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Comment by bravura | Hacker News Reader

So this is interesting. I was ticked off when it says: "what platform do you use the most?"

I have been looking at a handful of projects in this space, including notion.so and Roam, but am seriously considering moving back to Markdown-folder backed by Dropbox, for which there are a variety of editors including The Archive, and mobile apps too.

I urge you to allow zero-friction bidirectional sync at the very least. For me, unless I have complete data portability, a note-taking app that might disappear in a year is a non-starter for me.

[edit: I read deeper and see you have it, thank you]

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One insight when it comes to building note-taking apps with portability in mind is that when you want to build more rich features, like collaboration or backlinking, is that a database is more suitable to build upon than a basic filesystem. But that architectural choice is at conflicts with portability, because while bringing-your-own-file-system is possible with Google Drive and Dropbox, having your own personal database isn't as popular. Anyone share similar sentiments?

Yes and no. A database is just a layer. Using a dedicated database and storing your data in it is simple. But nothing prevents you from storing the data (including relevant metadata) outside of it, and use the database just as a caching-layer for it superior abilities in it's own realm.

Dividing layers is of course more work and has problems of it's own, but works well enough that AFAIK this org-roam here is doing under the hood too.

Have you had a look at Joplin (https://joplinapp.org)? It's mature, open-source, has e2e encryption, is markdown-backed, and supports syncing via Dropbox. Also supports attachments.

I actually switched to it from org-mode, but still edit the notes in emacs because of keymap (via "Edit in external editor" feature).

Yep I did look at Joplin, but it seems internal linking is not their focus, unfortunately.

Ah, sorry. I focused too much on the "seriously considering moving back to Markdown-folder backed by Dropbox". Joplin does support note linking (https://joplinapp.org/markdown/#links-to-other-notes), but it is quite clunky, to be honest. However, it does look like it's being addressed soon (https://discourse.joplinapp.org/t/syntax-to-link-notes/5264/...).

There's no sync right now, the source of truth is your local folder.

P.S. When I read bidirectional sync I misread it as bidirectional links, which is something we're working on as well!

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