What self-hosted life notes/family journaling tools exist?
I've been kicking around an idea of creating a sort of a journal/knowledge base for my family. I've considered Obsidian given its features with linking, customization, and markdown document compatibility for future proofing, but it's not really designed to be…
I've been kicking around an idea of creating a sort of a journal/knowledge base for my family. I've considered Obsidian given its features with linking, customization, and markdown document compatibility for future proofing, but it's not really designed to be a cloud service, at least not in the way I'm thinking about it. Ideally I have something that lives on my server and then I can access that from my mobile and PC devices without having to sync files between devices. Things I'd like to track would include: Family/people pages (with short bio, important information) Travel journals Daily/weekly/monthly notes Information about our cars, appliances, home tech, etc. I suppose maybe I'm creating a sort of family wiki but I'm wondring if there is anything that is more focused on this kind of stuff that maybe I've missed. Any suggestions?
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Another way to explain what I'm trying to do is create a knowledge base is my life. Things like my personal history, documenting life events, organizing the various elements of my life that need record keeping. It's just for me, so other people don't need access to it.
Thanks for sharing
Good to know about the official integration thing
This would just be accessed and used by me
Yeah, you could say that. I like most everything about Obsidian except that it's mostly designed around using it locally.
Yeah, the idea is that if whatever app disappears that the content is still usable on another platform.
I'll take a look. Thanks for the suggestion
I don't think I've heard of that one, so I'll take a look
This project is really just for me and isn't meant to be published or shared. Just kind of a personal history and information tracking/record keeping among my family (wife and kids).
Haven't heard of that. I'll check it out
If future proofing is the priority, keep the source of truth as plain Markdown and treat the web app as replaceable. Store the files in a versioned folder, back it up somewhere else, and keep attachments in predictably named folders. Then you can change the interface later without trapping the family history.
I use Trilium Notes for this. Server and desktop app. Works great The desktop syncs to the server. Or it can run standalone
I'm not entirely sure I understand your needs, but I'll leave you with two options. Trillium Notes. https://triliumnotes.org/ It runs on your own server, and you can choose to save everything as Markdown in case you need to export everything in the future. If you no longer want to use the same app, just export everything and keep the Markdown files. It has a very polished web interface and also has an Android app which is actually a mirror server. Journey: On the other hand, perhaps I misunderstood the journaling tool thing, but there's https://journey.cloud https://github.com/Journey-Cloud/self-hosted Journey It's a journaling app with native support on all platforms; you choose where everything is saved. Whether it's in their application cloud (free and paid), on your Google Drive, or on your own self-hosted home server.
I tried several of what others have recommended and landed on Outline. Its been great, OAUTH included in the base version, multiuser sharing, functional MCP client, etc
I just put my vault on OneDrive so it’s in a secure cloud. If that still doesn’t work for you, maybe Anytype?
Have you given haierkeys/fast-note-sync-service a try for your use case?
I use obsidian for this purpose, I host it on a simple Debian server on an old pc, I use sync-thing to keep my phone, pc and server syncd and I use google drive as backup so editing stuff on my phone can delete notes from my pc and server but they only one way sync to google drive so there will always be the ones I delete still there as a backup. Currently trying to find a better and less creepy alternative to google drive though.
A couple to consider https://github.com/usememos https://github.com/fccview/jotty
Suggest you review Obsidian with Ghost publish integration: - OBS hyperlinking very powerful - .md is very interoperable and can be consumed everywhere by many other tools - Notes aspect tells me you need daily journaling which OBS is just great at - Publish only what you want to Ghost via frontmatter flags Which part of cloud service do you need? You could better define the features on the cloud side. Does your family need to publish in the same environment, or are they read only? At end of day, my family has no time to interact heavily with me. We share calendars, that's about it. THe rest of the time they want to consume my info Photos - Immich (and they can log in and interact w/mobile, desktop) Trails - Wanderer - we share hiking trails with friends (ditto to immich) Thoughts - My (subset of) thoughts go out via Ghost to family If they need to interact they can use their own tool to publish to my ghost instance. All protected via cloudflare
It sounds like you want to reinvent obsidian, so just go with obsidian. Across the many ways obsidian can be synced there are definitely ways for it to work. The paid obsidian service is exactly what you want just not self hosted sadly, but the couchdb and sync plugin should do almost the same thing as instantaneous syncing with a bit more set up. There’s also at least one other version that I’m not familiar with though but I’m sure you could find it with a bit of searching.
Why not spin up a wordpress site secured behind authentication? This way you can access it from anywhere, your family members can make new entries and edits too, and your backup can be restored on another local server or vps in case of failure? The Gutenberg editor that comes with latest versions of Wordpress is easy to use. Your can get your non-technical family members to use with minimal learning.
Docmost - best I've found so far
If you already have Nextcloud installed it would be worth having a look at the following: Nextcloud Notes: For fast easy on the go notes. Nextcloud Collectives: For a Wiki notion like feeling on top. Also as some in here mentioned Obsidian: I've saw these days that there's now an official Nextcloud app for Obsidian sync.
I tried chasing this down for a while using some Markdown tools. None of them were as usable ans obsidian, and I wanted it to be web based. I ended up just going with BookStack. Early on I liked the enforced structure of shelves->books->pages as it meant I didn’t have to setup and link everything. I don’t love it in retrospect, but it’s useable by the other members of the family. I’ve got a script that outputs the contents to PDFs for backup.