this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026

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Open Slopware Appreciation Post / Why do FOSS notes projects suck so bad? (awful.systems)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by jaschop@awful.systems to c/notawfultech@awful.systems

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Dear god. Why are note-taking projects such a magnet for slop bros?

I'm on a bit of a quest to build up some self-hosted services for me and friends & family, partially because Ad- & AI-infested big tech slop was making me sick and also to become a better sysadmin. General requirement was notes available anywhere and decent editing on mobile.

I was about to rip my hair out, when every session for weeks digging into options ended in frustration. Every project with somewhat decent features had some meh aspects and became worse the longer I looked. And there are so many of them. You can drown your self in "Best FOSS Note-taking App in $(date +%Y)" listicles. Here's a list of over a hundred projects.

I suspect it's a bit of the shopping list problem. It's such a basic idea, that every ambitious clueless dev has it once while picking a hobby project. But note-taking also definitely has a place in toxic self-optimization / hustle culture. Some of the more developed project strike me as that.

I won't mention every basic note-talking project with a CLAUDE.md that I stumbled on, but here's some of the more disappointing lowlights:

Joplin main developer was one-shot. Added agent instructions to the repo this year and some provisions for his personal vibecoding rig to .gitignore. Also it's not a bug if the AI chat button is visible even if AI features are disabled, because how would people find out about the AI features then?
Notesnook seems okay-ish, but they're part of the mall ninja club. Business partnership with Kagi & Tuta.
Standard Notes was the least suspect to me. Later found out they Copilot-Review all of their PRs. (same as Notesnook btw)
I even considered going with a self-hosted binary of Obsidian. They don't get instant-disqualified by promoting themselves as AI-anything. And if you don't have a project you can trust, you might as well throw yourself at the most established option and pray.

I was running out of places to look for alternatives, when I remembered Open Slopware. You can guess how shocked I was, when note-software made up one of the biggest sublists in there. Through the shortlist of recommendations I ended up looking at Flatnotes. That project might be just enough notes for me.

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[–] hrrrngh@awful.systems 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I don't have any good answers but I've been experiencing a similar thing with Obsidian plugins (and I guess this goes for plugins in other types of software too).

Before, there were a lot but you could look through all the new ones to find something interesting. If you search for something, you'll probably find 1-3 candidates and you can research all of them and decide which one to go with. The people who made them often have some kind of clue what they're doing.

Now, it is a literal deluge of slop. I've heard the excuse that it's low stakes and doesn't really matter so you should lower your expectations since plugins are a good way for vibecoders to share with the community, but these plugins are usually just terrible or have glaring, horrible issues that no person would ever make. There is a big difference between doing something wrong or with an outdated API or not following best practices vs. dropping code into your project that you have no idea what it does. It doesn't matter if something is a bad idea, people just go off of their chatbot's responses which make them think whatever they're doing is fine. Also really common to straight up duplicate functionality that already exists or take a shot at implementing huge, over-ambitious systems for no reason. A badly programmed plugin will malfunction, a vibe-coded plugin could literally wipe my drive.

I'm probably going to make a plugin at some point that just filters other plugins with some automated criteria based on Open Slopware, like claude/agents.md or commit authors in the repository, or requested AI code reviews on Github. This is on top of trying to filter the thousands of horrible quality AI-focused plugins that have overtaken everything and colonized every noun and verb. I'm a little worried people are going to be mad, so I think it should be presented as neutrally as I can instead of just calling it the slop filter 9000.

Different context, but in a vibe coded video game mod I was reading through in ilspy, they looped through every single loaded assembly looking for a function with the right signature and then called it. It SAYS which function you should call in the documentation. That's just begging for the game to crash for no reason once you install enough mods. Insanity.

[–] ebu@awful.systems 2 points 2 days ago

unsolicited opinion: you might find yourself getting a lot more sealions on any ai slop filters you publish if you present neutrally. better to just rip the bandaid off, call it the mega ultra slopkiller 9000 director's cut, and mock the promptfans in the readme. giving them too much space to be obnoxious might prove regrettable. relevant: the jqwik saga

[–] rook@awful.systems 3 points 2 days ago

To be extra grumpy… seems to me that most note-taking apps have always been a bit shit, and coding assistants have just pushed them over the edge. All vast electron apps with terrible sandboxing as far as the eye can see.

I quite like the linked-text-document model for various things, and it would be nice if someone could make an editor that a) didn’t use electron and b) could do something like html export. Oh, and c) supported plugins that don’t get unrestricted access to my entire filesystem.

Not even any closed-source options manage that, though. Everything is just bloat and security vulnerabilities as far as the eye can see.

[–] rako@tarte.nuage-libre.fr 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Still haven't found a better combo than Markor + Syncthing. I briefly tried doing notes directly inside Deltachat, with a specific profile just for notes, as messages to self: it works but isn't extractable.

If you're happy going the Deltachat road I would humbly suggest a webxdc version of featherwiki, a fantastic wiki made for personal use:

https://git.sr.ht/~rakoo/featherwiki-webxdc

I hate AI with a passion so never use it in any form, and I try to use only tools that don't, but things might slip as you know

[–] nfultz@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago (3 children)

You said friends and family, does that mean orgmode or vimwiki is out of the running? I liked fedwiki back in the day but it had a learning curve. Never tried it on the phone.

Also to be fair to the FOSS options, commercial applications like OneNote or Google Keep also suck, and are somehow worse than I remembered.

[–] jaschop@awful.systems 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

They killed Google Keep btw. Not that I needed more reason not to tango with a corpo app again. All criticism here is based on failure to realize my utopian visions of spiritually pure notetaking.

The notes are just for me, but I was really hoping for a more conventional editor. No shade to emacs/vim enjoyers. (Heck, I use 90% NeoVim at work.)

[–] flowerysong@awful.systems 2 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Who is this "they" that killed Google Keep? In what way did they do so? The only thing I've found is that the Chrome app was discontinued in 2021 as part of the general push to get rid of Chrome apps, but that has no real effect on anyone's ability to use the service.

[–] jaschop@awful.systems 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

This apparently a reccurring April fools joke by @killedbygoogle on Twitter, that had me utterly punked.

[–] hrrrngh@awful.systems 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I honestly can't blame you because killing something called "Keep" sounds right up Google's alley.

boy that account did not like people clarifying it's a joke

[–] jaschop@awful.systems 2 points 3 days ago

My bad, I only had half-information from some screenshot. Don't really know or care what Google Keep is.

[–] schnoopy@awful.systems 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

org-roam and org mode are revolutionary. The combo makes a note taking and scheduling system you'll actually use.

Emacs has a client mode but non tech people probably wont like it. There's no good way to use it on a phone for example.

[–] theodoraward@awful.systems 1 points 19 hours ago

Obsidian got me like 60% of the way there but yeah, I was really just looking for Org-mode the whole time.

Orgzly + syncthing can get you a lot of the way there with org-mode on mobile, though I don't really carry a smartphone anymore so I haven't gotten a lot of mileage out of it. But yeah by the time you're suggesting syncing your .org files across applications using syncthing I feel like we're so far afield of "stuff that's friendly for non-technical users"

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 2 points 3 days ago

There should be a case study on how OneNote started out ok and just keeps getting worse and less usable every update. Maybe ms is using it as training ground for new project managers and it's been just a series of half-baked first attempts as updates since forever.

[–] jaschop@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago

Ah fuck me. He admittted he's using AI for development: https://github.com/dullage/flatnotes/issues/365

Notes apps man. They're cursed.

[–] grillme@lemmy.zip 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Silverbullet.md works for me.

I'm not sure if you were looking for recs or just wanted to vent.

[–] jaschop@awful.systems 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

It was on my shortlist before I settled on Flatnotes. Since I found out the AI stance of the dev there and encountered some technical issues... well I'm running a Silverbullet now.

It seemed a little too heavy on the customization front for me, but I guess I'll figure it out.

[–] grillme@lemmy.zip 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I basically just use it for text notes with no customization and it works totally fine for that.

I did have to learn about docker and caddy to make it available with a non self signed cert which was a little annoying but I don't have much of a tech background.

[–] jaschop@awful.systems 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

The SSL stuff is finicky, but I got a template that is quite satisfying now.

I got a wildcard cert using acme.sh (works with both Let's Encrypt and the API of my DNS registrar INWX), automated renewals scheduled with systemd. Internet facing proxy is Apache httpd, for every new service I just copy a conf template and update the URLs and ports. I can stand up a containerized service in 15min, provided it runs without issues.

[–] mawhrin@awful.systems 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

there's also nb, which at least doesn't contain claude commits.

[–] jaschop@awful.systems 2 points 3 days ago

thx. I'm thinking about making a PR to open-slopware once they're back from vacation. The non-tainted section is scarce enough and could use more entries.

[–] NightFantom@slrpnk.net 3 points 4 days ago

I recently started using logseq-og for taking notes, pretty happy about it. It lives as a bunch of .md files on your disk, with the option of autocommitting to a git repo I believe for syncing? Haven't used it beyond one pc yet. And it indexes them and has cross references and graphs and such

[–] nimble@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 4 days ago

Obsidian is not FOSS fwiw. So there's no way to know the kind of shit they use on the code