Comment by flkiwi
1 day ago
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).
I essentially have that with the templates I'm using with Silverbullet. Organically developed metadata based on categories that don't actually exist anywhere.
I'll spin up a Trillium instance soon and see if it's still not for me (but I uh won't approach it with that mindset).
Does Silverbullet support amending existing instances with the updated metadata when modifying the template? Does it let you extend templates from templates (e.g. a "Colleague" is a "Person" + some specific properties like "Department", "Joined on")?
One way to go with your experiment would be to create an inbox¹ where all the new notes go (or use a day note² if you want calendar support) and a side notes hierarchy called "Collections" with subfolders like "Persons", "Companies", … each having their own Template³. That way, when you are in a new note and need to create a reference to a note that doesn't yet exist, it will pull from the available templates and create the new note from it. The template note under "Collections" will retain the backlink to all instances. Just like that you got yourself something as capable as Tana's supertags⁴.
¹: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/attributes.html ²: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/day-notes.html ³: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/template.html ⁴: https://tana.inc/supertags