Comment by erganemic

Off the top of my head, all PKMs make trade-offs on discoverability, portability, maintainability, and ease of recall. Broadly, "discoverability" is how likely you are to stumble on something you'd forgotten (just recently, I found a file in my "taxes" directory listing all the documents I needed last year, which was a big help, and which I did not remember writing), "portability" is how resistant the system is to a company shutting down/project being abandoned, "maintainability" is how easy to keep your system consistent with its principles (including inserting a new note), and "ease of recall" is how easy it is to find something if you know you're looking for it.

When thinking about a lifelong PKM, I feel like I value portability more than most; something highly tied to a particular company like Notion is right out for me, and I'm leery of stuff like Obsidian or even org-roam, since even if the entries in those systems are just text, I just know that someday the logic that ties them together will stop being developed/maintained and I'll have to migrate.

I feel confident in directory structures and text files as long-term mediums though, and so JD is appealing to me, but its maintainability (specifically the cognitive load around inserting a new note) is such a stumbling block for actually creating content for it. Not to mention the primary thing it trades maintainability off for (ease of recall) is almost entirely solved by search functionality, leaving discoverability as the only benefit over just chucking everything in a flat "notes" directory.

I do something PARA-adjacent now, and I might just commit to that, although denote is interesting as an Emacs user for a slightly more portable tagging- and search-based option.