Up to now I’ve been using Simplenote, which has a Linux client (but also Android & iOS) & supports live collaboration on notes. However, Simplenote hasn’t had a meaningful update for a long time, & it’s recently been behaving strangely, e.g. notes undeleting themselves, line duplications & undeletions.
Can anyone recommend an alternative? Spinning up an ownCloud/nextcloud instance just to use Joplin feels a little overkill. I stumbled across turtl, but the project looks abandoned.
You don’t need your own server to use Joplin. You can select a local directory to store your notes and sync this directory with Syncthing between devices.
I am not sure if this works with iOS though.
For note taking, Joplin is pretty good, in fact I went from Simplenote to Evernote (over kill and not free) to Joplin using Dropbox for the syncing (syncing is done by Joplin, so you don’t need a ‘syncing’ app) between my PCs, all Linux and my Android phone. Simple to set up and free. I do not use it as a Journal as that is extremely poor, but for notes, it’s perfect
Maybe Notesnook? There’s a free version and they also offer a payed plan if you need more options.
Notesnook looks really promising!
Joplin has multiple sync options. Other than Nextcloud, you can use OneDrive, Dropbox, and they have a subscription service as well.
Obsidian is another to look at, but you need to either pay for sync or bring your own sync (
though I don’t know that you can sync to mobile without using their syncedit: see below comment by @fossisfun@lemmy.ml that explains how to do it).I think it’s probably helpful to know if sync across platforms is important to you, and if so, whether you’re willing to pay for it. I’m not sure that there are really many alternatives to an app provided for free with free syncing - that costs money to provide and honestly I’d be a bit dubious about using a service like that.
You can select a local folder in Obsidian for Android and sync the folder with Syncthing. You can even revoke network permissions for Obsidian and it all works completely offline (Flatpak override:
--unshare=network/ GrapheneOS: don’t allow the network permission).This is my current setup, even though Obsidian is not FOSS. I like that it stores standard Markdown files in a traditional filesystem hierarchy, instead of what Joplin does with using Markdown files as a database. This means that with Obsidian I can use any text editor or any other Markdown app to access and edit my notes, whereas with Joplin I would have to export them first to standard Markdown and then potentially rename and reorganise all the files and their attachments.
