You need to list out your requirements. What do you want to do? Where do you need your data? Do you care about open source? Self-hosting? Do you have an idea how your content will be organized? Will you ever need to tap into it as data? Etc
Have you tried trilium notes? Not as hyped and polished, but does extraordinarily well IME.
I didn’t like obsidian’s lacking in attributes structuring/typing and the fact that it cannot serve over a web UI (for wherever you cannot install the heavy client or just to share notes via URL), and found trilium notes to be doing that perfectly, and much much more. Highly recommend.
Matrix seemed interesting right until I got to self hosting it. Then, getting to know it from up close, and the absolute trainwreck that the protocol is, made me love XMPP. Matrix has no excuse for being so messy and fragile at this point. You do you, but I decided that it isn’t worth my sysadmin time (especially when something like ejabberd is practically fire and forget).
I don’t think our views are so incompatible, I just think there are two conflictual paradigms supporting a false dichotomy: one that’s prevalent in the business world where “cost of labour shrinks cost of hardware” and where it’s acceptable to trade some (= a lot of) efficiency for convenience/saving manhours. But this is the “self-hosted” community, where people are running things on their own hardware, often in their own house, paying the high price of inefficiency very directly (electricity costs, less living space, more heat/noise, etc).
And docker is absolutely fine and relevant in this space, but only when “done right”, i.e. when containers are not just spun up as isolated black boxes, but carefully organized as to avoid overlapping services and resources wastage, in which case managing containers ends-up requiring more effort, not less.
But this is absolutely not what you suggest. What you suggest would have a much greater wastage impact than “few percent of cpu usage or a little bit of ram”, because essentially you propose for every container to ship its own web server, application server, database, etc… We are no longer talking “few percent” of overhead of the container stack, we are talking “whole new machines” software and compute requirements.
So, in short, I don’t think there’s a very large overlap between the business world throwing money at their problems and the self-hosting community, and so the behaviours are different (there’s more than one way to use containers, and my observation is that it goes very differently in either). I’m also not hostile to containers in general, but they cannot be recommended in good faith to self-hosters as a solution that is both efficient and convenient (you must pick one).
How does that compare to wallabag?
I don’t care […] because it’s in the container or stack and doesn’t impact anything else running on the system.
This is obviously not how any of this works: down the line those stacks will very much add-up and compete against each other for CPU/memory/IO/…. That’s inherent to the physical nature of the hardware, its architecture and the finiteness of its resources. And here come the balancing act, it’s just unavoidable.
You may not notice it as the result of having too much hardware thrown at it, I wouldn’t exactly call this a winning strategy long term, and especially not in the context of self-hosting where you directly foot the bill.
Moreover, those server components which you are needlessly multiplying (web servers, databases, application runtimes, …) have spent decades optimizing for resource pooling (with shared buffers, caching, event scheduling, …). These efforts are all thrown away when run for a single client/container further lowering (and quite drastically at that) the headroom for optimization and scaling.
That’s… a tool in the bucket for that. But I’m not really sure that’s the point here?
I don’t think containers are bad, nor that the performance lost in abstractions really is significant. I just think that running multiple services on a physical machine is a delicate balancing act that requires knowledge of what’s truly going on, and careful sharing of resources, sometimes across containers. By the time you’ve reached that point (and know what every container does and how its services are set-up), you’ve defeated the main reason why many people use containers in the first place (just to fire and forget black boxes that just work, mostly), and only added layers of tooling and complexity between yourself and what’s going on.
How about nextcloud with only the bare minimum amount of plugins? Filles alone is pretty snappy.
Pydio used to be called ajaxplorer and was a pretty solid and lightweight (although featureful) solution, but then they rewrote the UI with lots of misguided choices (touch controls and android inspired interactions on desktop devices) and it became so horrendous, heavy and clunky that I almost forgot about it. I wonder if they reversed the trend (but from the screenshots it doesn’t look so).
Aren’t they not the same thing at all?
Many communities went back to IRC, though, because Matrix still is a hot mess, and the most visible ones which didn’t (Mozilla, KDE, …) are not hosting their own Matrix instance but letting New Vector do that for them, which makes in practice a disproportionate amount of users and accounts be managed by a single organization. I do think it’s better than discord, but barely so.
Don’t ever bring this to the people in charge or you might be told “sorry for that” “but now it’s been fixed, deployed any week now” “you are a liar, this has never been true” and “it doesn’t really matter for the general case” either in the same post or few responses apart. Matrix has been in a permanent state of unstable mess, and the leadership disingenuous attitude made me lose hope that this will ever change. More people should start reading through the fanfare and superlative blog posts, which, admittedly is the thing they do the best and much better than the other projects out there.
Or, you know, just use key auth only and fail2ban. Putting sshd behind another port only buys you a little time.
I think you should give Trilium(Next) Notes a try:
it has the hierarchical notes structure that you are familiar with in obsidian
it has better ways of keeping things organized (attributes can be values or references, can be shared and inherited, which provides a flexible framework for having notes “types” as templates that can be extended, e.g. people vs. colleagues, businesses vs. companies, etc)
it has the concept of note hoisting (which lets you focus on a note and its sub-notes, so other projects/spaces don’t come in the way of autocomplete and placing references), and workspaces that builds further on top of that
it can be used standalone (local client/offline-only, like obsidian) but coupling it with a remote-server opens more interesting use-cases (synching, sharing notes with others by public URLs, one-user/multi-client editing) which gives the best of both worlds (local-first/online-first) and lets you access your personal notes on devices you don’t necessarily own (which obsidian doesn’t). The mobile app story isn’t great (it’s a PWA with limited offline capabilities at the moment), but isn’t worse than the alternatives either (I can’t really work and think long form on a handheld, no matter the editor experience, but perhaps that’s just me).