[Natales]

For having been around for so long in its most basic form, it's pretty exciting to see an entire renascence of knowledge tools and methodologies.

Every few years I get bitten by the bug and I go on a hunt of what's out there. Most recently, some colleagues were very excited about Roam Research [0], so I took another look, and I was very pleasantly surprised to see that, among many great tools, the good old TittlyWiki [1] had evolved with the times, and now you have "distributions" tailored to apply the Zettelkasten methodologies.

I settled on Drift [2], and over a weekend, I moved hundreds of notes I had spread in several formats over to a small set of Drift files. I even moved my entire personal web site (mostly audio and foodie geeky stuff) into it, with close to 80 tiddlers by now [3].

Porting was phase 1. The fun part where the methodology becomes really powerful, is breaking down the monoliths, just like you would do with app modernization into microservices. Taking longer blog posts and decomposing them into discrete, reusable components that can hold meaning under different contexts. The more I looked at them, the more I could find I could break them down into more discrete ideas. And I'm sure I'm not done.

Several weeks into it, I've become more organized than I had been in years, and I realize it helps me structure my thinking, and how to connect ideas.

Regardless of what tool you choose (and there are plenty) it's a great moment to look at what this methodology can do for you.

[0] https://roamresearch.com/

[1] https://tiddlywiki.com/

[2] https://akhater.github.io/drift/

[3] https://ramirosalas.com

[Xavdidtheshadow]

For any readers looking for a slick, local-first app, I've really enjoyed using Obsidian: https://obsidian.md/

[Hasz]

I like the app, but cannot commit to a closed source solution.

I do appreciate the local-data first approach, but that is table stakes, especially for something as personal and sensitive as a knowledge base.

The "free for personal use" is a rug that can be yanked anytime without warning. After having a number of closed source but otherwise free pieces of software do this, I do not want to climb the learning curve, nor do I suggest anyone else do so.

[dana_janssen]

I've recently played with an open source alternative called foam, which builds a similar experience to Obsidian but inside a VSCode workspace. It's a new project, but under active development, and is already pretty close to the base Obsidian experience of notes + backlinks + graphing https://github.com/foambubble/foam/

[lethologica]

I can highly recommend Obsidian. I avoided Roam due to it being yet another cloud based platform (unless that has changed since it first came out?) My knowledge base is far, far too valuable to have it go up in smoke if the company ever collapses. I'm very much loving Obsidian. It just gets out of my way and lets me write.

[riidom]

Beside the knowledge-base aspects of obsidian, it is also an awesome markdown editor, for two reasons:

a) it blends source-view and render-view very well, I almost never use the actual render-view. Almost as good as Mark Text or Typora, and I wish VSCode would move in that direction either.

b) its BSP-style layout lets you make best use of your screen estate

c) (more of a gimmick, but I love it): When you want to change the theme, it randomizes the order of themes in the list. For any new vault I just pick the one that is on top, and have a different style for different projects.

[jasonv]

I tried obsidian but when it starts it doesn’t open a window. I posted to the forum and got a shrug. I try every once in a while thinking an update might fix it, but I obviously don’t know if I could use it even if it started working.

[CryingSofa]

IIRC only the AppImage works properly on Linux. Snap and Flatpak give trouble for many users.

[botvader]

Been using obsidian for my digital garden, found it to be very good.

[murrayb]

I recently moved to Joplin from Evernote. I think I use Joplin in a Zettelkasten way (though no doubt it would upset a purist) nonetheless I find Joplin a good fit and it is interesting that I independently arrived at a similar (though less complete!) solution. Now I have to think about how much of that completeness I go back and apply to my existing x thousand notes... :)

[ibn_khaldun]

Drift looks very nice. TiddlyWiki is interesting. But other than the name, one thing that I question is why it gives visitors the impression that they can edit posts. I know what the traditional concept of a Wiki is to facilitate collaboration, but is there a way to disable this for private instances?

[Natales]

I see why it can be confusing. The funny thing is that you can edit posts, but you can't save them on the server. In fact, you can save a local copy of a site built with TW, but it becomes your own copy. You can go to the settings and hide the save button. Not sure if you can totally disable it thou.

What I like about this model vs. others is that it's entirely self-contained in a single file. As long as you have a browser that supports Javascript, you can work with it. And as much as I like modern tools like Obsidian, TW pretty much guarantees me that if I save 1,000 tiddlers on a file (up to 100K are known to be possible), 20-30 years from now, as long as HTML and Javascript are still capable of being ran somewhere, my entire knowledge base will be there.

Heck, other than some Unicode issues I have, my entire site is happily in archive.org as a single, snappy file right now...