Hey everyone, I’m trying to replace most of the private owned app I use by FOSS ones, and today i’m pointing at notion.

I just use it as a way to organize my notes and use it both on my laptop and phone, and i’m looking for something that can have that fonctionnality.

I’ve already looked into a bunch of foss note taking apps but I didn’t see any that could do it. (maybe i didn’t look hard enough tho)

I’m willing to use syncthing or smth similar if needed.

do you have any recommendations? anyway, have a nice day and thanks to everyone making the internet/softwares more libre and accessible!

    • NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip
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      8 months ago

      EDIT: I am going to edit this to reflect that I HAVE NOT tried Joplin 3.5 which says: "

      More reliable syncing and sharing

      Syncing and sharing have been made more robust in everyday use. Joplin now handles repeated syncs more efficiently, avoids unnecessary data usage, and is better at detecting and syncing all changes, particularly when using WebDAV and S3 sync targets."

      Until I have new data I will scratch this out:

      In Joplin, I have never been able to successfully use an s3 instance with two or more joplin clients. It corrupts eventually. This is using a bucket for storage directly, not WebDAV.

      From my research the best bet is self host, webdav, or some kind of file sync

      • nunesgh@piefed.social
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        8 months ago

        That’s weird… I’ve been using S3 to sync Joplin between Linux and Android without corruption issues for more than a year now.

        • NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip
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          8 months ago

          Looks like you are lucky so far. It is still in beta and not considered a full fledged part of Joplin, they have told me as much.

          I admit I havetn’t tried in the last six months. I think I might, the release notes for January 2026 say they improved sync.

          I also was using 3 clients, so maybe I hit it faster. Maybe 2 is ok.

      • baronvonj@piefed.social
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        8 months ago

        yeah I use webdav on my home NAS with just one phone and one laptop. probably going to self-host serve so I can do shared notes with the Baroness.

    • kcweller@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Sadly, because honestly, all the FOSS options that are mentioned in this thread don’t even compare to how snappy, useful and expandable Obsidian is 😭

      • ComradeMiao@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        fully agree but the head coder is aggressively anti-foss on mastodon and I don’t like that. trilium is a decent alternative but it doesn’t have a phone app, and no not triliumnext.

    • yo_scottie_oh@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      Do you ever regret that Joplin does not store notes in plain text? (meaning you couldn’t edit your notes in a plain text editor if you wanted to)

      • Moodel@feddit.uk
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        8 months ago

        Nope not a bit. But you mean through exporting stuff I assume(?).

        If for any reason I need to move something to a text file (very rare) then I just cut/copy and paste without the MD.

        • yo_scottie_oh@lemmy.ml
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          8 months ago

          I just meant like if Joplin ever stopped working or vanished overnight. I know it might seem like a contrived scenario, but I’ve always been a little skittish about apps that don’t store files in plain text in case I want/need to use a different editor. Sounds like that hasn’t been an issue for you, though, which is cool.

  • SammyJK@programming.dev
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    8 months ago

    Notesnook should do it! It has a premium monthly subscription thing that gives you some extra functionality, but the free version does sync automatically between devices. I’ve been using it for a year now myself and have had no complaints.

  • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works
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    8 months ago

    I use Joplin through some WebDAV with my cloud provider, kDrive.

    Works perfectly once set up.

    I don’t know if you could make it work directly from your phone to your computer though.

  • Substance_P@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Is there something wrong with Standard Notes that I should be aware of? It hasn’t been mentioned here. It has the AES-256 encryption standard, there is a free tier, it’s open source and it undergoes regular security audits.

  • Zarlin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    8 months ago

    Obsidian + Syncthing has been working prefectly for several years now for me, across Windows, Android and Linux.

      • anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz
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        8 months ago

        Honestly most of my notes are just text files describing the installation process saved together with the installation files in a folder on my NAS. Not much of a note taker outside of that. I’ve heard many enjoy Obsidian though. :)

        • MalReynolds@slrpnk.net
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          8 months ago

          That (folder with files) is pretty much what an obsidian vault is, except it’s markdown files (of which text files are a subset). Should just import in with zero issues.

          • anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz
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            8 months ago

            Ah, I should’ve clarified - my notes are all over the place as "README"s or "INSTALL GUIDE"s in different folders together with the files needed to do the install in question. :)

    • foxwolf@pawb.social
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      8 months ago

      The android app is busted for me. I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled and it will not let me login or load anything at all.

  • clif@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    https://silverbullet.md/

    It’s like obsidian (I hear) but FOSS. I love it and it’s by far the self hosted service I use most.

    It stores your notes in a plain directory hierarchy of markdown files so you can just point a cron shell script at it to git add/commit/push at your desired internal and you’ve got history tracking/backups too

    Edit: also provides a PWA so you can “install” it on your phone instead of always using a full browser.

    Edit x2: includes a Lua interpreter so you can get scripty with it. I use that functionality more than I expected and I suck at Lua

    Edit x3: and it auto synchs to each device when open with conflict detection. Full copy is stored local to each device, synched when possible

    • [object Object]@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      includes a Lua interpreter so you can get scripty with it

      Any examples of what you’re doing with scripts? I use some custom programming in Org-mode in Emacs, but curious about what other people are doing in different apps.

      • clif@lemmy.world
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        The two biggest things I use it for are programmatically generating “lists of lists” (lists of pages, more accurately) and as a semi-hacky way to get text colors. Semi-related, the “Treeview” plugin gives you a folder hierarchy panel off to the left (by default) which is really, really nice.

        I should probably clarify that I didn’t write these, I stole them from the Silverbullet community forums… also I should reiterate that I suck at Lua so take my explanations with a grain of “this person may not know what they’re talking about” ; )

        Lists of Lists : I have a bad memory so I create a LOT of lists. I even have a base page named “Lists” that I then nest different types of lists under (TODOs for home, for work, for school, for projects, for selfhosting, etc). Since the table is programmatically generated, it’s always up to date on each load. This first snippet relies on using frontmatter on the respective pages along with the tags property.

        ${query[[
        from index.tag "todolist"
        order by lastModified desc
        select {
          List="[[" .. _.name .. "]]",
          Modified=_.lastModified
          }
        ]]}
        

        This retrieves all pages from the space index with a tag of todolist (from the frontmatter), orders them by lastModified, descending, and renders a table that contains the name and lastModified date. This is excellent for providing a list of pages (based on tag, todolist in this case) related to a topic and ordering them by the last time they were changed. I use this in the base page for pretty much all of my “folders”. Screenshot :

        Text Color Hack : Since the Silverbullet markdown interpreter doesn’t (currently) support plain HTML, and the way we usually color specific areas of text within Markdown is <span style="color: #fff">white text</span>, they had to get inventive. Somebody came up with a way to provide Lua functions that will accept text as a parameter and then render it with the specified HTML color/style.

        In my CONFIG page (that is applied to the entire space) I included a space-lua code block like :

        function Red(text)
          return widget.html(dom.span {
            style="color:#e60000; font-weight: bold;",
            text
          })
        end
        // Also about 5 more for different colors I use, snipped for simplicity.
        

        Then, anywhere in my Silverbullet space I can use a Lua code snippet like The following word is ${Red("red")} and it will invoke the space-lua function named Red() on the text red, apply the styling, and render it with CSS color #e60000. Hacky? Yeah… but it works for now. Screenshot :

        … I’ve been meaning to build a generic Colorize(text, hexColor) function (which would likely take all of 30 seconds : ) but haven’t yet. Maybe tonight.

        EDIT: That did, in fact, take 30 seconds. Function :

        // This assumes "color" parameter is a valid/properly formatted CSS color, meaning a known word ("red"), hex ("#ff0000"), or presumably RGB/etc but so far I've only tested color names and hex (I typically use hex)
        function Colorize(text, color)
        return widget.html(dom.span {
            style=string.format("color:%s; font-weight: bold;", color),
            text
          })
        end
        

        Usage : ${Colorize("any text", "#00ff00")}

        • [object Object]@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Interesting, thanks. This Silverbullet thing turned out to be more complex than I originally imagined, I thought it’s a hierarchical notes app as usual.

          I have a bad memory so I create a LOT of lists

          I’m the same way, but that led me to Org-mode with local files (synced to the phone) and loads of nested outlines, like thousands of items.

          But since it’s programmed in Emacs Lisp, I’ve made me some custom commands like logging taken medicine with the current time and date, adding an episode to the log of series watched, etc. I also plan on hacking together a brother extension that would send the page title and address to one of specific places in the outlines, but I keep putting that off.

          • clif@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Yeah, at the core it’s just a hierarchy of directories/markdown files with a WYSIWYG/autorender web editor but then they kept adding more and more fancy stuff : )