchy just like you.

I use my preferred editor (Emacs) to modify the files. I get to use all the functionality like key-bindings, search, version control. I push my notes to my self-hosted Forgejo instance (but it can be Github). Forgejo already has a web-interface the notes and links just work there.

On my laptop, I have mdbook configured to watch the directory and build the notes into static website. So if I just want to go through by notes or read something I can use that as well.

I tried finding solutions to take notes on my phone. But I realised that if its longer than a few lines than I prefer using my laptop anyways. I only ever read my notes on the phone. I've setup the same mdbook behind VPN so I can access it on my phone as well. If I ever want to modify notes on-the-go then I can use the Forgejo web interface as well.

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

#109

Post by vopi »

packetlost wrote: post #106
withinboredom wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want some windows-forms-esq app development, I highly recommend checking out Flutter Flow. It isn’t exactly cheap, but I’ve used it for some basic personal apps.

I kinda doubt FlutterFlow would meet my needs, it looks like it's primarily build on web technologies which is a nonstarter for this.

As far as I know, it's the opposite (using Skia to render). Flutter for the web is a second-class citizen, whereas for mobile apps, it's quite productive.

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

#110

Post by sunshine-o »

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 really like tagging but somehow the concept could never become central to any filesystem:

- I believe BeOS tried,

- MS tried with WinFS but cancelled it in Windows Vista,

- I am sure some cloud storage service bet on it but can't cite any.

Actually tagging is probably mainly successful in cases where we can reliably automate the tagging such as email or photos.

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