Hey folks! I’m completely new to Lemmy and still figuring out how everything works around here… But I’d love to share a project I’ve been building.
It’s called VOID (Versatile Open-source Infrastructure for Developers) - an open-source, local-first second-brain (note taking app but more powerful) application that combines the flexibility of Obsidian with the powerful organization of Notion.
Unlike many other tools, VOID is not just another note-taking app. It’s built with the idea of being a true second brain that you fully control. No vendor lock-in, no hidden cloud, no feature walls. Everything is open-source, customizable, and designed to adapt to your workflow instead of forcing you into someone else’s.
I’m currently building it with Rust, Tauri v2 and Vue.js. For certain plugins and configs, it also supports SurrealDB as a database.
check it out on my GitHub
I did a bunch of research into second brain/zettelkasten apps (that is to say, apps that support note taking with note interlinking and rich text) earlier this year, and I couldn’t find a single app in the category that’s (1) FOSS, (2) stores notes as .md files natively (Logseq will import/export to .md, but it’s not native), and (3) is cross-platform in some way (for my purposes, I need it to be on Linux, Android, and Mac OS, or have a usable web app). Even the ones that get close all have some kind of gimmick to them, or are super ugly or slow or otherwise hard to use.
If Void can get those three nailed, and do it in a usable way, it will fill a very particular and exciting niche.
Doesn’t logseq store the notes as
.mdfiles? There is a directory named pages which contained them last time I checkedThis is a mandatory comment about Emacs’ org mode since
.orgfiles are extremely similar in syntax to.mdand can be interconverted extremely easily.This is great intel, thank you.
If you deem
.orgto be sufficient and want to use Emacs1 itself, there is an extension for the zettelkasten method of note taking that you might find useful.1: Despite originating with the Emacs community,
.orgfiles are recognized by many (most?) IDEs, but I’m not sure if extensions are regularly ported to non-Lisp editors.Considering that one of your requirements is already using
.mdfiles, which is a format pretty common… maybe a combination of different apps on different platforms would work? Specially considering that mobile UIs are likely gonna have different requirements than desktop UIs.One approach I was considering was using neutrinote on Android (which is a relatively simple but functional no-bullshit markdown editor supporting cross-linking between markdown files) and VSCode / VSCodium on the desktop (which also supports cross-linking, and I think has some note-taking related extensions), or maybe zed, or whichever editor you might already be using that can support markdown. Then use syncthing for the sync.
However, I have not yet really gotten into it, primarily because second brain/zettelkasten note-taking in general has never really fully clicked with me, most of the time when I take notes I just use them as a scratchpad / temporary storage… without much of a proper organization … just a note meant to be scrapped as soon as it’s acted on. Often I just use tabs in my notepad app, without really saving them to a file.
That is something I hadn’t considered, and well worth considering. Thank you.
FWIW I use Obsidian on desktop and Nextcloud Notes on mobile (along with Nextcloud sync for, uh, syncing) and it works great. All this and a TB of storage only costs me about 5 EUR/mo with Hetzner.
I know this won’t go over well here but I don’t really care that Obsidian isn’t FOSS, because it’s just a frontend for markdown files in folders. There’s no lock-in whatsoever, and it being FOSS or not makes no functional difference.
I broadly agree with you, but I would still prefer to have another option so that if/when Obsidian goes the Notion route, I have another option to jump to easily.
Me too, but I figure a clone will pop up very quickly if that happens, and I’ll already have an easily portable folder with markdown files.
My big concern is that, since there’s no substantial Obsidian competitor now, there must not be any money in it, which would slow down the arrival of a new clone if Obsidian ever platform-decay’d. Yes, the fact that it’s easily portable is a good bulwark, and that’s why I currently use Obsidian; but to make a comparison, it’s been twelve years since Google Reader died, and there isn’t yet a successor that I’ve found which offers both opml & last-read syncing and unlimited feeds, unless you can self-host.
I guess I’m saying, I’ve been on this ride for too long, I kinda want to get off of it.
The Google Reader comparison is excellent, that one still hurts… I think RSS usage has simply declined tremendously overall though, as opposed to PKM which is still going strong (I think/hope)
I think it’s probably still a subculture, like RSS was. I hope both of them have a resurgence, though.