So I’ve tried almost ANY app for my notes and every one of them has some limitations.
The best experience I’ve had was using a forum! A simple forum like this: OBS Forums. I just open a new thread when I want to write about a certain argument, and I can post each time I want and posts are grouped by pages. I can use rich text, markdown, insert images, videos.
Basically this is what works for me, but I could use a forum only for a certain hobby of mine, I would like to use it for everything but of course I can’t just post every thing of my life in a forum.
Does someone knows a way to have a “personal” forum or an app that resembles one, or pehaps how to turn obsidian into something like it? Also please notice that I don’t want my content to be published on the internet or hosted somewhere that is not on my computer.
It’s an odd little notebook, but you can create topics and subtopics in it that are a little like posting in a forum. I used it for a little while and found it to be a great tool for creativity. Although it’s implemented as a web page, you can run it entirely locally on your hard drive without ever touching the internet.
Of course, it’s been a while since I’ve used TiddlyWiki, and I use Obsidian nowadays, so your mileage may vary. Might be worth taking a look at though.
In Obsidian, “grouping by pages” can be obtained by using a page tag each time you want to start a new topic. So say you want to write about “Argument”, you open a new page with that name. If then you want to write something connected to it, include a reference ([[Argument]]) to it in the new note. If you open the “Argument” note, the “Backlinks” pane will show you all these related notes, including the content if you do not collapse the result to just the name of the related note.
The added benefit over a strictly hierarchical structure is that here, notes could also be connected to different “threads”.
In its most simple way, that could be a single note where the additional “answers” are appended as you go. When each new answer is separated by a heading:
All headings can be collapsed/expanded to have an overview.
Through the Outline page, the entire “thread” can easily be navigated.
Through the Outline page, the “answers” can be easily rearranged. This is not possible in a forum.
That would have the limit that once the file is too big I would have to create another note like “Argument page 2”. Like this forum goes on endlessly, most forums instead have a fixed number of posts per page, that would be what I like.
Did you explore the limits of how many content one page can fit to keep it workable? If you indeed would systematically need large pages that affect performance, then indeed this cannot work. Still, cross linking to a continuation page would be very easy and hardly break navigation. Note that also the forum does split long threads into pages.
Yes, I would need long pages. That’s why I asked for something similar to a forum.
I tried tiddly-wiki as suggested by @Craig, but honestly it’s a to steep learning curve and I wouldn’t like lose much time. I would like a practical solution.
If we compare towards a forum or discord server then each note could be a category or channel. Each bullet point on the top level could be a new post/message, and if you indent a list item a level it’s a response to the previous level (I don’t really like the reply of a discord server). At this level they’re all rather similar I feel.
However, the folding capabilities I feel is better in most forums and Obsidian, versus a discord server. Only Obsidian is truly meant for going back and editing/correcting earlier text, although it can to some extent be done in the other two.
Rearranging stuff is yet another area where Obsidian is a lot better than the other two, and I feel linking is also slightly better within Obsidian.
Finally, the backup and synchronization options is far better in Obsidian than in the other two.
So all in all I’m kind of curious as to why you feel a discord server is the better choice for you?
And all of the above is native stuff within Obsidian, and there are some outline plugins which I believe can even further enhance the outlining experience…
