Selfhosted @lemmy.world jaschen @lemm.ee 8mo ago

Help finding a new notes app

Thank you for clicking my post.

I'm currently running a Synology Notestation with around 8 clients and while it mostly works, sometimes images don't load correctly(or doesn't at all) and has failed on me one too many times.

I'm looking for another notes app similar to DS notes.

1- Rich Text Editor 2- Self hosted 3- Has multiple users enabled 4- Native Android app

Nice to have: 1- offline mode 2- FOSS 3- Has an active community

I host files for my entire family and they rely on notes for all their important documents. So it has to be simple to use.

I have tried benotes, but not having a Native Android app makes it hard for normies to use it. I also tried Joplin, but it's single user only.

Thank you for the suggestions.

41 comments

Hey!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Joplin has all of what you're asking for and if you self-host, even a few more big things like note sharing and note collaboration.

As for multiple users: You can have multiple users ("Profiles") locally inside the app, or if you mean different accounts altogether, you can indeed have and manage them all in your own self-hosted Joplin server instance. Again, Joplin has collaboration and that necessarily entails more than one user/account! But we might mean two different things, happy to help in either case :P

Edit: added collaboration.
- Hey! Thank you for replying. I'm reinstalling the docker-compose right as we speak.
  
  Dope! Lemmy know (;) if you have other questions.
Joplin can be a multi-user solution as well. I use Joplin with Nextcloud. If you don't want to share notes just use Joplin and every user can use the same nextcloud instance, but different user accounts, to save their notes. If you want to share all the notes, all the users can synchronise with the same Nextcloud user. You can make different notebooks for different users. All the users, however, can see and edit notes. Joplin cannot be a solution if you want to share some notes. It is either all, or none.

Logseq can be another solution, with the same technique. However, you can use git to synchronise different databases, where one database is used in shared notes and personal databases for non-shared notes. I host my own Gitea (will soon shift to forgejo) to synchronise my Logseq databases.
- @nutbutter
  
  📝 Sharing only one vor a few #notes is possible with #JoplinCloud or selfhosting with #JoplinServer 🤓👌
  
  @jaschen @selfhosted
  @joplinapp
  
  Just set up a Joplin cloud server for me and my buddy to do a writing project. It's the most robust open source solution I could find for the situation and so far it is meeting every expectation.
  
  Thats great news, i've been using joplin for years without knowing about Joplin server
Obsidian.md hands down if you can transition to markdown instead of rich text. Lets users have wiki style hyperlinks to notes.
- Obsidian is one of those applications I sooo want to install because everyone loves it, but to me if I'm going through the pain of selfhosting I want to go FOSS only. Argh!
  
  The thing I most appreciate about Obsidian is, for now at least, they at least partially embrace a sort of FOSS mindset in that they offer a proprietary thing via a sort of compromise: your data is stored in plain text in markdown, so it remains 100% portable and parseable by anything which can parse markdown.
  
  But I get what you mean.
- I use markdowns at work and enjoy using it. Its faster for me. Normies will have a hard time figuring it out.
I use obsidian and syncthing, although I use it for just myself; as long as you aren't editing the same document at once it should work. If there is a file conflict, nothing will be deleted, just the conflicted file with have the word "conflict" in the name. So you can do a text compare between the original and that file to see what needs to be merged.

Syncthing is self hosted, obsidian has desktop and android apps. You can exclude certain files or folders from being synced on a certain device with syncthing. Obsidian uses markdown so that might take some getting used to, but the plus side being all your notes will be text so you aren't locked in to using obsidian.

You can also use another markdown / text editor as well, maybe one that supports wiki links for obsidian compatibility but obsidian works with the markdown link format as well.
- I would use this if it's just me. It's difficult to have 2 apps installed on normies phones. Setup obsidian and synthing. Seems like too many points of failure.
  
  I'd agree with that. I set this up on my phone, my wife likes how it looks, but when I told her I would need to set it up on her phone with another app she quickly lost interest. I would not go that way for more than one person and that is myself.
I use this app called MoeMemos which is for memos I guess? But the reason I mention it like this is because I'm the user who needs to have the easy access on our server :-P

I ~~don't know if it's an active community or not~~ just checked and it looks like it's active on GitHub at least.
- I saw this. I didn't know about MoeMemoes. Thank you. I'll install this to try it out.
Obsidian
- I use obsidian and synthing and its the best setup I have tried so far, but syncthing doesnt work smoothly on my android phone... Im happy with it, but still looking 😃
I also tried Joplin, but it's single user only.

No it's not. I have a self-hosted instance of the server and can share notes with the rest of my family.
- Oh, I didn't know. I saw someone online say it was single user only. Thank you. I'll reinstall it and check it out.
  
  The shares are at the notebook level, so each person can keep stuff private as well.
I am really happy with Trilium. Powerful enough to do lots of things, simple enough to just take notes. The install comes with some neat templates for the advanced stuff. Running on docker on my Synology, I can use the web UI there but I prefer the desktop client.
- I was originally going to go Trilium, but they announced that they are starting to abandon the project. Its currently in maintenance mode. https://github.com/zadam/trilium/issues/4620
  
  True, but it has a pretty great suite of features as-is
  
  Future work on the project is being carried out in a new project called TriliumNext which had the blessing of the original developer. Trilium has a bright future in this fork 👍
  
  Oh man, I just got super invested into it a few months ago, bummer. Well, I guess I am sticking with it though for now, works well enough for me as-is, and hopefully the guys that are organizing the fork of it are successful!

41 comments