no-nonsense alternatives to online note taking tools?

Technology
1

i often need to have some sort of online service to be able to take notes with friends for roleplay threads or when we’re discussing topics

tools like notion and milanote seem really appealing but they’re stuffed with ai or just that corporate aura, anytime i look up alternatives they’re roughly similar too

the only issue is since i need this to work with friends, they do need to be somewhat dumbed down and not something that requires my friends to install something and set it up…

is there ANYTHING like this? maybe an indie web tool or something i can use?

2

Sure, any Etherpad or CryptPad instance; the latter requires (one of) you to have an account.

2 Likes
3

32bit has an Etherpad instance where you can create and host collaborative Markdown notes. If you don’t need any images, that should be more than enough.

I’d say you can download or copy these notes to an .md file after the fact and upload them to your own cloud provider.

2 Likes
4

oh! this seems neat. so it’s like a google docs sorta thing i’m assuming?

i can use this for the immediate use case i need it for, but just to be clear these are persistent right? like i make a new note on the 32bit etherpad instance and then as long as i have the link and the service is still up, i’ll be able to access it in most cases? or is it more of a temporary thing that deletes itself after a while?

also are there any services with a bit more organization? this is a single note which works for now but if you’ve used something like notion, the appeal is in the fact that you can have multiple interconnected notes which are better for organizing information, would be neat if there’s something like that too

5

Etherpad lacks user accounts, so documents might vanish after a while if nobody opens them. The exact policy is going to depend on the instance.

On CryptPad you have to make an account, so unless you get banned or something you should be good for a while.

6

There’s also Ellipsus, which I’ve started looking at for a collaboration/critique sort of thing. They’re strongly anti-LLM!

7

i see, i think cryptpad sounds better then, i’ll look into that, thank you

8

this sounds great, this seems like it’s more oriented as people writing stories though, no? i can use this for that use case ofc, but i’m wondering if it’s also flexible for when we’re just taking more wiki-like notes with more organization and less long form writing

9

If you want something wiki-shaped, why not an actual wiki? You can host one easily wherever there’s PHP, like an InfinityFree account, or else there are hosted wiki farms like Miraheze and YesWiki.

10

There’s also https://tiddlywiki.com/ if you want a local wiki just for you.

Or just use one big text file. One Big Text File - the What and the Why - Ellane W

11

for wikis, there’s also dokuwiki! if you want to use markdown (and choose the popular option), you can also try obsidian! there’s also qownnotes, which is also written in markdown!

if you want an actual wiki, using php, npm, and sql databases, you can easily self-host your own wiki (through means like wiki.js). it truly depends on preference and what you’re looking for!