[anilgulecha]

A meta-discussion on note-taking: I see Show HNs of new notetaking software once a month or so. It's like a blog engine: everyone gives a shot to writing one. (I wrote a note-taking app a few years ago).

But none of these will ever touch the Evernotes of the world. I think the big step ahead here will be decentralization. Today, my notes are at the mercy of Evernote/OneNote/Keep.

Some newer options like StandardNotes [1] are taking this head-on. But even here the focus seems to be on easy import/export, which is a positive action that will have to be taken by the user to hold on to their data. One thing we know about user behavior is they they will not do anything that has friction.

A decentralized storage engine (like IPFS[2]) would be the ideal storage, which would allow copies of notes to automatically exist, and the user would not even have to worry about their storage provider going away.

Another point I want to make is that most notes don't have to be private.. anecdotal-ly speaking, most notes would benefit from being public, in that others will enhance whatever data/research you're collecting. So the next generation of note-taking will be about majority public, and a few private notes.

If anyone's interested in discussing this in a bit more detail I could setup a mailing list to discuss a bit more on the potential architecture of such a system.

[1] https://standardnotes.org/ [2] http://ipfs.io/

[notheguyouthink]

> which would allow copies of notes to automatically exist, and the user would not even have to worry about their storage provider going away.

How is that true? Not citing it's not, just asking.

In my understanding of IPFS, longevity of something is just a byproduct of it's popularity. If you're writing unpopular notes, then it would inherently have no longevity, right? Ie, if no one else has read your note, then when your storage goes down so does your note.

[diggan]

Well, it's not true-by-default (in IPFS at least) but you could easily model applications to make it true.

One way could be to have a more cooperative-like application. Let's say you join the cooperative by signing up to the application, and everyone agree to automatically help seed each others notes.

Another way could be to have small cooperatives inside the application, based on groups/organizations. So you sign up, apply to an group and everyone in the group help seeding each other.

Yet another way could be when you sign up, you'll just seed your own notes. However, if you pay 1 Euro per month, the maintainer(s) of the application will help you seed it. Or combine this with the group-idea and have groups announce their re-seeding possibility on the network, and pay the group.

Neither of the ideas are perfect and serve just as examples of what could be possible.

Btw anilgulecha, I would interested in participating in a discussion about it, and you might want to raise it as an issue on https://github.com/ipfs/notes, lot's of people who care about the same thing there.

[anilgulecha]

Right, peers can be added to your notes as a simple paid service, thus making storage a simple commodity you pay pennies for, with no lock-in (peers by different storage providers).

I'll setup a mailing list tonight. For those that want to join, please shoot an email to anil.verve @ gmail.

@diggan: ipfs/notes repo seems to be a discussion place for the protocol -- I'd wait until we can come up with a draft spec before starting a discussion there.