Hey folks! I’m completely new to Lemmy and still figuring out how everything works around here… But I’d love to share a project I’ve been building.
It’s called VOID (Versatile Open-source Infrastructure for Developers) - an open-source, local-first second-brain (note taking app but more powerful) application that combines the flexibility of Obsidian with the powerful organization of Notion.
Unlike many other tools, VOID is not just another note-taking app. It’s built with the idea of being a true second brain that you fully control. No vendor lock-in, no hidden cloud, no feature walls. Everything is open-source, customizable, and designed to adapt to your workflow instead of forcing you into someone else’s.
I’m currently building it with Rust, Tauri v2 and Vue.js. For certain plugins and configs, it also supports SurrealDB as a database.
check it out on my GitHub
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Awesome! I want more and better apps in this space. I personally don’t trust myself not to lose my phone, so I want to manually sync files to some trusted place, or preferably, have webdav/nextcloud for syncing the way some notes apps have it. It’s your project, so do what suits you, but that’s something that would push it to the top for me.
this looks cool!
no hidden cloud
Shots fired at Notesnook.
Why is this better than zim?
I didn’t even heard about zim before
It’s great! Don’t reinvent the wheel
Why not just contribute PRs to an existing project?
You might want to highlight what differentiates it from Obsidian, except being open source. Just from looking at the page, I don’t know what it means to have organization capabilities from Notion?
Thanks, i’ll rework README in the near future.
Yeah, the readme says stuff that don’t mean that much. Sure, all FOSS and no cloud but WHAT DOES IT DO??
What’s wrong with just notes in markdown in vim or helix?
Nice rendering of headings, bullet points, checkboxes, code blocks, images and so on. I know there is something available for vim if you are using a terminal emulator that supports displaying images, but as far as I know besides a language server for markdown helix can’t do that. If there is something I’d like to try it
Amazing apps, but not for my use cases
Looking good!
Slightly off-topic, but with all the craps that’s going on with Github, ever consider having your projects on Codeberg instead?
can you tell me in short what’s wrong with GitHub? I totally missed it
MS bought it and is folding it into their “AI” division
I saw you picked SurrealDB, what has been your experience with that so far?
I really like SurrealDB. It has amazing compatibility with rust + tauri and can be used in file mode with rocksDB. For my usecase it fits the best. I love static types)
Url viiiiiideo is broken
Strange, on my pc it works perfectly, while on mobile it not working. I’ll check it
What’s the difference compared to Trilium?
Russian text in the video makes me very suspicious…
szmer.info, isn’t this a polish anarchist istance?
Least racist liberal
Yeah, I’m from Russia. Is this a problem?
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I come extremely hard to trust a russian, especially taking into account my personal life experience and circumstances. Ultimately, I wish more people were more careful, especially when it comes to a system to store sensitive information. The basis of trust has been breached by whole nation, so it has to be earned by every single member of that nation.
At the same time, I cannot see even a word about the retaliation for the crimes the nation continues to commit each day: only requests “please finance me”, using the western platforms and western infrastructure — which seem to be quite convenient, isn’t it? In that circumstances, I can see such project to have some risk, even for simply self-hosting, because careful review of projects can be hard even for projects with lots of eyes, and there is already a track record for injections being planted in FLOSS projects1.
This has to be mentioned: my issue is not with you personally. You might be a nice person, yet to me you are an anonymous trying to hide his origin, and failing at it.
The basis of trust has been breached by whole nation, so it has to be earned by every single member of that nation.
- WTF is this collective punishment nonsense? Replace “nationality” with “race” (keeping in mind that a person typically doesn’t choose either and it’s decided by who their parents were) and you should be able to see the issue here
- I hope you rather quickly uninstall almost all popular FOSS software from your devices, because almost all of it contains sizeable contributions from russian citizens and I don’t think you’ve individually verified their intentions
Understood. You could use p2p sync without our/selfhosted server. I didn’t interested in anyone’s data. That’s exactly why I decided to fully open the source code of the app for all who interested. And I’m not trying to hyde my nationality, I just want to all who looks at my project/talks to me feel comfortable without need to translate every my message
By the state, not by the nation.
What I can see clearly is that nation overall supports the warfare, and the annexation of neighbouring country — either silently, or loudly. This sentiment was there for even pre-full-scale invastion time period, even in anti-putinists circles (the “Crimea is not a sandwich” statement supporting that1).
There is an extreme minority that is against war, though they are against war in principle, and make no action to support the warfare to any side.
There’s almost no civil society of any kind left in Russia, so it’s impossible to say if a nation overall supports or opposes the warfare. People with an active pro-war or anti-war stance are minorities, somewhere in the 10-20% range, and neither are allowed to speak up (interestingly, quite a lot of pro-war social media influencers are in prison right now for daring to speak up against corruption in the army or similar). The vast majority of people are just going about their days. Does that technically help with the war? Yes, I guess, it drives the economy, people pay taxes etc, but then the same can be said about an average american, brit or german right now - I don’t see them blowing up munitions factories (that directly supply the ongoing genocide).
@Transhumanist Depends. Do you stand with Ukraine? https://github.com/vshymanskyy/StandWithUkraine/
I prefer to stay apolitical. VOID is an open-source project meant for everyone.
@Transhumanist Funny how all silent supporters of genocide “prefer to stay apolitical”. So yes, this is a problem.
You know, I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but it’s funny how you don’t see these reactions to American open-source projects, despite the US government’s explicit support for the genocide in Gaza. Why do you think that is?
I don’t think that’s the case.
In what regard? Are you saying you do see American FOSS projects held to the same standard as Russian (and Chinese) ones?
@princessnorah I see plenty Americans daily loudly voicing their support for Gaza and their disgust about the regime which makes this genocide. But russians? Never. They “prefer to stay apolitical” like this fucker here. Again - think about what putin wants. He is jailing people for holding a plain white paper - because silence is what he wants, and fucking “ordinary russians” and their apologists are happily delivering. SAY SOMETHING! That’s the whole poit.
I don’t think there’s a law in the US that criminalizes pacifism [yet] (with actual prison time as punishment)
It’s easy to blame russians for not resisting the war when you don’t have the prospect of spending 7 years in a russian prison
There is a complex sociopolitical history as to why it’s likely Russians aren’t as vocal about these sorts of things. So no, I don’t think it’s as simple as calling out any Russian that does anything ever, and deciding to give every USian the benefit of the doubt.
As well, I’d like to point out that being vocal on the internet is not the same as making a material difference in the real world.
Please don’t force people to take a stand because 1. he’s Russian and what he say may have repercussions for him, 2. this is not the place for discourse like this; and even if it was, I think it’s important to prioritize persuasion rather than accusation, and 3. He’s just trying to share something he’s enthusiastic about. Just let the guy share and maybe redirect the anger to more vocal supporters
The genocide perpetrated by Israel and the West? Is that the genocide you’re silent about?
@3abas I’m definitely not silent about that, are you? Fuck your whataboutism. Another typical russian thing.
I get that some people may see it differently. Still, my goal here is simply to share a tool I’m building.
A new competitor to Obsidian other than Trilium and Logseq would be awesome. I have to ask are you vibe coding? The length of the project and extensive use of emojis in the read me makes me question… I wish you the best. If you get a server container and an iPhone app I would seriously support it.
I tried to make README less boring using emoji) And I’m pretty confident in my Rust and Vue skills, so not using chatGPT(or any other AI tool) in my work). I wrote all of the VOID by my hands.
Awesome! Just asking based on posts I frequent
Also iPhone app would be released after successful VOID open beta
Unlike many other tools, VOID is not just another note-taking app.
no offense. but if I got a penny for everytime Ive heard this…
no offense. but if I got a penny for everytime Ive heard this…
yeah, I know) but I try my best to make this project as perfect and useful as possible
for everyone who walked this path of finding (or making) the perfect note app. there is no general perfect. everybody will find eventually a workflow which works - and evolves.
but I whish you all the best and that you may built an app which inspires many. :)
My like 10 year old, way out of date, note taking app for Owncloud that I forgot about just got a PR. So I guess perfect is different for everyone.
exactly.
Is it a notes app? Second brain doesn’t mean anything to me, and I don’t understand what it does from your README. The name is also confusing. What does it mean by open source infrastructure?
I wrote a blog article about creating a second brain some time ago. It’s meant mostly for programmers, but the concepts hold true for other people as well :) https://blog.sewera.dev/second-brain
Yep, it’s just powerful notetaking app
Second brain and powerful note taking app just smells like somebody trying to make joplin but with AI assistants, I almost skipped your post because of the way powerful stopped meaning abundant and complex.
Second brain is a much used term really. There are plenty of second brain apps, it’s not some made up term.
the idea of being a true second brain
It’s good that it’s built with this idea, but what is the actual implementation of this idea? What features make it «a true second brain» that other «second brain» apps (obsidian and hundred other note taking apps) don’t have?
I did a bunch of research into second brain/zettelkasten apps (that is to say, apps that support note taking with note interlinking and rich text) earlier this year, and I couldn’t find a single app in the category that’s (1) FOSS, (2) stores notes as .md files natively (Logseq will import/export to .md, but it’s not native), and (3) is cross-platform in some way (for my purposes, I need it to be on Linux, Android, and Mac OS, or have a usable web app). Even the ones that get close all have some kind of gimmick to them, or are super ugly or slow or otherwise hard to use.
If Void can get those three nailed, and do it in a usable way, it will fill a very particular and exciting niche.
You can also try VSCodium with Foam, I think both are FOSS. You can read a bit about this setup on my blog: https://blog.sewera.dev/second-brain
Nice, thanks for that info. I do use vscodium, so that could work.
Did Logseq change? It used to write directly to .md files.
Unclear, at this point, and it’s been a while since I looked.
Doesn’t logseq store the notes as
.mdfiles? There is a directory named pages which contained them last time I checkedIt’s been a while since I read the details, but as I recall it stores them primarily in a database. The
.mds are mirrors or something, maybe?In any case, it looked to me like they could get desynced pretty easily.
AFAIK it stores the notes as
.mdand an index in it’s own proprietary format, which is mostly an issue because the index won’t be encrypted if you encrypt the notes.
This is a mandatory comment about Emacs’ org mode since
.orgfiles are extremely similar in syntax to.mdand can be interconverted extremely easily.This is great intel, thank you.
If you deem
.orgto be sufficient and want to use Emacs1 itself, there is an extension for the zettelkasten method of note taking that you might find useful.
1: Despite originating with the Emacs community,
.orgfiles are recognized by many (most?) IDEs, but I’m not sure if extensions are regularly ported to non-Lisp editors.
Considering that one of your requirements is already using
.mdfiles, which is a format pretty common… maybe a combination of different apps on different platforms would work? Specially considering that mobile UIs are likely gonna have different requirements than desktop UIs.One approach I was considering was using neutrinote on Android (which is a relatively simple but functional no-bullshit markdown editor supporting cross-linking between markdown files) and VSCode / VSCodium on the desktop (which also supports cross-linking, and I think has some note-taking related extensions), or maybe zed, or whichever editor you might already be using that can support markdown. Then use syncthing for the sync.
However, I have not yet really gotten into it, primarily because second brain/zettelkasten note-taking in general has never really fully clicked with me, most of the time when I take notes I just use them as a scratchpad / temporary storage… without much of a proper organization … just a note meant to be scrapped as soon as it’s acted on. Often I just use tabs in my notepad app, without really saving them to a file.
That is something I hadn’t considered, and well worth considering. Thank you.
FWIW I use Obsidian on desktop and Nextcloud Notes on mobile (along with Nextcloud sync for, uh, syncing) and it works great. All this and a TB of storage only costs me about 5 EUR/mo with Hetzner.
I know this won’t go over well here but I don’t really care that Obsidian isn’t FOSS, because it’s just a frontend for markdown files in folders. There’s no lock-in whatsoever, and it being FOSS or not makes no functional difference.
I broadly agree with you, but I would still prefer to have another option so that if/when Obsidian goes the Notion route, I have another option to jump to easily.
Me too, but I figure a clone will pop up very quickly if that happens, and I’ll already have an easily portable folder with markdown files.
My big concern is that, since there’s no substantial Obsidian competitor now, there must not be any money in it, which would slow down the arrival of a new clone if Obsidian ever platform-decay’d. Yes, the fact that it’s easily portable is a good bulwark, and that’s why I currently use Obsidian; but to make a comparison, it’s been twelve years since Google Reader died, and there isn’t yet a successor that I’ve found which offers both opml & last-read syncing and unlimited feeds, unless you can self-host.
I guess I’m saying, I’ve been on this ride for too long, I kinda want to get off of it.
The Google Reader comparison is excellent, that one still hurts… I think RSS usage has simply declined tremendously overall though, as opposed to PKM which is still going strong (I think/hope)
I think it’s probably still a subculture, like RSS was. I hope both of them have a resurgence, though.
