> Since my PKMS is hosted online to manage notes across devices, I have multiple layers of security to ensure my notes are kept private. {Screenshot of a login form}
The biggest life hack I can recommend for a self hoster is to set up a VPN on your local network and then just never expose your services on the public internet unless you're specifically trying to serve people outside your own household.
Before I did this I was constantly worried about the security implications of each app I thought about installing or creating. Now it's not even worth setting up auth on a lot of simple services I build because if someone is able to hit their endpoints I'm already in deep trouble for many other reasons.
rafram · 21m ago
The downside is that if you’re on a two-week vacation and your home network/server goes down on day two, there’s probably nothing you can do until you get home. If it’s hosted online, you can count on that 99.99…% uptime and SSH access no matter what.
vhanda · 12m ago
I think what they meant is that if it's hosted online / home-network, only allow access to all services through a VPN. Wireguard is relatively easy to setup, and you can configure all your services to only be available through wireguard.
Ever since ssh almost got backdoor-ed, the only thing "exposed" on my servers is Wireguard, which is UDP based and therefore harder to know if it's running. SSH also goes over wireguard.
jauntywundrkind · 16m ago
Ssh exposed on a non-standard port, with root disabled, using key-based auth should be pretty non-controversial.
The security through obscurity (non-standard port, no root) are both kinda silly but why not.
That said, with awesome services like TailScale, it's pretty hard to get locked out of your network. TailScale is so so good at "just working".
sabellito · 47m ago
For single page web apps I use pagecrypt [0] and just publish the html file (with inline scripts and styles) as public files.
Good point. I also use my PKMS as a CMS for my blog. Might just split out the services and go this route.
mutoyoru · 57m ago
> Obsidian was a great tool for me personally for a long time. But I felt frustrated when I wanted to access my notes on my phone while on-the-go and saw that I had to pay for this feature.
I'm using Syncthing [0] to sync my vault between devices. On my main PC, Syncthing runs constantly in the background. Say, if I made a change, and want to send those changes to my phone, I open the application on my phone and let it fetch the changes. It's not perfectly smooth, like Obsidian's own integration, but I prefer this instead of setting a Git repository. Also, the files don't stay in a remote server.
Or you setup a Couchdb and the self hosted live sync plugin.
Although the data will reside on a remote server in this case.
Saris · 16m ago
Syncthing is a lifesaver, it's such a useful tool!
There are also several Obsidian community plugins for sync, I use Remotely Save via WebDAV.
MSFT_Edging · 41m ago
I've been meaning to switch over to syncthing. I currently use insync for google drive syncing on Linux and it's basically instant and constant. I can make an edit on one machine and in the time it takes me to grab my laptop, it's been synced. That said, using google drive which I don't want to do anymore.
It’s $4 a month to sync Obsidian notes, for anyone wondering.
galleywest200 · 28m ago
This was news to me, so this must have changed recently, as I have been billed more than that ever since I signed up.
I looked at my account, and I am charged $10 but it seems they automatically moved me to a "Plus" plan that has more storage. So no complaints from me really. Either that or the $4 plan is new. [1]
The $4 only comes with 1GB of storage. I would recommend the $10 for 50GB if you use images in your notes.
It's a good price but still feels wasteful if you also run/pay for nextcloud or similar.
vunderba · 1h ago
Good article but as a heavy user of Obsidian (and previously Evernote), I would offer some counterpoints:
> After some mental gymnastics weighing if I should continue with Obsidian, I found solace when asking myself "Can I see myself using this in 20 years?". I couldn't. The thought of cyclically migrating notes from one PKMS to another every 5 years, as I had done from Evernote to Notion to Obsidian, made me feel tired.
In point of fact this is actually an argument IN FAVOR of Obsidian. While the editor might be proprietary - the notes themselves are just standard markdown. If somehow all the copies of Obsidian magically disappeared off the earth tomorrow, I could easily switch over to Emacs org mode, VS Code, or literally anything else.
> Obsidian was a great tool for me personally for a long time. But I felt frustrated when I wanted to access my notes on my phone while on-the-go and saw that I had to pay for this feature.
Again, a little bit odd considering that the author is technically savvy enough to write an entire PKMS but didn't seem to consider that you can just check your markdown notes into a git repository and sync with the native android/iOS Obsidian app on a mobile device. All my notes sync up to Gitea hosted on my VPS and it works relatively seamlessly.
I'm glad the author had fun. Personally, I'm very happy with Obsidian and the plugin architecture has made it easy for me to extend it where necessary.
caconym_ · 1m ago
> In point of fact this is actually an argument IN FAVOR of Obsidian. While the editor might be proprietary - the notes themselves are just standard markdown. If somehow all the copies of Obsidian magically disappeared off the earth tomorrow, I could easily switch over to Emacs org mode, VS Code, or literally anything else.
100% this. The reason I started using Obsidian in the first place is that it's built on the exact directory structure and file formats that I was already using to manage my writing and notes, and if Obsidian goes away for some reason, that won't change.
williamsss · 1h ago
Thanks for the feedback! Agreed Git can be used to sync your notes. Its a great solution for those comfortable putting their notes into a Git repo like Github. I wasn't comfortable with that however.
Currently vetting a way to sync my database files with my markdown files on my laptop, so it functions similar to Obsidian. I enjoy Vim too much to work constrained to Directus' markdown editor!
JonChesterfield · 36m ago
Git is decentralised. You can sync between laptop and phone directly, no third party server required.
achierius · 51s ago
To be clear, GitHub is centralized, but Git is not. You can sync between laptop and phone directly with Git -- no third party server required.
e28eta · 49m ago
What about git makes you uncomfortable?
I saw that you didn’t want to use a 3rd party provider, but why not stick a git repo on your VPS (which you are trusting with your data today) and use that to coordinate syncs between your client devices?
I expect my PKMS to evolve and wouldn't rule out a self-hosted Git server if I find it's a better option long term.
exe34 · 1h ago
> The thought of cyclically migrating notes from one PKMS to another every 5 years, as I had done from Evernote to Notion to Obsidian, made me feel tired.
I guess he hasn't tried org-mode yet.
rcarmo · 29m ago
Reads like a mix of valid concerns and a plug for Directus, which is sort of fishy.
Either way, like many others, I use SyncThing to sync my vault, and routinely edit it with vim, so Obsidian is just one comfortable shell that can (relatively easily) be replaced.
Sytten · 1h ago
I really don't want to critisize OP since building stuff for yourself is always a good mentality. But lets be realistic, 1000$ over 10 years is nothing.
It will always cost more if you consider your own time for maintenance long term. Obsidian is one of the most consumer friendly business for note taking out of there, they are not VC so the Evernote comparison is unwarranted IMO.
SOLAR_FIELDS · 1h ago
FWIW, I’d be more concerned about the implications of the company having my notes in lieu of the pure cost perspective. But the thing is, you can avoid that entirely too by implementing your own sync
misnome · 17m ago
FWIW unless they are outright lying this is a choice, one of the choices when setting up a vault is E2E that you have to enter whenever setting up a new sync, but they are really clear that if you lose this password you are at the whims of your own backups.
They do also publish the “verify the encryption steps” for this.
Of course, depending on your threat model this could be insufficient, but then you probably wouldn’t trust obsidian in the first place.
para_parolu · 1h ago
And implementing local sync for obsidian is just running on docker container
hartator · 1h ago
I think the author point still stands though: Obsidian won’t probably be here in 20 years.
no_wizard · 42m ago
I’m a time traveler from 2046 and I hate to break it to you but it’s still running strong.
Couldn’t avoid the computation panic of 2038 but it got by
MissTake · 38m ago
Neither solution is guaranteed to stick around for 20 years.
As we’ve seen before, it takes one VC investment to change a source available license into something not so friendly and forks are never guaranteed.
TiredOfLife · 54m ago
Can I have those 1000$ if you think that is nothing?
harvey9 · 29m ago
Sure, but only in installments over the next 10 years and in exchange I need you to provide a sync service for my notes.
OlivOnTech · 1h ago
OP's main arguments to build their own PKMS are:
- cost (feature or maintenance)
- migration because it won't exist in the future
But their solution is to depend on directus, which can lead to the exact same issues. To my eyes, they just added an extra step...
Can I ask how you created the image at the top of the article? I really like it.
vunderba · 1h ago
I noticed it too, 99% chance its gpt-image-1 generated.
williamsss · 45m ago
AI image gen
gbraad · 1h ago
I used git to sync a work related repo, but now use remotely-save with WebDAV (nextcloud, with base set to /Notes). No cost for sync and still access to the ecosystem of Obsidian.
horsellama · 1h ago
fwiw, on mac/ios you can put your obsidian vault inside icloud directory and have a “free” cross-device sync feature.
bspammer · 12m ago
I had the bright idea of symlinking $HOME/.local to an iCloud directory once. About a week later it got completely deleted. No way to restore, or any indication of what happened. Luckily I had a backup with another provider, but I will never trust iCloud again for anything that’s not on the golden path (e.g. photos)
zikduruqe · 1h ago
Hell, you don't even need obsidian. Just create a bash function
> But I felt frustrated when I wanted to access my notes on my phone while on-the-go and saw that I had to pay for this feature. Obsidian charges $8 a month to access the same notes across multiple devices.
Errm, no? Obsidian sync is optional. I pay for it to support them, but my main vaults are all synced by iCloud, which was auto set-up by Obisidan during initial setup on my iPhone.
On the Android side, any service which can sync files can work, I assume.
Note: Yes, I use Obsidian on my phone without sync, all the time, and it syncs.
layer8 · 1h ago
Not practical if you want to also sync with non-Apple devices.
misnome · 14m ago
Then use the git-sync plugin, or many of the others mentioned here.
bayindirh · 1h ago
I think any app which can sync in the background can automatically sync things? Dropbox, Moebius, PCloud, Google Drive?
My Office vault lives in a separate cloud service, and it works?
layer8 · 19m ago
My understanding is that on iOS your only non-paid choice is iCloud, and iCloud doesn’t reliably sync to non-Apple systems. To clarify, the use case here is that you have an iPhone but also non-Apple systems, which is a fairly common scenario.
Saris · 14m ago
TBH that sounds like a better reason to get something other than Apple systems instead of changing all your apps to work around Apples bizarre limitations.
ollien · 1h ago
I wrote my own CLI tool for notes a few months ago (https://github.com/ollien/quicknotes). A web interface with proper rendering is something I thought about, but didn't pursue because I just know my UI skills aren't up to the task. Directus is a really interesting compromise!
williamsss · 49m ago
This is just the sort of tooling there should be more community around.
You can do it so easily with AI coding tools. I'm not a frontend dev, but now I can whip up something decent looking in 10 minutes.
hartator · 1h ago
Interesting that storing images is not something solved yet.
If you watch the animated gif, he is still using a third party service to store that graph.
I also think people to tend to like Markdown mostly because it’s plain text. The added benefits of that preview view is minimal. Like my gut feeling Markdown is popular 90% because of it’s in an accepted way to do plaintext and only 10% for the added formatting.
chrisweekly · 44m ago
> "The added benefits of that preview view is minimal."
In relative terms you may be right... but subjectively, having grown accustomed to Obsidian's live view in editor mode, I'd have a hard time giving it up.
skydhash · 59m ago
With plaintext, it's very trivial to add a script that put images in some location and build the link to that.
Markdown is great because you can easily add structure while typing compared to other format which have a more extensive markup format. I prefer org-mode because what Markdown can do, but also more extensive capabilities if you need so, but there's not a lot of editors for it especially on mobile.
bayindirh · 1h ago
Obsidian can automatically ingest files and store them on disk while giving links to it. My personal vault contains many kinds of files living in the "Attachments" folder.
> Markdown is popular 90% because of it’s in an accepted way to do plaintext and only 10% for the added formatting.
For me Markdown allows me to write and format text at the speed of thought. Added bonus is that it's readable with "less xyz.md" or anything which can render text.
vunderba · 1h ago
Yep. Obsidian strikes a good compromise of automatically copying attachments into a relative subfolder for the note and then linking them in the MD file:
Also makes it trivial to run a note through a static site generator and publish online.
damir · 1h ago
I believe tiddlywiki stores PNGs as base64 strings, so image is always there.
Yes, the file can grow large with many images, but it's a single file containing everything... even scripting!
Tomte · 1m ago
If you run the node.js server version it can handle images properly, as separate files. That also gives you the practical ability to use many large images and videos.
bayindirh · 1h ago
Yes, it embeds all attachments as base64.
TiddlyWiki is great until you want to add a structure to your Wiki. I was using it like mad, then I found out that linking pages took more time then writing notes, and I pulled the trigger and moved to Obsidian.
knlb2022 · 32m ago
I've built a couple for myself so far; the most recent is in zig (sqlite extension that treats markdown files / frontmatter as virtual tables) and it's lasted me. I plan to rewrite it soon to adapt to how I've been using it :)
Sounds like something I would use. A demo gif in the readme would help understand what it does faster
dmje · 59m ago
I just don’t have any of these worries with Obsidian. I pay for it because it’s great software and needs support. The sync is amazing, totally solid. The data is wherever you want that data to be. It’s just MD files. You can adapt the tool to be whatever you want from a PKM system - massively complex, with some kind of dataview hell, or just some files in a hierarchy. You can use plugins or not use plugins. You can build your own. There’s no lock in. “Migration” isn’t really a thing - it’s some files in a folder system. It’s as future proof as it can be.
I mean go nuts and roll your own if you want, but really, what’s not to like?
Trasmatta · 55m ago
> Obsidian charges $8 a month to access the same notes across multiple devices.
It's $4 actually, for the normal plan that works perfectly well for most use cases. It's also end to end encrypted, which is great. And it's not just about syncing for me, it's about a backup solution for the notes.
> I started to have concerns about the longevity of the plugins and app itself. Some of you may remember when Evernote aggressively limited free users to 50 notes, many users migrated their notes elsewhere. I was one of those users.
The great thing about Obsidian (in comparison to Evernote), is that everything is just a plain text markdown file on disk. You can open those files in any app. If Obsidian goes away someday, all your notes can continue to be edited in any plain text editor. Sometimes I open notes in VS Code, because there are certain things I just prefer writing there.
williamsss · 40m ago
Glad to see they have improved their pricing. It was 8/mo paid for a full year or 10/mo paid monthly last year when I decided to build this.
Does anyone know of a tool that can e2e + collaboration (or in other words: notion but e2e)?
jszymborski · 57m ago
Kudos to the author for scratching their own itch.
People in a similar position might be interested in Joplin, which is indeed FOSS, and has lots of sync options. I personally use SyncThing, which keeps things free, but you can also use a number of other free cloud providers. You can choose to encrypt your notes to protect your privacy.
AlienRobot · 15m ago
I'm not saying AI is going to replace programmers, but it's been almost a century already and we still don't have a decent note taking app or even a todo list app and that's like the first app you learn to make. Maybe humanity just kind of sucks at this whole application development thing.
I use cherrytree currently, by the way.
SOLAR_FIELDS · 1h ago
The main thing being complained about here is that you have to pay for device sync. But instead of setting ups FOSS alternative like with a-shell and git you decided to… checks notes… build a less featureful obsidian without getting all the benefits of the obsidian ecosystem?
I’m all for doing projects like this as an intellectual exercise. It’s just that the motivation behind doing so in the article is a bit more “huh?”
williamsss · 1h ago
Yep fair point. I'm doing the project in chucks and writing about it. his written part notably unlocks the ability to use my phone. Currently vetting a way to sync my database files with my markdown files on my laptop as I enjoy using Vim.
Funny enough I had downloaded a-shell and experimented with it and going git based. But ultimately didn't want my notes stored through Github. If that way works for you, cool!
SOLAR_FIELDS · 1h ago
Doesn’t HAVE to be GitHub, git is git is git. You could host your own git server like a self hosted Gitlab if privacy is a concern (which is a totally valid concern! I share the same concern, I don’t necessarily want all of my inner brain workings available to GitHub). You could probably also figure out some clever way to encrypt the files too, I bet there’s a plugin for that. Then you could use anything you want without that worry
williamsss · 1h ago
You have a good point. I don't have experience hosting Git servers personally. Is it easy to run and maintain? I'll have a try on my VPS if it is.
riwsky · 25m ago
Heck, you don't even need to run something like GitLab. Owing to Git's design as a distributed version control system, a "Git server" isn't even really a separate piece of software—it's the same software being used in a different way. Details @ https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-Setting-Up-... , but you basically just need to `git init` somewhere on your VPS that you can later ssh to and add as a remote a la `git remote add origin username@yourvpsserver:/srv/git/project.git`
misnome · 11m ago
The only limitation here is that (on iOS at least) the git plugin on mobile cannot do ssh, only https.
(This is at least 1+ years old info, might have changed)
matrss · 28m ago
In a single user scenario where you don't care about a web interface (and its associated additional features) for your repository you can literally use any server that is accessible to you via ssh and has git installed as a git remote for your repository.
vunderba · 1h ago
I do agree with the author and others that I also wouldn't feel comfortable storing personal notes on Github. As I mentioned in a previous comment - you can use "git" without Github by hosting an instance of the open-source Gitea service.
My concern with this approach would be I've read through Directus' codebase and can understand it. With a self-hosted Git server like this I'd be worried if shit hit the fan and corrupted my Git files or stopped being maintained I'd be a duck out of water
OneDeuxTriSeiGo · 3m ago
It's also worth noting that Gitea forked a while back. The community fork is Forgejo.
And if you really just want a simple hosting system, https://tangled.sh is really easy to set up. It uses atproto (network underlying bluesky) as their identity provider and for tracking issues, PRs, comments, etc. Their "knot server" is basically just a little self-hosted go node that manages git repos. The project is fairly small atm and it's pretty much all in go so it's not too hard to skim through if you want to see how it works under the hood (or if you are afraid of needing to be able to keep it maintained long term).
jmbwell · 59m ago
I appreciate that you are taking the time not only to do the work but to document your experience and share it.
williamsss · 43m ago
Thanks. More devs should write about what they're building. Its the hardest part for me
exe34 · 1h ago
> The thought of cyclically migrating notes from one PKMS to another every 5 years, as I had done from Evernote to Notion to Obsidian, made me feel tired.
The biggest life hack I can recommend for a self hoster is to set up a VPN on your local network and then just never expose your services on the public internet unless you're specifically trying to serve people outside your own household.
Before I did this I was constantly worried about the security implications of each app I thought about installing or creating. Now it's not even worth setting up auth on a lot of simple services I build because if someone is able to hit their endpoints I'm already in deep trouble for many other reasons.
Ever since ssh almost got backdoor-ed, the only thing "exposed" on my servers is Wireguard, which is UDP based and therefore harder to know if it's running. SSH also goes over wireguard.
The security through obscurity (non-standard port, no root) are both kinda silly but why not.
That said, with awesome services like TailScale, it's pretty hard to get locked out of your network. TailScale is so so good at "just working".
[0] https://pagecrypt.maxlaumeister.com
I'm using Syncthing [0] to sync my vault between devices. On my main PC, Syncthing runs constantly in the background. Say, if I made a change, and want to send those changes to my phone, I open the application on my phone and let it fetch the changes. It's not perfectly smooth, like Obsidian's own integration, but I prefer this instead of setting a Git repository. Also, the files don't stay in a remote server.
[0]: https://syncthing.net
There are also several Obsidian community plugins for sync, I use Remotely Save via WebDAV.
I looked at my account, and I am charged $10 but it seems they automatically moved me to a "Plus" plan that has more storage. So no complaints from me really. Either that or the $4 plan is new. [1]
The $4 only comes with 1GB of storage. I would recommend the $10 for 50GB if you use images in your notes.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37251708
https://obsidian.md/blog/standard-plan/
> After some mental gymnastics weighing if I should continue with Obsidian, I found solace when asking myself "Can I see myself using this in 20 years?". I couldn't. The thought of cyclically migrating notes from one PKMS to another every 5 years, as I had done from Evernote to Notion to Obsidian, made me feel tired.
In point of fact this is actually an argument IN FAVOR of Obsidian. While the editor might be proprietary - the notes themselves are just standard markdown. If somehow all the copies of Obsidian magically disappeared off the earth tomorrow, I could easily switch over to Emacs org mode, VS Code, or literally anything else.
> Obsidian was a great tool for me personally for a long time. But I felt frustrated when I wanted to access my notes on my phone while on-the-go and saw that I had to pay for this feature.
Again, a little bit odd considering that the author is technically savvy enough to write an entire PKMS but didn't seem to consider that you can just check your markdown notes into a git repository and sync with the native android/iOS Obsidian app on a mobile device. All my notes sync up to Gitea hosted on my VPS and it works relatively seamlessly.
I'm glad the author had fun. Personally, I'm very happy with Obsidian and the plugin architecture has made it easy for me to extend it where necessary.
100% this. The reason I started using Obsidian in the first place is that it's built on the exact directory structure and file formats that I was already using to manage my writing and notes, and if Obsidian goes away for some reason, that won't change.
Currently vetting a way to sync my database files with my markdown files on my laptop, so it functions similar to Obsidian. I enjoy Vim too much to work constrained to Directus' markdown editor!
I saw that you didn’t want to use a 3rd party provider, but why not stick a git repo on your VPS (which you are trusting with your data today) and use that to coordinate syncs between your client devices?
I expect my PKMS to evolve and wouldn't rule out a self-hosted Git server if I find it's a better option long term.
I guess he hasn't tried org-mode yet.
Either way, like many others, I use SyncThing to sync my vault, and routinely edit it with vim, so Obsidian is just one comfortable shell that can (relatively easily) be replaced.
It will always cost more if you consider your own time for maintenance long term. Obsidian is one of the most consumer friendly business for note taking out of there, they are not VC so the Evernote comparison is unwarranted IMO.
They do also publish the “verify the encryption steps” for this.
Of course, depending on your threat model this could be insufficient, but then you probably wouldn’t trust obsidian in the first place.
Couldn’t avoid the computation panic of 2038 but it got by
As we’ve seen before, it takes one VC investment to change a source available license into something not so friendly and forks are never guaranteed.
But their solution is to depend on directus, which can lead to the exact same issues. To my eyes, they just added an extra step...
[1] https://github.com/directus/directus/blob/main/license
Errm, no? Obsidian sync is optional. I pay for it to support them, but my main vaults are all synced by iCloud, which was auto set-up by Obisidan during initial setup on my iPhone.
On the Android side, any service which can sync files can work, I assume.
Note: Yes, I use Obsidian on my phone without sync, all the time, and it syncs.
My Office vault lives in a separate cloud service, and it works?
A gif would help clarify what your tool does. I've used an automated flow with Github Actions and Charm's VHS (https://github.com/charmbracelet/vhs) in my repo here to demo my CLI tool I built a while back (https://github.com/Amber-Williams/yall/blob/main/demo.gif). Might be of interest : )
If you watch the animated gif, he is still using a third party service to store that graph.
I also think people to tend to like Markdown mostly because it’s plain text. The added benefits of that preview view is minimal. Like my gut feeling Markdown is popular 90% because of it’s in an accepted way to do plaintext and only 10% for the added formatting.
In relative terms you may be right... but subjectively, having grown accustomed to Obsidian's live view in editor mode, I'd have a hard time giving it up.
Markdown is great because you can easily add structure while typing compared to other format which have a more extensive markup format. I prefer org-mode because what Markdown can do, but also more extensive capabilities if you need so, but there's not a lot of editors for it especially on mobile.
> Markdown is popular 90% because of it’s in an accepted way to do plaintext and only 10% for the added formatting.
For me Markdown allows me to write and format text at the speed of thought. Added bonus is that it's readable with "less xyz.md" or anything which can render text.
Yes, the file can grow large with many images, but it's a single file containing everything... even scripting!
TiddlyWiki is great until you want to add a structure to your Wiki. I was using it like mad, then I found out that linking pages took more time then writing notes, and I pulled the trigger and moved to Obsidian.
https://github.com/kunalb/termdex
I mean go nuts and roll your own if you want, but really, what’s not to like?
It's $4 actually, for the normal plan that works perfectly well for most use cases. It's also end to end encrypted, which is great. And it's not just about syncing for me, it's about a backup solution for the notes.
> I started to have concerns about the longevity of the plugins and app itself. Some of you may remember when Evernote aggressively limited free users to 50 notes, many users migrated their notes elsewhere. I was one of those users.
The great thing about Obsidian (in comparison to Evernote), is that everything is just a plain text markdown file on disk. You can open those files in any app. If Obsidian goes away someday, all your notes can continue to be edited in any plain text editor. Sometimes I open notes in VS Code, because there are certain things I just prefer writing there.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240104200401/https://obsidian....
People in a similar position might be interested in Joplin, which is indeed FOSS, and has lots of sync options. I personally use SyncThing, which keeps things free, but you can also use a number of other free cloud providers. You can choose to encrypt your notes to protect your privacy.
I use cherrytree currently, by the way.
I’m all for doing projects like this as an intellectual exercise. It’s just that the motivation behind doing so in the article is a bit more “huh?”
Funny enough I had downloaded a-shell and experimented with it and going git based. But ultimately didn't want my notes stored through Github. If that way works for you, cool!
(This is at least 1+ years old info, might have changed)
https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea
My concern with this approach would be I've read through Directus' codebase and can understand it. With a self-hosted Git server like this I'd be worried if shit hit the fan and corrupted my Git files or stopped being maintained I'd be a duck out of water
https://forgejo.org/
And if you really just want a simple hosting system, https://tangled.sh is really easy to set up. It uses atproto (network underlying bluesky) as their identity provider and for tracking issues, PRs, comments, etc. Their "knot server" is basically just a little self-hosted go node that manages git repos. The project is fairly small atm and it's pretty much all in go so it's not too hard to skim through if you want to see how it works under the hood (or if you are afraid of needing to be able to keep it maintained long term).
git or syncthing