It depends on the notes, for me:

I’ve had an oddly long-running obsession with Tiddlywiki!

It has a bit of a learning curve, but it’s VERY flexible. My favorite part being that by default it’s just a single, portable, HTML file. No special app required besides a browser, no accounts, and you can just sync it like any other file. (Syncthing, Nextcloud, and friends)

There’s also an app called Tiddloid for Android to make managing and saving a little easier, but they open in any browser.

I have a Tiddlywiki that I use like one might use Obsidian, where I just stash stuff I’ll want to remember and maybe link between similar ideas.

And then I’m currently trying to use it to make a solution to sketch out my Savage Worlds RPG campaigns. It gets a little tricky but you can make templates, script buttons, and that kind of thing. If you’re already comfortable with web stuff you’ll probably catch on WAY better than I have.

You can also host it as a website, or on your server or whatever, to use it like any other wiki. There’s also plugins to use Markdown instead of “wikitext.”

There’s also an excellent guide to learning it at https://groktiddlywiki.com/read/ . It’s basically an online workbook using Tiddlywiki itself!

The community is also super helpful. I do wish it had a little more out of the box, but something about a customizable, portable, digital “notebook” that doesn’t require an account or hopefully-supported-in-5-years application is SUPER appealing to me. It’s quite underrated.

Also just for fun I wanted to share my favorite example someone’s been working on for quite some time now, a heavily customized D&D wiki

https://intrinsical.github.io/wiki/index.html

Tiddlywiki can be a bit dense and the documentation is slowly improving, but there’s so much potential!

Ohhh I see what you did there. They’re all extensions. So 98% of users doesn’t even know it’s a possibility if it’s not default lol.

Blah.

Maybe for the Discord use-case of joining mass-community servers it simply doesn’t have the network-effect yet. I haven’t used it much myself sadly! But I imagine a lot of users had the same idea you did: “Let’s make a server! Aw nobody’s here.”

But I think adoption would grow if we started using it for what a LOT of people use Discord for currently: The micro-server for get-togethers of smaller social circles.

• Voice chat for videogames
• Small digital meet-ups, like artists, churches, clubs, etc.
• Distance-playing tabletop RPGs.
• College study groups.

That’s where adoption starts and snowballs. Unfortunately, I believe the VC-funded data-mining corpo-apps will always have the advantage in scooping up the “I want to join a crowded mass community room” users.

But that’s okay for a start.

The way I see it, we need to be most concerned with keeping our security and privacy amongst our closest associates, and occasionally we’ll need to venture out into the “commercial-net” with our hoodies up and sunglasses on to interact with the crowd, fully aware there’s surveillance everywhere.

That’s a super neat trick actually. Why the heck has RSS been losing popularity when it seems to be the only magic protocol you really need to keep up with what you actually care about?

Oh I just answered my own question: It must be harder to hijack RSS with intrusive ads and clickbait…

I still don’t think I understand the full utility of RSS. I guess it’s good for forum communication too?

Because my first thought was “RSS is cool but first we need human-written content and blogs to come back.”

Zulip sounds neat!

Shoutout to https://revolt.chat/ as a Discord alternative too.

Ah, that captures such a stark answer to why people use xitter though.

It’s not “so I can hear from you” it’s “So YoU cAn HeAr FrOm Us!!!11oneone”

Walled gardens? More like prison yard. Lol