[grantc]

I'd recommend exploring Obsidian. It's inherently self-hosted : it's just local markdown files (but you can sync via git or their for-pay sync service). The plugin community is large and it has some of the best extensibility going.

My suggested starting point (others' may be superior): switch to Minimal theme plus watch a few videos (search for 'my obsidian setup' and you'll find a broad range of fairly different takes on how to use and configure Obsidian, and you'll likely get a hint of the plugins available -- 'top obsidian plugins' is also a decent quick tour of what kinds of things are already available).

On balance, it took a couple of tries w/ Logseq and Obsidian and then a month of iterating and adding to Obsidian, and I had something better than what I liked about Bear, Ulysses, Craft, Spaces, Roam, Logseq, Evernote, Simplenote... I feel like I've tried them all.

You won't end up with the 100% polished experience of some of the well crafted paid apps above, but it's pretty close and the depth of features w/ extensibility is worth the delta. Obviously, this is very much based upon which features and workflows matter most, but it's been a delightful piece of software that no single other product seems to best right now.

[riffic]

nice, thank you. I've had Obsidian installed since its release and have been using it off and on but something about my own workflow has always kept it at quite an "almost there level" but never approaching something I'm 100% invested in.

The only reason I ask about self-hosted options would be to roll this kind of software out within a group environment.