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I'm checking out various "personal knowledge management" tools in a sandbox to see if it be an upgrade my ragtag collection of text file-based notes.
First candidate is #Logseq, supposedly "privacy-first".
How #privacy friendly is something based on Electron (aka Chrome)? Debatable, but then they also do this:
- Have "Send usage data" on by default
- Start with an example page that embeds a YouTube video, and accepts all cookies
tcpdump and mitmproxy go wild when starting the program.
Next up is #Obsidian, a tool I'm hesitant to consider because of the developers' view on open source. Hence, the source is not available except the obfuscated JavaScript that's ran by Electron.
Despite that, Obsidian itself only does a version check (which can be disabled) and starts in "restricted mode" by default, which disallows third-party plugins (but does still embed external content when asked to.)
There's some phoning home by Chrome but far less than with Logseq.
Color me surprised.
@[email protected] Huge fan of opensourse, but I do use Obsidian as my main notes tool these days. It's so pretty, just works, and while the core tooling isn't open, I have peace of mind that I can leave any time and move to any other text/markdown based tool.
That's a big win over other polished note-taking tools like Evernote, for instance.
I'd love to see open tools like Joplin get to the level of visual appeal Obsidian has.
@[email protected] That's definitely a big plus for Obsidian (and the current version of Logseq.)
Anytype hides everything away in a database blob that can be somewhat exported, but when doing it in Markdown format the "relation" metadata (think Dataview) is lost, where with Obsidian Dataview's metadata is just there in the Markdown.
Despite the misgivings I had about Obsidian it's looking like a very good option indeed.