Ditching Obsidian and building my own • Hacker News Board

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#121

Post by ezst » Sun, May 18, 2025, 7:38 PM UTC

I went deep into to the PKMS rabbit hole a year and a half ago, benchmarked Obsidian and many many others, and settled with Trilium¹ which I can only highly recommend. It addresses all the hosting/deployment requirements of OP² without the quirky workarounds mentioned here (syncthing & al), and makes the kind of "lifestyle scripting" this article about very simple and straightforward.

In my mind and experience, Trilium has a very unique and extensible model that lends itself to "growing with your PKMS": notes is the atom of information, attributes can be used to manage notes as structured and relational data, templates and inheritance provide structure and consistency at scale.

Trilium may not look like much on the surface, but it is incredibly capable while being approachable. Give it a serious try.

¹: https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes/

²: you can use Trilium local-first/only, or cloud-only, or hybrid. It has its own sync protocol, you just point your instance to a server to sync with, and now you have a master-master replication. All my notes are available offline so I can keep working in-flight, notes shared with others are available via web whether I'm online or not, and I can edit my notes on the web where I don't need offline persistence. All of that is built-in/native to Trilium.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#122

Post by williamsss » Sun, May 18, 2025, 7:38 PM UTC

ericb wrote: post #90

I'm a fan of TrilliumNext, which is open source, for this: https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes

Thanks for sharing. Their encryption service is a nice source of inspiration on note encryption https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes/blob/56d4d7c20f775eed73...

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#123

Post by batch12 » Sun, May 18, 2025, 7:39 PM UTC

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #75

rafram wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downside is that if you’re on a two-week vacation and your home network/server goes down on day two, there’s probably nothing you can do until you get home. If it’s hosted online, you can count on that 99.99…% uptime and SSH access no matter what.

Ssh exposed on a non-standard port, with root disabled, using key-based auth should be pretty non-controversial. The security through obscurity (non-standard port, no root) are both kinda silly but why not. That said, with awesome services like TailScale, it's pretty hard to get locked out of your network. TailScale is so so good at "just working".

> The security through obscurity (non-standard port, no root) are both kinda silly but why not

I think these are decent controls when layered with others. The effectiveness differs depending on your threat models, of course, but at the very least it helps reduce the noise seen from most automated scans reducing the effort involved in monitoring your assets.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#124

Post by mettamage » Sun, May 18, 2025, 7:40 PM UTC

I'm at the other side of the note system trade-off thingy. I use Apple Notes.

It's not perfect, but if I really want better search functionality, I'll just use the SQLite database that stores the notes. I've never needed to roll up my sleeves for that. I get around the limitations.

It's not perfect, but crafting one's own Personal Knowledge Management System sounds like a 5 year journey for 10 to 20 hours per week at least.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#125

Post by ezst » Sun, May 18, 2025, 7:41 PM UTC

flkiwi wrote: post #119

As a longtime Logseq user who was sick of their app focus (it used to be a webapp!) and skeptical of their revenue model, I switched to Silverbullet a while back. It gets the basics right, and I can throw together some Lua and make it do whatever else I want. Plus there's a small but enthusiastic community developing for it. I have it set up in a VPS and it has brought back most of the magic of early days Logseq.

I inadvertently converted a longtime Logseq user to Trilium. In case you find yourself hacking too much around Silverbullet, or want to try something else, you should give it a try :-)

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#126

Post by justsomehnguy » Sun, May 18, 2025, 7:43 PM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #6

> Since my PKMS is hosted online to manage notes across devices, I have multiple layers of security to ensure my notes are kept private. {Screenshot of a login form} The biggest life hack I can recommend for a self hoster is to set up a VPN on your local network and then just never expose your services on the public internet unless you're specifically trying to serve people outside your own household. Before I did th…

welcome to the world when not TailScale, not a private WireGuard, not aL2TP, OpenVPN works. No, SSTP doesn't too. HTTPS works. Even on the devices you don't or can't control.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#127

Post by ezst » Sun, May 18, 2025, 7:43 PM UTC

ericb wrote: post #90

I'm a fan of TrilliumNext, which is open source, for this: https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes

Same, this gets my recommendation. Trilium is one of the most under-rated tool I know of.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#128

Post by conception » Sun, May 18, 2025, 7:44 PM UTC

AlienRobot wrote: post #77

I'm not saying AI is going to replace programmers, but it's been almost a century already and we still don't have a decent note taking app or even a todo list app and that's like the first app you learn to make. Maybe humanity just kind of sucks at this whole application development thing. I use cherrytree currently, by the way.

There are hundreds of decent note taking apps and todo apps. The issue is that almost no one has the exact same needs or workflow for either of those things. I’ve given up on suggesting those things to people and sticking with “whichever one you use is the best”. So the best you’ll ever do is a decent one //for you// but it’s possible that definition may not work for anyone else.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#129

Post by ctkhn » Sun, May 18, 2025, 7:44 PM UTC

jszymborski wrote: post #40

Kudos to the author for scratching their own itch. People in a similar position might be interested in Joplin, which is indeed FOSS, and has lots of sync options. I personally use SyncThing, which keeps things free, but you can also use a number of other free cloud providers. You can choose to encrypt your notes to protect your privacy.

Self hosted Joplin with encryption has been more than enough for me. It was pretty easy pulling all my apple notes into joplin as md files. Building my own like this just seems excessive

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#130

Post by flkiwi » Sun, May 18, 2025, 7:46 PM UTC

ezst wrote: post #125

flkiwi wrote: post #119

As a longtime Logseq user who was sick of their app focus (it used to be a webapp!) and skeptical of their revenue model, I switched to Silverbullet a while back. It gets the basics right, and I can throw together some Lua and make it do whatever else I want. Plus there's a small but enthusiastic community developing for it. I have it set up in a VPS and it has brought back most of the magic of early days Logseq.

I inadvertently converted a longtime Logseq user to Trilium. In case you find yourself hacking too much around Silverbullet, or want to try something else, you should give it a try :-)

Trillium is great for some folks (and I would have no qualms recommending it), but I cannot stand hierarchical notes. That's a personal preference. I just want a big mishmash of notes all linking to each other. I don't want to manage a taxonomy.