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Comment by herval | Hacker News Reader

> A centralized search interface for my digital brain

I actually spent years on-and-off building this. What I found is I don’t really care about MOST information I store, and the pieces I DO care about are kept in a place I can easily memorize (eg a couple folders on iCloud).

I ALSO found that nobody really wants to pay for a product like that (in my case, it was a desktop app that’d index everything on your machine - no cloud, etc). Similar products come and go every other month, and they usually die because 1) indexing isn’t cheap and 2) people don’t seem to use said indices much, in practice (crazy high churn).

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The problem, in my opinion, is not specifically storing an searching, but rather connecting these pieces of data together.

This has driven my interest into Roam... a freeform ability to connect sources/idea/data that can drive cumulative value over time rather than fragmentation and dusty old drives/notes.

I'm super interested in Roam for this reason too, but the online-only subscription model is a deal breaker for me. And I'm not usually the one complaining about subscription based things or online-only things, but when it comes to all of my collective information that I've painstakingly organized, I'm really not into someone locking my memories behind a paywall.

I used to use DayOne as a journaling program until I realized the same thing: as soon as I stop paying, all those memories are gone, lost in time like tears in rain. Sure it is really nice and convenient software and the user experience is fantastic but if I stop paying, it's all lost. If they raise their price higher than I want to pay, it's all lost. If they go out of business or pivot or get sold or... it's all lost.

I'm willing to take that risk... but I'm not willing to pay for the pleasure of taking that risk. I ended up just writing everything in Apple Notes that's free on all my devices. Sure it's the same risk, but at least I'm not paying $165/year for something that can disappear whenever the founder gets bored.

> as soon as I stop paying, all those memories are gone, lost in time like tears in rain. Sure it is really nice and convenient software and the user experience is fantastic but if I stop paying, it's all lost.

Yes, this is why I made Open Source and open formats an absolute requirement when I started looking at journaling software. The content is irreplaceable.

After trying several things, I found that Joplin does everything that I need for journaling and note-taking. I made a point of donating to the project the equivalent of what I would have paid for a commercial offering.

Trilium is somewhat similar to Roam. https://github.com/zadam/trilium/

I think the problem is that the friction of getting data from mind to pc is too high. I'm not convinced the search needs to be that clever, but getting stuff to search isn't easy: A simple example would be working out a maths problems, I can basically type in LaTeX at the same rate I can think but nothing will ever beat some nice paper and fountain pen (for me at least) for actually iterating through my thoughts as they arrive.

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