Thanks a bunch for the detailed response! That community looks lovely, I joined and will hopefully be active in it in the future.

As far as physically writing, maybe big tech has already gotten to me but the idea of writing digital notes is much preferable. I’m sure I could definitely get more comfortable writing by hand and organizing in a zettelkasten, but for the moment I really enjoy markdown. Takes up less space, I can make backups, and I can do fun analysis with my notes. The other day I made a github commit-inspired graph of my writing frequency over time, and I don’t see a way I can easily do that with physical notes.

Obsidian is closed source - if I shift away from my current system I’d prefer something open source.

Out of curiosity, any ideas why so many people around FOSS/linux spaces recommend obsidian, despite it being closed source?

I do keep a physical journal on me, and I love it! It’s great for sketching, mapping out thoughts with others, and quick writing on the go, but it doesn’t fit this use case.

Given the volume of writing I do, I don’t think hand-writing is feasible. The last few years average out to about 2000 words a day, and most of it is done on computers where I can comfortably type for long periods, and much faster than I could write by hand.

In addition, I need something queryable. Beyond just a ctrl+f search across my notes, I embed all of my notes and store in a vector db so I can group by semantic similarity.

Thanks for the advice! I have been wanting to check out NextCloud for a while, I think this would be a cool project to explore it.

I find it convenient to be able to write notes on whatever machine I have with me at the time - desktop, laptop(s), or phone. If I only had one device I used, it would be easier to keep a backup on local storage. With multiple devices I prefer to have up-to-date notes on each device, and so I’ve leaned more towards remote storage and peer-to-peer file synchronization. This does add some security holes, but it’s acceptable within my threat model. Frankly, I’ve never used local storage across multiple devices because I don’t know how to do that, if it can be done with Borg but I will check it out!

Thanks a bunch for the suggestion, I will definitely check out Joplin’s E2EE syncing. I guess I should have been more specific; I’m looking more for a way to store and synchronize notes, rather than a tool to edit them. Given that my notes are all nearly all text, most of the time I edit notes using vim or vscodium.