[Solved] I want to ditch Nextcloud notes

Tiritibambix@lemmy.ml to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 41 points –

Hi.

I'm curently using Nextcloud notes for its convenience. I use the app on my phone, and the webui on my pc.

I'm willing to ditch Nextcloud as a whole, so I want to replace my note taking habits.

I've tried Trilium, which lacks an Android app, and I feel the WPA makes the UI unpractical and hard to read.

I've tried Joplin, but it lacks a webui.

Are there other alternatives I've missed out ?

Solution: I ended up finding Flatnotes. It's dead simple to run and to use, has markdown and WYSIWYG, and the WPA is flawless.

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Logseq can be launched as a desktop app and in a web browser and has both iOS and Android apps. Official sync is a paid feature but there are other options (e.g. Syncthing).

That's what I use.
Logseq with Syncthing for interoperability between my PC & smartphone.

How does syncthing compair to git. Im using git currently but sycing to mobile has a tendancy to break

No problems at all.
I setup a 3-way folder sync between 3 nodes:

  1. Desktop (Linux)
  2. Android
  3. VPS

VPS is always on, so even if my smartphone is not connected to the internet when I log off of my desktop, the smartphone automatically fetches the updated folder from the VPS .

I haven't used git for this purpose but I'd think the process would be tedious. Manual commit, push, fetch ...

Also, I tried to set it up with Nextcloud but I couldn't get Android Logseq to use the Nextcloud folder for some reason. I don't remember the exact issue.

I might have to try syncthing then im sure i can use git for versioning my notes from just one node and retain that feature. I use logseq so on desktop git syncing is automatic.

Second (or third?) Logseq. Bit of a learning curve, at least for me and overall it suits me much better than Standard Notes, which I was using previously. Standard Notes is now way overpriced compared to what it initially was, so great timing as well. One gripe I have with Logseq is you are unable to export queries as a page or text doc. It definitely has its quirks, though overall it's great. And if anyone wants to share how they organise pages, tags, etc. feel free!

I want to avoid syncthing for my notes as I've read some people experience issues with duplicates and conflicts between versions.

Since it just uses markdown files in a directory, You could use anything to synchronise the state. E.g. nextcloud desktop or git

Obsidian

I quite like Obsidian too. Markdown note app that has desktop & mobile versions. You can create templates and have it so that a new note using a template is opened automatically when you open the app (e.g. for daily notes). It also supports a lot of different community created plugins.

I sync across android & linux via google drive for free, otherwise Obsidian also has a paid sync feature.

While there seems to be a selhosted version, I can't log to it with the proprietary android app.

I think you can just sync the Obsidian Directory with any cloud service or syncthing and it should work fine.

yup, this is what I do and it works great. just be careful if you add plugins that store a ton of metadata that changes a lot (or logs) because that can lead to some sync conflicts and you might wanna exclude them. I've just been ignoring the sync conflicts tho and haven't had issues yet so maybe you could do the same

Came here to say the same thing.

At the end of the day you simply can not beat unreasonable effectiveness of plaintext.

Anytype - An open-source Notion alternative.

org-mode/org-roam in Emacs, on Orgzly mobile, synchronization via git.

If you’ve used Anytype, can you share your experience? I have an account and I’d like to move over some of my Notion content, but haven’t had time to try it yet.

Just a note taking app with support for different types of notes, templates, fields on notes for metadata etc.

I mostly use it to write down my ideas down and log tasks.

No, I haven’t used Anytype, I know it as an alternative to cloud proprietary Notion/Obsidian

I started on a similar journey (escaping from Evernote rather than Nextcloud), and ended up on Silverbullet run at home and accessed over Tailscale. It is a bit of a different approach and has a small upfront learning time. I love having all my notes as reasonably plain markdown, so if I ever want to change my solution, my data's in an easily movable format - for example changing to Obsidian would not involve any import/export.

+1 for silver bullet. Love it. PWA works great. And it works offline I believe.

That looks really interesting, I'm fairly happy with Joplin but SB looks like how I’d do things if I wrote something like this.

Notesnook is not ready for self-hosting yet, but it’s up next on their roadmap. I’ve been trying it out in advance and it seems to work ok. The only issue I have with it is that it logs you out of the apps way too often.

Org-mode, with Orgzly on Android, sync via a WebDav server, which you can also mount on you PC and literally use any editor to edit.

Filestash also has a Orgmode web-ui and works on top of WebDAV.

Thanks for going back and updating with your solution - I'm gonna check that out.

The WebApp for trillium works great compared to the desktop app. You won't tell a difference

Are there certain features you've grown to rely on?

I use plaintext documents with markdown. There's a markdown editor for the web. Markor is an excellent Android app. Take your pick of a number of text editors with markdown.

Just need a nice webui and a nice android app. But I need both.

Joplin via Dropbox (free account) is effortless and painless. I used to sync it via nextcloud and it always gave me issues. It has an iOS, Android, and Desktop app so why do you need Web Ui?

A webui can be extremely useful on, say, a work computer with strict install policies, or if you're borrowing someone else's machine and need to look something up (maybe you're fixing or installing something on someone else's computer and want your notes easily accessible).

There are other note apps that can sync with Nextcloud. I settled on Quillpad because of its checklist functionality, though admittedly it's not perfect.

I've been using the most recent fork and it was good, but as I said, I want to ditch Nextcloud as a whole.

As someone who is looking into having a nextcloud server running in the near future, may I ask why?

Overbloated, slow and there's always a problem needing to be solved

It can be slow out of the box, but if you set up locking/memcaching (I use APCu+redis), it's way faster.

I get not wanting to mess with it though. I was at that point until I got more free time. Now I have mine running smoothly, but I had to put in maybe 10 hours to iron out all the things, although that includes upgrading the host OS because it had gotten old. If I had a full time job, I'd probably just pay for a fully hosted NC.

Do you have any guide on this to put me on tracks ?

Most guides are for the initial setup, so if you are not starting from scratch, YMMV.

This is the one that put me on the right track, but it's for older version of Ubuntu, so it's not exact step-by-step because it's old.

https://bayton.org/docs/nextcloud/installing-nextcloud-on-ubuntu-16-04-lts-with-redis-apcu-ssl-apache/

A more updated guide to the same basic setup, but i've never used it so I can't vouch for whether it is accurate:

https://www.knthost.com/nextcloud/nextcloud-memory-caching-with-apcu-and-redis

(edit: I just checked and it is accurate, but it just hand-waves away the redis setup. which is not insignificant)

Here is the NC docs page.

https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/configuration_server/caching_configuration.html

Note: If you are short on RAM or want the simpler version for home/lan use, you can just set up APCu and get a decent performance boost. I got better performance with both: APCu for file locking along with redis for memcaching. But setting up both will be a bit more complicated to setup and maintain.

Six months ago, I was exactly where you are, but updating host OS, then updating Nextcloud to 27, and setting up memcaching worked great for me. Get everything updated before doing the setup, though, or you'll break shit and have to troubleshoot.

I'm ditching my nextcloud as well. It's just way too bloated. I wish they offered a stripped down version with only the features you want to use.

It is odd that there’s no web app for Joplin given that it’s written in TypeScript. It’s such a commonly requested feature, I wonder what the problem is.

Memos might do the trick for you. There is a 3rd party android native app, but I found the PWA to be quite good. Markdown is stored in a single sqlite db file though, if that bugs you.

I use memos already, but for another purpose. This app is great :)