So, when we drive up to Georgia or South Carolina from Florida, there’s a point on I-75 where the Jesus billboards come out. Many of them are the usual “Babies have heartbeats” variety, but there’s also the following:

• “Have you decided yet … Jesus” which we always render in an exasperated voice, aka “OMG have you decided yet? Jesus!”
• “Go ahead, let go. I’ll catch you - Jesus” which we always respond to with “WTF Jesus just reach down and grab me, you’re RIGHT THERE!”
• “Jesus is in control” with mysterious Russian tanks and American soldiers.
• Zombies and Jesus for … reasons.

Thanks to COVID and work from home and smartphones and Teams/Zoom, I’ve gone from an hour commute each way to a constant stream of meetings, texts, emails, IMs, etc. that must be addressed immediately, from 8am to 6pm. I don’t think the “back in my day” folks fully understand how much more people are asked to do now. I once obliterated an older colleague when he complained that youngs these days don’t put in half the hours he used to. I was like “Um, you used to go to the print office and wait four hours for prints to come out, take them back to the office, proof them, then take the documents to the courthouse and file them in person. In the same time, I’m responding to 100 emails, reviewing 20 documents ON MY PHONE, conducting 3 conference calls, listening to 2 coworkers’ breakdowns, and drafting, reviewing, printing, proofing, and submitting the documents you used to sit and wait for.” To his credit, he said I was right and I never had a problem with him again.

All of which is a long way of saying that, sometimes, more often than I would like, I can’t just “go to the restaurant” because of time or because I’m no longer commuting. For all their problems, the apps mean that I’m eating fewer frozen pizzas and more poke bowls and salads.

Sort of, but the notes aren’t organized in the filesystem. So you point to a location where the files will live and it creates, e.g., journals and pages folders into which journals and pages are dropped. Each is one flat directory (which seems like a scaling problem after a while, but I’m nowhere near that being an issue).

Because logseq doesn’t do freeform markdown by default, you cannot just open any arbitrary markdown file in it. Or, rather, it will give unpredictable results if you do. If you’re used to a free-form editor that organizes files hierarchically, that is going to seem very, very strange and may not be what you’re looking for. My preference is to spend zero time organizing files and organizing text, so logseq’s choice to make both a non-issue is an absolute godsend. Open the app, start typing. It’s great (for me).

Logseq is really, really close. It’s basically a page I can start writing on, forcing minimal organization through bullets but otherwise freeform. Backlinking, plugins (meh), plain markdown. It’s just so good. It doesn’t require me to do anything other than write. It used to be entirely browser-based, syncing through a github repository. They could have released a self-hostable version of that and I would have been over the moon. Or, alternately, a self-hostable version with non-local storage so I could store my notes on a notes server I control. But they went with the app + sync service route. Understandable but sad.

So I just rolled my own sync through a git server and it works fine (other than iOS, which requires a maddening setup, but that’s not logseq’s fault).

I looked at Zettlr once or twice (thank you for mentioning it). Obsidian makes me crazy with all the UI fiddly bits and configuration. I tried. Oh how I tried. But it just didn’t work with my brain. (It’s the exact same reaction I have to KDE – there’s just TOO MUCH and it sets me off in unproductive directions, and that’s not a criticism of either project as such.)

A while ago, I started keeping a personal library/journal/etc. using Logseq. I could fire up Logseq in any browser on the planet, connect to my notes, and jot down whatever idea I had in the moment, all in a FOSS journal that stored my notes in plaintext markdown.

Then … I don’t know what happened, but 100% of their effort went into building an app, which then required them to build a (paid, proprietary) sync service, all rather than just releasing a self-hosted build of the web interface so I could spin up my own note-taking server. (Please don’t suggest alternatives; I’ve probably tried them all.) To “preserve privacy” and promote “local first”, I had to download an app and rely on a closed-source backend to do something I could trivially accomplish on my own. If my platform doesn’t support the app, no notes, unless I rely on the increasingly unmaintained web “demo” that does exactly 100% of what I need from the service, despite dozens of features missing compared to the app version.

But the kicker is that I cannot install things on my work computer. At all. Not portable apps, nothing. I will get a phone call from infosec if I even try, because we are a heavily regulated company. So if I have a bright idea at work, a thought I want to preserve, find a good article, etc., I have to go to another device. I have to interrupt my workflow, change my focus completely, and, probably, lose half of what I wanted to capture.

The thing is, I don’t think they’re data farming. I think they’re running a really good project! Users were begging for an app. “When are you going to release an app?” was a common question forever, because a whole generation of dingleberries cannot be bothered to go to a website that does the same thing, faster, and better than any app.