Free and Open Source Software

I used Evernote for a long time but, you know, non-FOSS things happened. Then I tested several open source alternatives and I finally switched to Joplin. I am really happy about it. I didn't remember why I discarded Trillium, maybe because I can't share my notes with my Android device.

Looking at this today, here are a few reasons for why it may not be adopted on a wider scale.

Looking for their web clipper extensions

• I see no extension in the Firefox store. The source code is at GitHub. Most won't bother.
• I see an extension for chrome. Yay! However, in the permissions section, for those privacy minded, it appears to request permission to "read and change all your data on all websites." Had this been a Firefox extension this would mean it can see all of your passwords and anything you see on the Web. This is probably also true for chrome but I can't state it as fact. Perhaps someone can explain why this isn't a red flag.

If you want to sync between different devices, it's great that it supports a sync server. However, how many users are going to self host a server? 1% or less of the population? For the remaining 99%... The website appears to be silent as to how to manually sync between two or more desktop computers manually. Maybe it can be done? I don't eat to be the first to try

Look at the details of the upgrade path. It looks rough going. And issues at GitHub reflect this . Take a look.

A single SQL lite database file hiddenly stores everything. This is scary for those of us who have lost our data on other SQL lite platforms like the darktable photo editor. SQL lite databases are supposed to be so reliable they say... Until they are not.

Markdown does not appear to be it's standard. That can be good or bad 😔
For me that might be bad because the more privacy friendly markdown web clippers might not work . I'll have to try .

That's a lot of friction to overcome. Not to mention the extent of cross platform support compared to logseq. Still, I might quickly try it just because of it's code notes and math notes. I could really use these. In fact I may only use it for those and use logseq for web and general knowledge stuff.

I hope someone can correct any misinterpretations I've made. Please feel free. I'm trying to like Trillium.

For whatever it's worth, this is the first I've ever heard of it (I thought you were referring to the IM client at first). It doesn't seem to be on any of the popular self-hosted software lists (like https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted).

I used it for a while and right up to the point I actually set it up to give it a go, I'd never even heard of it before. Definitely feels like it flies under the radar.

I loved the idea behind it, but a few points ended up sticking out so I ended up dropping it at some point. Namely, I didn't like the markdown editor much, plus it was very awkward to use on mobile (which, granted, is an issue with most competitors). I also don't like how it's dabatase based, vastly prefer using local markdown files. Plus, it's more of a personal thing but I came to prefer graph based implementations better than hierarchical ones. Still, really impressive project and I very much appreciate that it's open source and fully self hostable, not much in the way of competition there when it comes to second brain alternatives.

After exploring a few options, I've ended up on Logseq. Shame that one isn't self hostable, not fully anyway, since last I checked you still need to open a local folder even if you do host it yourself.

Ive tried out loads of thees knowledge base apps, but I always end up coming back to org-mode and org-roam. Once I integrated everything into Emacs, its hard to swap out to something else.