Dear god. Why are note-taking projects such a magnet for slop bros?

I’m on a bit of a quest to build up some self-hosted services for me and friends & family, partially because Ad- & AI-infested big tech slop was making me sick and also to become a better sysadmin. General requirement was notes available anywhere and decent editing on mobile.

I was about to rip my hair out, when every session for weeks digging into options ended in frustration. Every project with somewhat decent features had some meh aspects and became worse the longer I looked. And there are so many of them. You can drown your self in “Best FOSS Note-taking App in $(date +%Y)” listicles. Here’s a list of over a hundred projects.

I suspect it’s a bit of the shopping list problem. It’s such a basic idea, that every ambitious clueless dev has it once while picking a hobby project. But note-taking also definitely has a place in toxic self-optimization / hustle culture. Some of the more developed project strike me as that.

I won’t mention every basic note-talking project with a CLAUDE.md that I stumbled on, but here’s some of the more disappointing lowlights:

  • Joplin main developer was one-shot. Added agent instructions to the repo this year and some provisions for his personal vibecoding rig to .gitignore. Also it’s not a bug if the AI chat button is visible even if AI features are disabled, because how would people find out about the AI features then?
  • Notesnook seems okay-ish, but they’re part of the mall ninja club. Business partnership with Kagi & Tuta.
  • Standard Notes was the least suspect to me. Later found out they Copilot-Review all of their PRs. (same as Notesnook btw)
  • I even considered going with a self-hosted binary of Obsidian. They don’t get instant-disqualified by promoting themselves as AI-anything. And if you don’t have a project you can trust, you might as well throw yourself at the most established option and pray.

I was running out of places to look for alternatives, when I remembered Open Slopware. You can guess how shocked I was, when note-software made up one of the biggest sublists in there. Through the shortlist of recommendations I ended up looking at Flatnotes. That project might be just enough notes for me.

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    3 days ago

    You said friends and family, does that mean orgmode or vimwiki is out of the running? I liked fedwiki back in the day but it had a learning curve. Never tried it on the phone.

    Also to be fair to the FOSS options, commercial applications like OneNote or Google Keep also suck, and are somehow worse than I remembered.

    • jaschop@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      5·
      3 days ago

      They killed Google Keep btw. Not that I needed more reason not to tango with a corpo app again. All criticism here is based on failure to realize my utopian visions of spiritually pure notetaking.

      The notes are just for me, but I was really hoping for a more conventional editor. No shade to emacs/vim enjoyers. (Heck, I use 90% NeoVim at work.)

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      There should be a case study on how OneNote started out ok and just keeps getting worse and less usable every update. Maybe ms is using it as training ground for new project managers and it’s been just a series of half-baked first attempts as updates since forever.

    • schnoopy@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      org-roam and org mode are revolutionary. The combo makes a note taking and scheduling system you’ll actually use.

      Emacs has a client mode but non tech people probably wont like it. There’s no good way to use it on a phone for example.