Joplin doesn’t seem fully FOSS.
Logseq seems nice but I won’t be able to hit it at notes.mydomain.works
What are good options? Ideally for keeping recipes and things
Honing in on the “recipes” par of your post. I’ve really enjoyed self hosting mealie for those.
I wrote a post a while ago comparing various wiki and wiki-adjacent offerings. I’ve settled on DokuWiki as it’s easy to host. The UI is dated (though I don’t think it’s outright ugly). The vanilla experience is a bit bare-bones but there’s a built-in GUI for searching and installing plugins. The only pain point I can foresee is upgrading and long-term management thanks to juggling so many plugins. If the newest version of the base software doesn’t play nice with a particular plugin, or if a plugin stops being developed, etc.
The ui is dated? Lol what?
What about trillium, is it not fully open source? I’ve been using it for a while and I think it’s amazing
I’ve got Docmost running now, and fairly happy with it.
It can be improved in some ways, but I might just make those fixes myself in a PR on their project
I didn’t understand what you meant by Joplin not being “fully FOSS”, so I went looking for the license. Is really quite strange. Basically they’ve used a “personal license” for some parts and the AGPL for the rest. That’s… annoying.
This is surprising… And completely unmanageable from a user’s point of view. In order to find what licenses it has I need to browse folder by folder in the code, instead of, you know, having a list of licenses and where they apply.
On a quick look I saw only two places with a special license, one is the example indicated by the developer of the server package which is an odd license that gives me pretty bad vibes for my lack of legal knowledge but probably is ok? It might even be reasonable, but what is the server package? Is that the server I self host? Or the server for paid Joplin? Then I found some other code that was an MIT license… But how deep do I need to go searching in the folder structure to find all licenses? This is irritating. I guess I gotta consider changing to something else then if only to be able to know what license I am using.
Also… What is the legal implications of using a software than upon any update might suddenly add a weird random license? Would that mean I am expected to keep checking all foldernevery time they change something?
I built a fully open source multi-user live collaboration notes app, self host with docker, serve at root or a subpath, has an android, windows and Linux client app, plus the usual web UI.
Very promising! If I understand correctly though, I can’t even create a note in offline mode to sync later? That would be a bit of a deal breaker for me personally. I couldn’t see much details on e2ee either, but maybe I missed that. Anyway, really well done!
Yeah, it’s entirely online only. And no e2ee, just relies on web server encryption like SSL.
Thanks for the extra details! I mean, it does make sense the way you are guiding the use case for the project. It’s just not my use case :)
In any case kudos for the job you’ve done!
Do some parts of go-notes have proprietary sources? I can’t find the source for the native Android client in the repo or instructions on how to download and build it from elsewhere.
The android, windows and Linux app use propriety parts, the android app is a web view app built in android studio, the Linux and windows apps are just electron apps. I have all the source code I used to build them on my pc, but I didn’t create a repo for them. go-notes is fully open source with the backend in go, the clients are just extremely basic frontends.
Edit
Just gone and checked and all the electron apps source code is in my repo, so the Linux and windows apps you can build yourself from the code. I can upload the android code from android studio if you want as well?
It’d be cool if your app was installable from F-Droid, for which the sources have to be somewhere under a free license. I most likely won’t be able to contribute code but would indeed like to look through the sources, and maybe help with translation if the code supports internationalization.
Cool. I’ll add the android source code to the repo when I get chance 👍
Nice, I’ll check it out
So I’m going to try Docmost https://github.com/docmost/docmost
It seems to be the closest thing to what I’m looking for and under a GPL3 license
+1 for docmost, I’ve been running it at home for nine months now. Very happy with the performance and feature set
FYI to everyone, SSO tax.
you could selfhost AnyType, then if all devices are connected to the same WiFi they sync via P2P.
I find it even better than Notion in fact, because you can define any objects then do whatever you like with them.
What it lacks is the math stuff from tables unfortunately.
I don’t think the anytype apps are foss.
What it lacks is the math stuff from tables unfortunately.
It also lacks reminders, alerts, and notifications. I really wanted to like it when I tried it out, but this was a huge deal breaker for me.
Maybe take a look at Outline. (Not affiliated, but I host it for myself.)
I also host KitchenOwl, but mostly just as a grocery list.
Affine
Maybe silverbullet will suit you better? It’s very flexible and programmable. The licence is MIT
SilverBullet is absolutely solid, with a simple and elegant architecture. SPA app, offline support, flat file backend, etc. Highly recommended.
I like NocoDB though the self-hosted version isn’t as complete as their hosted version. For my needs though it works quite well.
Do you want database features? Or just markdown style note organization?
I’d be fine with just a good clean Markdown editor, if it has other bells and whistles that’s a bonus.
I’ve recently gotten really into HelixNotes, which I sync to my phone via Syncthing. And the developer is on Lemmy. They’ve been pushing a lot of updates so I’m excited to see where it goes.
That looks really great, It doesn’t seem like I can host it at my domain though.
Looking for something I can just run in my cloud and eventually share with family members etc. so we have a joint space for notes and things
Visual Studio Code, with a syncing folder, a markdown plugin that suits you, and Claude Code to sort your notes for you. :-)
Obsidian?
That’s not Open Source right?









