Regarding your requirement, you might want to take a look at KitchenOwl.

If you prefer freestyle notes/lists, Joplin can share and sync note collections as well.

use case is a shopping list for my SO and I. I want to be able to add stuff throughout the day, and cross them off once I grab them from the shelf, and separately be able to clear completed tasks

Sorry for the late reply. Oh yes, that’s what I like about Google Keep, the collaborative aspect. What do you mean by “separately be able to clear completed tasks”? Do you mean being able to do it from multiple devices which are synchronized in real-time?

[Simple Chat] Why not just use one of the other Matrix clients?

Yes, you have a point… let’s keep Simple Chat for later then. I had this idea of making an app for each of my needs and let them all connect to a single server with a single unified user. Good quality Matrix clients already exists, I guess there is no need to build a custom client for the chat if I end up adopting Matrix as the protocol.

[Simple Docs] This seems overly ambitious.

Let’s say that’s a longer term goal for the future. I might be underestimating the complexity of Google Docs, but if you think about it I would say it’s not much more than a rich-text editor. Basically it’s the same things as text notes, just with a bit more formatting options. I couldn’t say the same thing about Google Sheets and Google Present.

No. Matrix is designed for chat, not data, and self-hosting it requires a fair amount of resources.

Why do you think so? I have tried it and it seems to be as simple as any other server thanks to Docker. I have a script to launch it here (mirror). It seems to use 160MB of memory and about 1% of my CPU when idle. I haven’t done any serious tests though, maybe it wouldn’t scale as well as I think.

I’d personally just DIY it since it’s really not a ton of logic

Well… there must always be a protocol behind it, it can be as simple/specific or as complex/generic as you want, but there must always be an agreement of the format of data exchanged between client and server.

By adopting the Matrix protocol, there wouldn’t be any need to write a custom server, because Matrix servers already exist.

Matrix is designed for chat, not data

What’s the difference between chat and data? A chat is a list of messages. A collaboratively-editable document is a list of changes. As far as I understand, Matrix uses “events” to describe things happening. When a user sends a message, the server emits and event like “add user X’s message Y to your list of received messages”. It shouldn’t be too different than emitting an event “replace text at position X with Y” every time a document changes. They even have ephemeral events for temporary state, such as “the user X is currently typing”. That should be similar to “the user X placed their cursor at position Y”.

Do you think I might be oversimplifying or thinking it wrong?

As far as I know, Joplin is not really real-time collaborative, nor federated. I was using it a few years ago and I like it, that would be a great suggestion for people not interested in those two things.

why you wouldn’t hop on projects already out there

Ah… that’s… yeah, that would probably make a lot of sense. I think that to us developers it’s much easier to come up with our own ideas than to hop onto other projects unless they align very well with our vision. It’s quite unusual to find other people with our very same goals. I’ll be honest, I code for fun. I would like to build this tool because want it more than because I need it, as there already are both Google Keep and Joplin after all. If there was an alternative out there with most of the feature features I need, in a programming language and framework that I am familiar with, I would probably have joined or forked it. But no, unfortunately that’s not the case. My goal is not to just find/build a replacement for Google Keep, my goal is to find/build a framework that can be used to build more collaborative apps in the future. A replacement for SplitWise is my next goal immediately after Google Keep, and I assume (hopefully not too naïvely) that once I will have a starting point, making more similar apps will be virtually free in terms of time required.

Actually, I was just so incredibly lucky that the Matrix protocol seems to overlap almost exactly with all the things I had in mind. I had included a few more features in my draft for a custom protocol, but honestly adopting something already made would save many tens of hours of work, so joining something already existing sounds like a good idea. I don’t think I will be able to contribute code to it though, as it’s developed in a language I am not familiar with (yet), so if I decided to go for Matrix after all, I will just be joining as a consumer.

LibreOffice also has Async collab […] might also benefit from another person putting their time towards it

Oh, that’s actually good to know, thanks! Personally, at the moment I use Google Docs when I need to work in real-time on a document with someone else. In my opinion it’s just too convenient to just be able to share a link which can be opened with a web browser from any device and operating system. There are some good self-hostable web options for documents imho though, which are probably less resource-demanding than LibreOffice.

Unfortunately I am not interesting in contributing to LibreOffice. I have installed it on all of my devices, but I almost never use it.

Whatever you choose to do, I’ll be super interested to see the results.

I’ll take that as an encouragement! Thanks!

I have to admit that I didn’t really think about reminders. That would perhaps make more sense for Simple Calendar, perhaps in the future I might consider linking notes and reminders. Or maybe it would make sense to implement it directly in Simple Notes? I don’t know, I’ll keep that in mind for later, thanks!

the number of clicks/menus/presses it takes to create a note

I strongly agree on that. It must be at most as many clicks as on Google Keep, i.e. two clicks (plus a few to open the app).

import existing Keep notes from a Google Takeout into your Simple Notes

I didn’t think about that. That shouldn’t be too hard. After the MVP (minimum viable product) will be ready, imports from various common formats should be implemented, and I guess Google Takeout for Google Keep should be supported too.

Thanks for the suggestions!

Joplin is not really real-time collaborative, nor federated. Or rather, it wasn’t last time I used it a few years ago, unless things have changed now. As a developer, I like Joplin though, that would be a great suggestion.

Its not really a keep replacement. Its a good note taking app though.

There’s also IHateMoney as a self hosted service and MoneyBuster as an Android app to interact with IHateMoney.

Oh yeah, both Joplin and NextCloud are great. I tried them both in the past. NextCloud is a bit bloated in my opinion though, I was hoping to go for something simpler both to install and to use.

Most of us here on the Lemmy Selfhosted community are skilled enough to keep a computer running somewhere, expose it securely on the internet (or just LAN, if that’s good enough), and install their own services such as Joplin and NextCloud, but my goal would be to make something that you don’t need to self-host. If you can trust any server, you don’t need to host your own. I like the idea of building a network comprised of both self-hosting users, and “normal” users, like here on Lemmy.

The federation may leave you wanting more and the collaboration might not be “real time” enough for you either, though. If you can build something better by all means go for it.

I’m not sure I understand what you mean. Do you mean writing a protocol that supports federation is a very difficult thing to do? Actually my first draft didn’t include federation as that’s just too much for my skills. But I am considering adopting Matrix, and Matrix includes federation, so why not? They built real-time messaging with Matrix, so I would assume that should be real-time enough for document editing.

same here

@ShouldIHaveFun @bruce965

Simple Mobile Tools were forked to https://www.fossify.org/

Ah, that’s a shame, I quite liked the idea of using the “Simple” prefix. Well, naming software is hard! I’ll just keep it as a temporary name for now. Thanks!

Oh yeah, I looked into and tried some of the European collaborative docs softwares, in particular I like this Numerique’s clean Material UI interface and I’m definitely going to take inspiration from it (although I haven’t installed and tried it, I just checked screenshots). Although, if you are recommending it as an alternative to my idea, Numerique doesn’t seem to be federated, nor to be privacy-centric (well… it is if you self-host, but my idea is to let people collaborate through different servers, like Lemmy, I don’t want users to need to trust the owner of the servers they join). And I really need an alternative to Google Keep more than Google Docs. I’ll be honest, Google Keep is really well made in my opinion, I would say we don’t yet have a good self-hostable alternative.

did I mix google keep and docs

Yeah, Google Keep is more like for text snippets, links, checklists, scribbles, and images. Google Docs is a full-fledged RTF editor. I was planning to implement the two things separately. I considered implementing Markdown in the Google Keep replacement, but I am still undecided whether it might count as feature-bloat.

vjournals

Oooh, that’s nice. I know about VCard and VCal, but I didn’t know about VJournal. Thanks for the hint, this might be very useful!

I didn’t know this term! I knew about DAGs which are probably a way to implement CRDTs. I just read the definition on Wikipedia, it says that “[CRDTs feature] an algorithm (itself part of the data type) automatically resolv[ing] any inconsistencies that might occur [in case of conflicts]”, that sounds interesting. I was thinking to try to resolve conflicts automatically whenever possible by adapting Git merge strategies, and when impossible: either just concatenate both versions and let the users fix it manually, or giving users the option to choose line-by-line which version they want.

With this keyword I might be able to find more literature on the topic. Thank you for suggesting it!