Serenity notes: E2E encrypted notes | Hacker News Reader

Serenity notes: E2E encrypted notes

serenity.re

39 pointsdomoritz36 comments

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let me introduce everyone to StandardNotes

- Fully FOSS

- E2EE

- Multi-platform (web, iOS, Android, Linux, macOS, Win)

- designed for the "longevity" of your notes

(https://standardnotes.org/longevity)

- no limit on notes, all core features of the product itself are 100% free

The paid version gives you:

- 2FA

- a long list of extensions, editors and themes

- note version history

https://standardnotes.org/

I've been a long time subscriber to SN for all the reasons stated above.

Neat - that looks significantly more interesting.

Too bad it’s not possible to selfhost

It is.

https://standardnotes.org/help/47/can-i-self-host-standard-n... https://docs.standardnotes.org/self-hosting/getting-started/

Nice, thanks for sharing

Even if you pay 10$/mo, to use images you need to connect to a separate service which I thought was crazy

So I would need to host the standard files server, and also host my own webdav server in addition

I like Joplin and I run a seafile server as the webdav backend

https://joplinapp.org/

IMHO - if they became an image host it would get in the way of the longevity and portability of their notes themselves.

IMHO, they take the "unix" philosophy of "do one thing and do it well, and interoperate with other things". And i wish more tools operated this way.

It is almost perfect for someone who doesn't want to self-host, but you have to use another commercial service

why am I even paying them, with Joplin I can also sync to Dropbox. And I still have to pay them even if I'm self hosting

I think Joplin is more single purpose since it doesn't focus on the server side, and is just a client

On OSX/iOS, if you don't care about markdown/open-source/self-hosting you should just use Apple Notes

Create up to 3 notes? Srsly? :-) I don't need to collaborate to 50 people like a real "pro" would but I won't even bother registering to create 3 notes. Something around 1000 notes would make a reasonable limit for a free personal edition.

Why? Why does the free edition owe you anything?

It doesn't.

But I'm not going to bother trying it at "3 notes for free".

It doesn't, but it is odd that this is marketed as something usable.

. "Personal Free: Ideal to get started"

A 3-note-limit is not "ideal" for anything.

It would be better advertised as a free trial (purely for evaluating otherwise paid-only service), rather than pretending they have a free plan.

Well from an adoption standpoint it would be nice. I'm not going to even really bother with software that limits its free users so much. I mean I would TRY it but I'm not going to get a true experience out so few notes. And as a result I'm not going to buy it because I wasnt able to try it.

I'm not saying 1000 notes is the answer. Maybe its 50, maybe its 500. But 3 certainly is limiting.

It's not really a matter of being _owed_ anything, it's more that a lot of people aren't likely to pay for something unless they know they're going to use it, and 3 notes doesn't seem like enough to really see if it's sustainable. They don't have to have a free tier at all, and likewise no one has to try the product out. However just because we aren't "owed" anything, doesn't mean we should just accept _anything_.

Nothing but you might as well have no free tier under those restrictions.

Not offering a free version is totally reasonable, but calling this a trial version would seem more honest.

Why are customers not free to decide what makes a product worth using?

I don't think that people understand that paid limits sometimes aren't there for you to hit or even get anywhere near. It's like how Dropbox doesn't offer a paid tier less than 2TB. It's not like most people need 2TB it's just that the idea is once you're paying it's unlikely you need to worry about the limit.

It's an unlimited duration free trial. The copy suggests it's usable and fair enough, it isn't really. But that doesn't invalidate the remainder of the product. This looks like it just launched, they're likely still iterating on the copy.

I mean, the same page also says "We need to charge, because we can't sell your data", so let's not get stuck on such a small detail.

I must say that for a just-launched utility SaaS, this looks remarkably well done. Clear targeting, good website, no nonsense.

This is reasonable, nevertheless they should give at minimum some dozens notes for people to actually try that. 3 notes sounds more like "fuck off". Even a time-limited (what I generally find a bad idea too) trial would be better. And I doubt some 100-1000 notes would eat too much resources unless they let you insert HD video in the notes (which absolutely should be a paid premium feature if it actually is there).

$48 US a year for a note taking app, again death by subscriptions... I'm so tired of this model.

How would you prefer to pay for your software?

Once and only once

Is note-taking-application-fatigue a thing yet? I feel like I might have it.

I simply cannot look at the pros and cons of yet another application that will finally solve note taking better than what I do now. Trying it out, thinking it might be pretty cool until, 2 hours in, I find out about some total deal breaker yet again.

(I won't mention what I am using now as that is besides the point. )

Concurred. I have had checking out Notion.so on my TODO for over a year now while simply using Google Keep despite all of its problems.

Few things here:

1. Note taking apps are easy to build.

2. Note taking apps are something many of us want and take pretty seriously (you say you find a deal breaker in a workflow as basic as note taking, which seems to indicate this is something you take quite seriously).

3. We have a desire to tweak our setup for whatever reason. Whether it's "if I can solve this one problem everything else will fall into place" syndrome, motivation, solving an actual problem or simply to avoid real work, productivity porn creates clicks.

So yeah, I'm pretty tired of it, but I don't think fatigue has yet set it because it scratches and itch in many people.

At this point its plain text documents for me. No set rules. If I need it in multiple places/version control/etc I throw it in a git repo.

Free version lets you create up to 3 (!) notes: https://www.serenity.re/en/notes/pricing

I just ran the iOS app. It does not use any client side encryption (i.e. at application level at rest) only in transit. From what I can see it is also using the default iOS data protection class. So while this app might provide good security for data in transit it provides little or no security for a local attack on a device locked but AFU.

It's actually wrong about Roam - you can now encrypt individual notes by password https://mobile.twitter.com/roamresearch/status/1226658292333...

I wonder if building something like this on Matrix would be a good fit.

Note "collections" would be rooms, to share collections you can invite people to your encrypted rooms.

They actually do somewhat. The creator talked about it at https://twitter.com/nikgraf/status/1374666231861686274.

There's Obsidian for those that want their notes to stay local, or at the very least decide if you want your information flying around the Internet: http://obsidian.md/

Ummm, still no self-hosting method.

Also check out Joplin:

joplinapp.org/

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