A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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That’s awesome. I need to migrate off of Google Keep. It’s the last Google service I use.
If all you need is a simple note taking app, I recommend Notesnook. It is free and open source and offers E2EE cloud syncing. That is what I used as a Google keep alternative. Silverbullet is good, but may be too feature-full for something as simple as a Keep replacement.
If it’s not self hosted, I’m afraid I don’t want to use it. It looks nice, though.
It does look like they’re working on self hosting, which is awesome. Their GitHub says it’s in alpha.
https://www.usememos.com/ is another option that's super light weight and self hostable.
Last time I tried usememos I couldn't figure out how you can export the notes, which gave me a bad feeling
reading the github issues it seems the developers are actively against it? stating that the data is in a database and easy to export that way. but my sqlite-fu is quite poor
except from that, i enjoyed using it
That looks really nice! I’m gonna try that out. Thank you. :)
What about maps? I can't seem to replace it.
I don’t know. I use Apple Maps. Probably not any better privacy wise, but I don’t know what is better that has similar features. I’ve tried Magic Earth and CoMaps, and they’re both promising, just not at the level that I’d be willing to switch to.
This looks like it could be an open source alternative to obsidian.md. Would anyone be able to speak to that?
It is. The differece is that Silverbullet is self-hosted and not in app like Obsidian. The basics are the same, Obsidian has a way bigger community and more plugins, Silverbullet is easier to extend due to using Lua. Lastly, Silverbullet has queries built in, in Obsidian you have to use Dataview. If you need a markdown-based note storing system Silverbullet is great. Obsidian has more bling and customizability, but is not self-hostable.
Obsidian now has a native query ability via the Bases core plugin. I've barely played with it though.
I like what I am hearing. I was a big fan in the beginning, but it developed to add more and more features and some breaking changes, and I decided to stop using it until the bleeding edge development slows down
What is the outlook regarding breaking changes in v2? Should I wait a bit?
That website scrolls funny on my Firefox mobile. Is that a sample of what to expect from the actual software?
Looks fine to me (Firefox 142.0.1 on GrapheneOS 2025081400 on a Pixel 8).
Bunch of ideas in this thread. Does anyone know of a good solution for reading text files (markdown) in a folder? I tried flat notes (too bare bones), An Otter Wiki (it was fine, but I couldn't get into it). I'll try silverbullet.
Obsidian does that. But I don't believe it's FOSS
Trying out typemill. Seems ok so far.
Edit: crap. Search requires a license.
VSCode with Foam. Or go old school with Vim Wiki.