Comment by flkiwi

1 day ago

As a longtime Logseq user who was sick of their app focus (it used to be a webapp!) and skeptical of their revenue model, I switched to Silverbullet a while back. It gets the basics right, and I can throw together some Lua and make it do whatever else I want. Plus there's a small but enthusiastic community developing for it. I have it set up in a VPS and it has brought back most of the magic of early days Logseq.

I inadvertently converted a longtime Logseq user to Trilium. In case you find yourself hacking too much around Silverbullet, or want to try something else, you should give it a try :-)

  • Trillium is great for some folks (and I would have no qualms recommending it), but I cannot stand hierarchical notes. That's a personal preference. I just want a big mishmash of notes all linking to each other. I don't want to manage a taxonomy.

    • For the record, it's not forcing you in this or another way, you can just dump all your notes on a flat level and later browse a network of backlinks in Trilium like other similar systems.

      Where I find Trilium to shine though, is when, after linking notes to one other for a little while, you realise "Well, I have a bunch of them that relate to `People`, others to `Products`, and, oh, a bunch of `Customers` as well, wouldn't it be nice if those were sharing the same properties?" (like People:{"Lives in", "Date of birth", "Partner of"…}, Customer:{"Address", "Contracts":-Multiple-, …}).

      When you reach that point you can use Inheritance (from the hierarchy) and/or Composition (from Template notes) so that all your "People"-like or "Customer"-like notes share the same properties, and you can then easily manage them as data, giving the same organisational and queryable power of a RDBMS without having to commit on a data model from the get go (it evolves with you as you refine the inherited or templated attributes).

      I think any sufficiently large collection of notes eventually reaches a point where it self-organises around a set of "Reference notes" more often linked to, and this is where Trilium saves you a ton of time instead of giving you more house-keeping work (good luck maintaining those "Reference notes" in sync with each-other in a system like Logseq or Obsidian, been there, done that).

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