Memos: A lightweight, self-hosted memo hub | Hacker News Reader

Memos: A lightweight, self-hosted memo hub

github.com

129 pointsTomte40 comments

I think I like this, but I can't find any high level information about what this actually is, which is surprising given how popular the project seems to be. I figured the marketing site might have more details, but it's remarkably scant even down to the FAQ.

Is a "memo hub" a common term that I'm just not familiar with?

My guess is that they are an open source alternative to mem.ai. It looks super polished & well designed.

I agree. I think I like this. Enough to try it out. I've seen hundreds of to-do apps, local, cloud, and hosted. This one having the timeline visible on the front page is appealing. Too many apps try to obfuscate and obscure the details. For memos and notes, I feel like review is an important aspect. Having visibility of _when_ you wrote something can be just as important as what you wrote. It's kept simply here, but still functional.

This app does seem to be aiming for a collaborative experience. With that it would be nice to see some sort of comment or thread for posts. I.E. Create a to-do post that others can respond to without directly editing. That way memos aren't kept here while discussion is in Slack or Teams.

From the Pull Requests, it looks like Comments API is in the works.

https://github.com/usememos/memos/pull/1900

Awesome, thank you for digging that up.

It seems to be imitating https://flomoapp.com/

Thanks, this helps!

I feel the same!

Its like the *Continuum Transfunctioner* from the film "Dude, Where's My Car", in that, its a powerful and mysterious device! lol :-)

Self hosted stuff makes me lol all the time. Half of them you read the documentation for and come out like “what does it do?”

I used to think I just wasn’t educated enough and someone with more education would know exactly what it does and why it was created just by context alone, but now I don’t think that’s what’s happening

The description doesn't say much (well, it's a place for memos) but the screenshot shows exactly what this is.

The lack of alt-text would make it difficult for people relying on assistive technology to understand it, though.

It's all in the title, though. It's a place to store memos.

I was going to suggest you to check the live demo (link in the README.me) but the autofilled credentials do not work :)

I just spent a while playing with it and I REALLY LIKE IT. I think it would make a cool little "social network" for family and friends.

I agree. The author(s) use the word ‘memos’ as a proper noun (e.g. We are memos), but the use of ‘memo hub’ is descriptive (e.g. this is a memo hub). Thankfully, the power of HN community can explain, where the authors are too shy to say.

The app itself looks pretty neat. But I don't know how much I can agree with "lightweight" for a full stack webapp that just stores and presents text.

I've noticed of late that "lightweight" doesn't seem to mean what it used to mean.

Its always meant the same thing: lighter than the shit that's in the middle of standard-normal distribution of $THING.

Meh the first thing I saw when I opened the demo page was a spinner. That's sitting at the opposite side of the normal distribution for site lightness.

It seems to be able to connect to OpenAI‘s API and to Telegram, as well.

It's a ~20 MB Docker image. In an age of 800 MB Electron instant messaging apps, I'd say it qualifies.

I wouldn't. That it's not as enormous as it could be doesn't mean it's "lightweight".

It’s all about context right? By embedded systems standards it’s huge but for a self hosted docker app it’s pretty small

That's the same size as my first hard drive back in the late 80's!

It uses SQLite database. I like this!

This seems kinda fishy to me, and I can't quite put my finger on why. For a project that has a readme dedicated mostly to showing how popular they are and how many GitHub stars they have, it barely describes what it even does beyond the vague notion of hosting "memos" locally. The project is only a year old, but it has 160 submitted issues and over 15k stars?

I'll pass for now. I get the feeling this is a fairly competent web-based project but with the intent of gaming GitHub in order to bolster someone's resume. That's just how it looks to me. If the creator(s) is reading this, please consider adding real documentation so the legitimacy of your software is obvious.

They do have a fully functional demo linked, so maybe that counts for something? https://demo.usememos.com/

Does it require a registered account? Not great.

It does not. Shows the logged-out experience and prefills a demo user when you select 'Sign In'. Simple click shows that. Which is a great way to demonstrate each side of the software.

> It does not. Shows the logged-out experience and prefills a demo user when you select 'Sign In'. Simple click shows that.

You're describing something that contrasts with my own experience.

When I open the link I get the 'Sign In' pane, but when I click on the sign in button I get an error message complaining about "incorrect login credentials, please try again".

Not great, not usable.

It's full of open source projects from China that do this star astroturfing thing. The projects themselves are legit, but they like to signal this strength even when they are all pretty new. If you want some evidence, check some of the stuff I've submitted to HN (not the developer or anything related, but you can find pretty new projects in the note-taking or AI realm, and they all share that pattern)

I’m using this app for sometime for notes. It fits the usecase when you want to write down something without thinking about where to place it. It also works like a simple micro-blog with Public memos. There is a nice looking third party app available for iOS. https://memos.moe/

thanks for mentioning the IOS app. I've also been selfhosting memos for a while now. But wasn't aware (never really checked) if there was an actual mobile app for it.

Description says it is an unaffiliated developer, which could explain why you didn't know about it but seems like a good signal.

> I’m using this app for sometime for notes. It fits the usecase when you want to write down something without thinking about where to place it.

Why not just create private groups/channels/chats for that purpose? No infrastructure required, at least other than the one you're already using.

The android app is pretty good, but no offline support really limits its usability.

Imo, every mobile app should have some kind of offline support. The fact that I'm unable to access my notes if I'm not online means anything I require under an unreliable network has to go in a different app. Just a quick example, my local supermarket is underground which means I often don't have signal there. So I can't replace my regular notes app with this for my supermarket list.

But being open source, it means there's a lot of space to grow and supposedly this is a planned feature; so I guess, just gotta wait or try to do it myself :)

This comment makes me wonder if there is a standard or some current in the wild apps that have a 'we tried to sync and found that these three lines exist in the server version of your notes from yesterday that do not exist in today's version, and there are these 10 lines of text in your local note that from today that do not exist in the cloud version' - should we merge from newest or append whats missing from each into both (and maybe add a date/timestamp at the end of each line) or color code or something?

Fossil works well for self hosted memos. Writing markdown in a phone browser isn’t horrible.

the scm?

Yeah. Versioned. Easy export for other tools. Simple setup. Works on my phone with just a browser. Can make home network only as I am vpn'd to my house anyway. Ticks a lot of boxes.

I have been wanting this forever! Even built an MVP in rails. This is a lot more polished.

Excited to try this. Now excuse me while I go yak shave a kube cluster here at home so I can quickly run/test apps like this.

When will you release the desktop app ?. This can replace the MacOSX Note app for me.

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