Hacker News Reader

Comment by midtake | Hacker News Reader

The issue for me is that I don't want to run another web service just to take personal notes. I'll likely keep using Obsidian until I can find something else that is self-managed and "flat".

View on HN

Try SiYuan Note.

It's a free and open source local-first of Notion+ Obsidian.

https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan

Currently, you can install it as a PWA app. when the web version is stable, I will develop a desktop app.

In which format are the notes stored? Many of us have been bitten by vendor lock in before, so we prefer our notes tobe in simple human readable formats that can also be read in 30 years when your app (more likely than not) doesn't exist anymore.

If you expect that your notes will still be valuable in 30 years, then you should probably migrate them to something other than a quick note taking app. If everything I wrote into onenote before eg last year disappeared right now, I wouldn't lose much sleep.

Why would I do that? I use only apps that use text files anyways. I am pretty confident I will be able to open them in 30 years.

I even have files from 20+ years ago that I can open just fine, including notes.

If you use something proprietary, then yeah, it might be difficult. But that doesn't stop us from asking whether something we're interested in using now uses data formats that would be easily readable in 20-30 years.

Exactly my point, then.

I agree with you, I'm largely confused by the one who replied to you before.

My point is that I sincerely doubt that these notes will have any usefulness in 30 years.

Depends on which notes you take. I still have academic notes from 15 years ago that are useful.

I'm an academic. Any kind of note that I didn't migrate to a durable support from more than a year ago is basically gone.

I constantly have book X that I read ages ago where I need to find point Y. My notes are valuable for that. But I and my note-taking are not universal.

But even if I it wasn't I don't like to think about the lifetime of any thought as I note it down. This os a distraction I don't need. If the closet with the notes in it fails, I want to be able to read them still.

Situational, I suppose. I still have an active project that's not quite 30 years old (it's mid-20's) that I reference old notes for all the time.

Actually... I reference a lot of notes from at least 20 years ago. There is a lot that doesn't change, you forget, and is an instantaneous search away. I don't foresee this changing in the interim 10 years.

If you are making notes about your life, memories, etc, you might want to revisit them years in the future, and not tomorrow

It's not a human readable format outside of simplistically formatted text, but even then the vendor locking is solved via exporting to that simplistic format so that you can easily do that when the app dies and you need to move to another one, no need for every app to suffer the limitations by choosing that as its internal data format

Reply on news.ycombinator.com