Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Obsidian with Syncthing running on both your Android and your server for syncing your notes.
That solution doesn't exactly spark joy. Folder sync in general is, in my experience, too error prone. So I just stay away from it. Maybe I'll need to finally give it another try.
Obsidian livesync works really well. Notes are live synced between my desktop and Android device
Well, OK, you got me to give that a try!
Well, that sounds good. But my god is that a complicated mess. It's not working for me and I don't have the will to deal with that crap anymore. Set up my own CouchDB, ran the init script, connection test is fine. But I can't get the plugin to actually sync anything, it just keeps failing with "Failed to initialise the encryption key, preventing replication". Whatever that means. It won't explain which encryption key or what failed. I did not enable E2E encryption.
Maybe run through the installation again, and run via Docker if you aren't already. It was plug-and-play when I set it up
Alternatively, obsidian offers a 1st party paid sync feature
I sync hundreds of gigs, (if not terabytes at this point) using Syncthing with errors on only one machine (it's running on 6 devices, including a VM). And those errors are of my own doing, not random Syncthing errors.
It's surprisingly robust these days, especially for a single-user notes.
I have an indexing job that runs on my server every 30 minutes, saving into a text file (it indexes my media folder, which is about 3TB of movies and TV shows).
Those text files sync to my phone when they've changed (so every 30 minutes). They're always up to date when I open them.
My phone also has jobs to continually sync my photos to home, an ad-hoc folder to my laptop, and about 25 other folder pairs (including NeoBackup) that sync under different conditions, without fail.
I'm currently testing Cherrytree using Sourcherry on Android and it seems to work fine as a single-user solution with Syncthing.
Joplin will do this for you. It comes ready to sync with all sorts of cloud options, as well as "local folder" which works well with Syncthing. It's offline-first, cross-platform, and FOSS.
Plus the FF extension is really full-featured. I can clip in different formats or even take a screenshot if the webpage makes clipping hard.
Plus the FF extension is really full-featured. I can clip in different formats or even take a screenshot if the webpage makes clipping hard.
I didn't even know there was a Firefox extension! I might give it a look.
I suggest looking into using or hosting Notesnook
Mobile app is great. Desktop and web clients are great. End to end encrypted.
Self hosting docs I am unsure of. But it exists.
Quillpad forever ❤️
Man, I like Quillpad but I can't use the sync. If I enable that, I have to go to NC to delete notes, if I delete them locally they just come back. I guess that's fine, I only use it for temporary notes anyway, stuff I want to save and organize goes into Joplin.
It happens to me the same, but since last update in.able to sync :p
Look at Notesnook. You can even self-host the server, though it’s somewhat more complicated than it needs to be.
This along with a home VPN and you can hit it from anywhere.
I've been happily using SilverBullet lately too. Can recommend
Can recommend, works offline and online with PWA support and stores everything in Markdown files for easy migration if you want to change your frontend.
If privacy is important for you, https://anytype.io/ has E2EE (End-to-End Encryption). You can run your sync nodes also. Personally, I've used Roam Research, Doom Emacs, moved to Logseq, then Obsidian, back to Logseq and now I'm using Anytype for two years.
Edit (hit post by mistake): The encryption part was not a must for me also, but then I started using my notes in my work laptop also and I didn't want my notes stored in plain text on a computer which is not fully controlled by me. I'm mentioning it because over time you'll have many, many notes and the transition from one tool to the other is very time consuming.
Take a look at Affine. I am using Joplin currently, however I am leaning more and more towards Affine due to OIDC support
Joplin for sure. But I personally use Obsidian because of the UI. I sync it with my server using Syncthing. All devices are synced to the server and not with each other so I have one source of Truth.
For this scenario, I can recommend Standard Notes and/or Notesnook. I've tried Joplin and Logseq and didn't like either.
Obsidian aldo has (paid, subscription) native sync that is supposed to work better than file sync. Another alternative is git sync. That's basically file sync through git but great if you want to track your changes.
Obsidian with Syncthing
There's a community plugin for self hosted live sync.
I have Joplin with Nextcloud sync. It works fine for me! It’s got a desktop app and a mobile app with, in my opinion, pretty good UI. Markdown support, syncing between devices, etc. are all there. You don’t need to connect to the network to view notes, a local copy is saved.
I know this is said a lot, but nextcloud does all that.
As an added benefit the files are just in a directory that you could edit if needed
I have a Nextcloud instance, which I don't use much because the native apps are janky as fuck. I tried the notes app just now and it just won't even let me connect to my account. That's a level of bullshit I don't have the energy to deal with. Which is sad, because it would be nice to use something I already have.
Oh, that's a shame. Maybe need to see why?
I have the notes, files and news apps all connected just fine.
If it's over your VPN, does your phone now how to find nextcloud?
In general, yes. The main app works fine. But when I try to connect the notes app to my account, it just crashes and loops back.
Edit: Nevermind, I fixed it. Works fine now and looks to be exactly what I need. It was also trivial to import all my Trilium notes.
Oh, iOS or Android?
I am using SiYuan and I use the web app as a short cut, so that I can easily create notes on my phone.
I use the Quillpad app and sync it with Nextcloud notes. Been pretty flawless so far.
I have joplin but personally found myself using Nextcloud Notes 100% of the time. I just need very basic, quick markdown notes
Ticks all your boxes