cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/1707114

• The 3 I'm considering have 2 things in common:

  • They're open source

  • They're offline first. Meaning you'll never lose access to read or edit your notes if you find yourself without internet, in a tunnel, elevator, airplane, etc. This excludes notion and the like from this list

• They are Anytype, Logseq, and SiYuan ( a less known but still incredible PKMS)

  • please note these pros and cons are only in relation to using as a method of brainstorming and working on projects.

• FYI: Logseq is my current PKMS of choice and i've settled on it though if Anytype ever gets trasnclusion support I'll have to go back and see. Also to note: Anytype is currently free, the rest will cost you if you want to utilize syncing across devices

• Anytype

  • Pros

    • beautiful, slick interface

    • creating types allows for projects to have a more first class feeling.

      • A project can be a type with multiple templates

      • a feature can be a type with multiple templates

      • sets allow for displaying alist of projects based on what type of tepmlates, same for any type (anytype, get it?)

    • excellent layout and customizability

  • Cons

    • Major con no Transclusion. I HOPE they introduce it. my discussion on github is the highest after the docker container ask and the stuf the staff prepopulated. Looks like one of the maintainers noticed it.

  • Mobile experience

    • by far the most robust and fuck up proof mobile solution. It handled anything I threw at it and it syncs practically immediately

  • Collaboration

    • I believe this is one of their primary focuses at the moment

  • Examples

    • List of projects. Note these can be any scale - a small script, an extension to a browser, an entire program suite or OS, a physical product. Choose your own way of organizing and anytype should be able to accommodate

    • 

    • Example project main page: Note that I'd prefer to use transclusion here instead of the card previews but anytype doesn't have transclusion support. at first I wrote off the emoji/background, but it's so easy to do (only a couple of clicks) that I did it on a whim and realized I actually love it, and not only that, that little bit of imagery makes it's at least 1 million times easier to quickly identify what page you're on and bring some immediate context to the forefront of your mind. It's a little thing that makes a surprisingly big difference. Anytype uses upsplash images and you just type in what you're looking for (for this example I typed in books), and you'll find a great selection of high quality banners for your pages.

    • also note the organization here. You can have page links (here in cards with previews) as many across as you like and it's easy to arrange them that way.

    • 

• Logseq

  • this is infinite outliner first. collect and connect knowledge. Etc. For projects, it's not as robust as anytype, and while it has transclusion, it doesn't add a lot to a project page

  • This would be better for doing some very quick notes at the genesis of a project. I guess that counts as brainstorming. That said I don't feel as organized and secure as I do working on projects in anytype

  • Pros

    • great for really quick brain dumping (though that's no different than anything else on this list).

    • Transclusion support. though not as beautiful as SiYuan's, it adds about 3 indentations before beginning the actual transcluded content, something they say they're going to address at some point.

  • Cons

    • Interface was designed by engineers and it shows.

    • Feels easy to wreck things

    • has some bugs to work out

    • mobile experience is mostly lackluster and seems to be low priority

  • Mobile Experience

    • mobile is like, mostly unusable for me currently due to a bug where the text your typing scrolls down below your keyboard. so yeah you're typing blind. hope they figure that out soon as it's a breaking bug. Syncing is fairly slow - you can expect to see changes propagate between 10-15 seconds. sometimes a device will say it's fully synced when it's not, and if you don't notice that's not good. best to restart and make it goes through the full sync

  • Collaboration

    • on the radar though not currently in the works. I believe it will come some day and that there are some workarounds but nothing built in

  • Examples

    • project list

  • 

    • example project

  • 

• SiYuan

  • Pros

    • Beautiful editor and transclusion implementation

    • fastest PKMS that exists by a mile

    • can have several notes open in tabs, and it's by far the best implementation of this concept I've seen in any PKMS

    • nice visual customization in line with notion or anytype.

  • Cons

    • no sets/collections/queries. There's no project page unless you build it and update it yourself

  • Mobile Experience

    • Mobile device is probably about equal with logseq. Nothing spectacular, nothing too extremely buggy but it just feels like you're a bull in a chinashop with this. Like you have to be very careful not to break things. Still, from what I've seen, it doesn't have the same litany of bugs logseq has

  • Collaboration

    • No idea where they're at with this. I don't believe it's a priority.

  • Examples

    • This is just their tutorial landing page, but you can get an idea of the layouts and customization possible. It just looks gorgeous and it's the fastest PKMS I've used.

    • 

• Ending thoughts:

  • Mobile: Anytype wins

    • without a doubt the best mobile experience. more polished and robust. You don't feel like a bull in a chinashop like you do in logseq or even siyuan to a degree. That said, logseq still wins in one very small but very important department, and that's swiping to adjust indentation. may seem small but if indentation is buried behind several menus, it's just painful when your'e in the middle of jotting down some important notes. That said logseq mobile is broken (at least for me)

  • Collaboration: no one wins, though anytype is focusing on this

    • Most likely will have to choose another program, probably something that isn't offline first. For this there are a million great options

  • Best overall: Anytype.

    • Being able to create a type is awesome. Then having multiple templates off that type, and "collections/sets" to allow organizing lists of those projects with fairly strong filters and sorting is great. This ability, while exists on logseq, requires knowledge of some programming languages. I think called datalog. In SiYuan I don't believe it's possible. One quick sidenote about SiYuan though, it's a fantastic app and the developers/maintainers work at a blinding pace. One time I made a comment about the line spacing on their english forum, liuyun.io, and the developer answered within a few minutes stating that it was already fixed and in the upcoming version. Anything said about SiYuan is liable to change at a moment's notice (but in a good way!)

  • Best for early/initial braindump: Logseq

    • With its infinite outliner, logseq is fantastic for braindumping quick and dirty prototypes to be fleshed out more fully in another PKMS. I definitely don't think Logseq is the best for projects, but it's definitely not worthlesss

  • Best price: Anytype (for now). Anytype is free.

    • It will be free forever if you decide to selfhost. They will almost certainly add paid plan to use their synving infrastructure (which they implemented brand new for the work they're going to do on collaboration soon)

  • Privacy: Logseq, Anytype.

    • Both can avoid the company's servers completely if you set it up that way. Anytype will required self hosting which for now is not very good because to use the mobile ios app selfhosted, you need to compile through xcode and sideload it onto your device...yeah that's a blocker. Logseq is possible to avoid completely their servers, but it's a worse experience. it's hard to set up. And I believe that their syncing is locked to allow them to eventually offer a premium plan. Anytype's syncing mechanism is up on their github right now.

Anytype has finally followed through on their promise and open sourced their repositories. Self hosting is now possible though there is no docker container available.

This is a major step forward for all PKMS and I wholeheartedly congratulate them.

btw Anytype is free, even their included sync service, which is the best of any offline-first style PKMS I have experienced. Anytype is top 3 PKMS for me, followed by Logseq and SiYuan. They're in good company and now it's only going to improve!

Resources:

Self hosting documentation

Contributor discussions

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/847316

Some choice quotes: (saved from highlights from Omnivore a free (for now) open source read it later app that's quite popular. There's also Readwise Reader which I personally use though it's a subscription based model, but it has feature that Omnivore needs to catch up on (which it may).

Anyway, the quotes:

We’ve made a habit of filling those hundred random spaces in our day with glances at Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. But those glances have slowly become stares, and those stares have grown to encompass a major portion of our waking hours.

The end result is the same person who spends 127 hours per year on Instagram (the global average) complains that she has “no time” for reading.

**Much of the time when we pull out our phone, we’re looking for something to match our mood (or energy, or time available, or other context). We use our constellation of shiny apps as mood regulators and self-soothers, as time-fillers and boredom-suppressors, for better or worse. ... So you need a little entertainment, and you open…an ebook? Yeah right. ... **

It’s practical to have organized reading material at hand when you’re on your way to a meeting that may be starting late, a seminar that may have a window of time when nothing is going on, a dentist appointment that may keep you waiting, or, of course, if you’re going to have some time on a train or plane. Those are all great opportunities to browse and work through that kind of reading. People who don’t have their Read/Review material organized can waste a lot of time, since life is full of weird little windows when it could be used.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/669073

Worth noting that this is put together by AmpleNote. As of now it's very robust and trustworthy. But they day may come that they decide to cash in on this to boost their own offering. As of now I 100% believe in the content. It hasn't failed me yet.

ALSO, if you see something that isn't right, or that it's missing a product you'd like to see listed, you can make suggestions here:

https://nextnoteapps.featureupvote.com/

https://noteappsfeatures.featureupvote.com/

Quick peek at the UI

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/1003789

I've just tried this out and it's a really fantastic experience. Development is happening at a rapid pace, and it's open source with 11k+ stars on github. For example, one month ago, they didn't have a ios app. Now they have offerings for every platform imagineable. The app is robust as well.

Allows transclusions but editing a transclusion pops up a window that's annoying, but the transclusions themselves look absolutely fantastic. In general this is what I wish using logseq felt like.

It does tick the 4 most important boxes for me:

1. Transclusion
2. Offline first
3. platform agnostic: ios, macos, windows, android, linux, docker, webview
4. Open Source

Additional goodies:

Looks like it'll have a plugin ecosystem. Logseq and obsidian benefit greatly from this. I have 30 plugins running on my logseq instance and it pushes the experience just that much higher. I have not explored the siyuan ecosystem, i don't even know if plugins yet exist, but I'm certain they'll have some excellent plugins in the future.

I'm not sure about cost but they currently sell lifetime subscriptions for ~$150. Not bad IMO but it's too often that these things shutter or become abandonware so buy with caution. Not sure what the cost of the monthly subscription is, but for reference, I pay$5/mo for logseq sync and it's good but not great and still a work in progress.

I love this quote from the creator's github page: (originally chinese)

"My wife Vanessa and I have been writing open source software since 2009, of which we have been maintaining the Solo project for 10 years now. Our creative field revolves around blogging and community systems, and we've been working hard on the B3log idea - a distributed community network. At the beginning of 2018, Vanessa and I resigned from the company and officially started our entrepreneurial career as a "full-time open source and freelancer". We built a company whose main product is the Sym community system. Its community edition is completely open source, and individuals can use it for free based on its open source license. In addition, we also operate a community chain drop with more than 50,000 users as the community end node of the B3log distributed community network. Recently we launched a new project, Siyuan Notes, which is a local offline-first personal knowledge management system that supports fine-grained block-level references and Markdown WYSIWYG. Welcome everyone to try and give feedback. For me and Vanessa, open source has become more than just a hobby, it is a way of life, and we are very confident in the future of this "open source living" path. Hopefully along the way we can help others with open source software, and others can help us. Open source connects you and me, open source builds the future, let us enter the open source world together! "

I recently got serious about using mem.ai after seeing a video on its AI features. Anybody else out there testing this out?

I started using logseq recently. I'd love to exchange ideas with other users on lemmy/kbin/fedi but I couldn't find (ikr, fedi) a dedicated group so far. This is the closest. I'll ask on reddit (the irony!) but I thought I'd shoot a note here too (although I didn't see any mention of logseq so far)

Stay organized 🤙

I don't use some of them nearly enough, but I really like Zim Wiki on desktop/laptop for the ability to link to different files in my notes. For on the go, I tend to use Joplin right now as I like that it's open source & relatively easy to sync between my PC & phone.

I've dabbled a little with TiddlyWiki, but I feel like I need to learn more to really customize it more to my tastes. I've also been meaning to try running DokuWiki from a flash drive, as I like the wiki format a lot, but I feel like it may be a bit overkill.

I've seen some mention of Evernote & Obsidian here, but I've not used those personally. Also sorry if personal wikis are out of scope for this community, they're just among the first to come to mind when I read the name & sidebar!

I've been using Obsidian for a while, but recently, I've started considering that either of these grant me Obsidian's main advantage- your knowledge base being portable- while also being FOSS software. (In particular org-mode also gives me access to some things VimWiki would lack like support for things like images.) ...Oh, and apparently org-mode can be exported to loads of other things through the glorious program that is Pandoc. Loads of Android apps that work with org-mode as well, so you can, in fact, sync everything between pretty much everything!

Right now it feels like a lot of extra work to do it right. So I just postponed watching valuable content, because I need it to watch while taking notes. It is different to when I just watched videos and felt smart for a minute. Only to forget about it in a week...

Did you see a significant productivity increase? Did your motivation to work on long projects change? Did it help you get over roadblocks in long project? (I tend to lose motivation whenever I struggle to make progress for more than 3 hours in a row.) How do you decide what goes inside of the system and what doesn't? (we have search engines and chatgpt that can quickly give us the information we want for most things) How do you keep the information up to date, for example if you read a research paper and later it is partially disproven?

Thank you! Looking forward to learning about your experiences :)

Image related to avalanche of information

My mom asked how to wash the yellow marks from white t-shirt and it took me too long to find the answer. I guess it was also on me because I forgot to put it in Projects folder. After I will clean my t shirts I think to put it in AREA folder. It will be the first :)

Feeling a little bit intimidated by the amount of stuff my basb needs to consume to be valuable for me

Put my first project in Archive, hoooray 🥳🥳🥳 I know it's not good, but I am a person, who needs inspiration to start doing a task. Like I randomly think what I want to do today and start doing it. Creating a list of things to do tomorrow never worked for me. But now I have a list of 16(+2) projects and can choose randomly between them.

It was really hard to find note taking app, that fits my needs. Obsidian is great, but I have problems with obsidian sync at the moment. Evernote is still iffy, cuz even frontpage is monetized, I can't change anything unless I pay. Wtf. Anyway, I am happy that i can create folders in 2 levels. But it's not the usual way of creating folder inside of a folder. You create notebook, which then can be put inside different stacks. Feels like a hack. So you can have PARA stacks, where you shift notebooks back and forth. Right now I only have Projects folder 😅. But honestly I already feel easier. I am not holding ideas for projects (not only ones like write summary of an article but also planning dates) in my "first'' brain, and it's such a relief. Can wait when I finish some projects and will need an Archive stack(folder).

That's a big struggle for me. When I was learning about Zettelkasten, the idea of immediatly writing in your own words the summary of a chapter feels daunting. What if I use the wrong words and wouldn't understand later? What I want is to have notes from the book and then use them to write summary maybe in a week after reading a chapter. I can't just do it immediately. What do you think are some good ways to aproach telling in your own words?

I recently used linked thinking in Obsidian to do some critical meme analysis for therapy. It was a good exercise in creating index notes, e.g. a meme crossing over Marvel and The Good Place wouldn't fit in a folder for either one.