Zotero 8 • Hacker News Board

Re: Zotero 8

#21

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 9:21 PM UTC

tony_cannistra wrote: post #15

> Zotero is open source and developed by an independent, nonprofit organization that has no financial interest in your private information. With Zotero, you always stay in control of your own data. Refreshing as a cool breeze on a hot summer's day.

[deleted]

Re: Zotero 8

#22

Post by smuenkel » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 9:22 PM UTC

Honestly the piece of software in my life that I have the least issues with ever. So so good.

Re: Zotero 8

#23

Post by einpoklum » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 9:23 PM UTC

ulnarkressty wrote: post #20

tony_cannistra wrote: post #15

> Zotero is open source and developed by an independent, nonprofit organization that has no financial interest in your private information. With Zotero, you always stay in control of your own data. Refreshing as a cool breeze on a hot summer's day.

Right up until one tries to set up a self-hosted server (spoiler - you can't, at least not without 'significant effort' - they themselves say that if you ask about it).

Is this intentional crippling / obfuscation, or did they just bother to do the necessary work for the server-side software robust enough to run on different HW & SW setups?

Re: Zotero 8

#24

Post by gdevenyi » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 9:35 PM UTC

ulnarkressty wrote: post #20

tony_cannistra wrote: post #15

> Zotero is open source and developed by an independent, nonprofit organization that has no financial interest in your private information. With Zotero, you always stay in control of your own data. Refreshing as a cool breeze on a hot summer's day.

Right up until one tries to set up a self-hosted server (spoiler - you can't, at least not without 'significant effort' - they themselves say that if you ask about it).

Or try to build it yourself.

Re: Zotero 8

#25

Post by ashton314 » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 9:54 PM UTC

I have nothing bug praise for Zotero. Zotero is absolutely essential to my workflow as a researcher, second only to Emacs. Without Zotero, I would be spending inordinate amounts of time keeping all my papers + associated citation information organized. Zotero just takes care of it all. I love the iOS app—I read and markup papers on my iPad and everything gets synced smoothly.

I've been a paying member for a few years now. Part of it is for the storage (PDF packrat here) but mostly because I want to support development. Please consider supporting them if they help you in your work—they're worth it. https://www.zotero.org/storage

Re: Zotero 8

#26

Post by bonsai_spool » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 9:57 PM UTC

ulnarkressty wrote: post #20

tony_cannistra wrote: post #15

> Zotero is open source and developed by an independent, nonprofit organization that has no financial interest in your private information. With Zotero, you always stay in control of your own data. Refreshing as a cool breeze on a hot summer's day.

Right up until one tries to set up a self-hosted server (spoiler - you can't, at least not without 'significant effort' - they themselves say that if you ask about it).

I haven't had an issue doing this with a standard WebDAV server and this has been true since 2007 or so.

Re: Zotero 8

#27

Post by tingletech » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 9:59 PM UTC

einpoklum wrote: post #23

ulnarkressty wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right up until one tries to set up a self-hosted server (spoiler - you can't, at least not without 'significant effort' - they themselves say that if you ask about it).

Is this intentional crippling / obfuscation, or did they just bother to do the necessary work for the server-side software robust enough to run on different HW & SW setups?

I think it's the latter

Re: Zotero 8

#28

Post by ajb » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 10:02 PM UTC

bonsai_spool wrote: post #26

ulnarkressty wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right up until one tries to set up a self-hosted server (spoiler - you can't, at least not without 'significant effort' - they themselves say that if you ask about it).

I haven't had an issue doing this with a standard WebDAV server and this has been true since 2007 or so.

My understanding is that that works for personal use. If you want to use a group library, not so much. Which can be considered fair, as mostly organisations which should be able to help fund zotero are the ones that need group libraries.

Re: Zotero 8

#29

Post by zvr » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 10:06 PM UTC

Another enthusiastic Zotero user here. Current library has 13,775 items and for a low yearly price one can have multi-device sync and support the project. I'm also syncing to a server I own, for complete data ownership (just in case).

Re: Zotero 8

#30

Post by kens » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 10:11 PM UTC

whimsicalism wrote: post #12

I highly recommend everyone to use Zotero. Their original marketing as being 'for academics' is entirely wrong and it is a first-in-class bookmark/knowledge manager. There are many software recommendations that seem sort of hype-y: Obsidian, Notion, Keybase, etc. Zotero is not that and is a daily driver for me for years. It has also replaced Calibre for me although YMMV there.

I second the recommendation for Zotero, especially if you find yourself buried under PDFs. Two things make it very useful for me. First, it organizes my PDFs and lets me search them, instead of manually searching through directories. Second, it has an OCR plugin, so I can OCR old PDFs and search the text.