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sourraspberry | 1 year ago

I've been using this for a couple of years on my home-server.

It's an Obsidian knock-off. It's pretty janky and the documentation is lacking. It's open-source which is nice... But the company behind it is ??? I don't know. They are Chinese but I couldn't find much about them.

I use it because I can self-host it, it has most of the features Obsidian has, and I can use it in a web-browser from anywhere - which is the biggest feature for me that Obsidian lacks.

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phforms|1 year ago

It seems like they borrowed heavily from Notion, Obsidian and RemNote, as far as I can tell (wouldn’t call it a knock-off though, since there are sooo many apps in this space that you don’t really know who came up with what anymore). But the app doesn’t feel janky to me at first glance, it definitely feels more responsive than Notion and less “slippy” than RemNote. Although it is quite noisy with all the tooltips popping up immediately.

My first impression is that they really wanted to include everything (even RemNote-like spaced-repetition flashcards, Notion-like Databases and of course there has to be AI too) and it seems like they did a pretty decent job at that. I also appreciate that there are so many export options, even for Org-Mode (preserving internal links, images, code-blocks, etc.).

I like that it provides a solid, feature-rich alternative to all the cloud-first, closed-source apps in this space. But it may be too distracting/overwhelming for my use-cases with all the advanced layout capabilities and features though. Tana is a similar all-in-one solution that is really well done (and more innovative than this one), but I always seem to gravitate toward more focussed apps.

dammaj|1 year ago

I assume you want to self host in order to sync locally, right? If that's the case, you can use Obsidian with git plugin and you get sync + versioning (all what git offers).

Terretta|1 year ago

Which git plugin do you like? And have you used the plugin from more than one machine to a repo more than one machine also syncs with?

number6|1 year ago

Sync is premium since some versions. Before it was free, you had only to provide a S3 bucket or a webdav location

bdhcuidbebe|1 year ago

I use syncthing to sync my obsidian vault which is also a git repository between linux, mac and windows.

Works great!

jazzyjackson|1 year ago

Logseq is floss(gnu license, closurescript) and almost perfect for me but it's totally mysterious to me what's stopping it from serving a web interface that serves files on the web server. It's an electron app with an HTTP API but for some reason the web demo only opens files clientside with filesystem API

Anyway, one of these days I'll fork it and make it work for me. I also have a perverted desire to change the serialization format from markdown to XML so I can manipulate the graph with other tools that talk xpath, xquery, basex.

grepexdev|1 year ago

They are doing a rewrite of the app to have a SQLite DB storage for notes instead of markdown files. I think once that is released it will be available in a web browser. Currently in alpha testing, I access the application through the browser.

rukshn|1 year ago

I also installed it on my computer to give it a try, but then as you mentioned I could not find who are behind it other than it's based in China. So decided to just keep with Obsidian

oefrha|1 year ago

Took me like a minute to find out who are behind it. Committers on GitHub project point to two profiles:

- https://github.com/88250

- https://github.com/Vanessa219

The first profile has a README (zh-CN, easily translated) introducing themselves as a married couple as well as their career trajectory leading to their current company. Googling the company name leads me to https://www.tianyancha.com/company/3153162387 showing the company’s legal structure, the legal names of the couple, their address, etc. (again, zh-CN but easily translated). Looks like I can view their financial reports too if I have a subscription.

The profiles also link to their social media accounts (on their own dev-focused community).

What more is there to know? At least it’s more than the average ShowHN asking for your email and sometimes credit card. I don’t understand these “couldn’t find much about them” claims.

hajimuz|1 year ago

They open sourced it and you can self hosted. I mean, does it even matter where they are from? Why it’s automatically suspicious when you know the authors are Chinese.

asdf147|1 year ago

Why are you not using Obsidian itself? Anything wrong with it?

gbraad|1 year ago

for web-browser access I host Obsidian with kasmvnc. It is not ideal for use on the phone, but from a tablet it works, and I can host it with Vivaldi in a webpanel for quick edits.