Comment on Developing a self-hosted alternative to Google Keep
Chee_Koala@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Hey Hey! What a fantastic idea, I sure hope you can manage!
I was immediately wondering why you wouldn’t hop on projects already out there. For example: I recently ditched google Keep // Trello for Joplin, which i think already ticks all your boxes, even Async collab should work (but not realtime, and you’d have to manually resolve conflicts). Maybe adding better collab in Joplin is a more efficient way to spend your time? LibreOffice also has Async collab, since I think about 6 months, so while it might be young, it will grow, and might also benefit from another person putting their time towards it.
Whatever you choose to do, I’ll be super interested to see the results.
bruce965@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
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.
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.
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.
I’ll take that as an encouragement! Thanks!
Chee_Koala@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I think I understand your requirements more clearly now, a framework for FOSS collaborative work would be really great. I Hope you can find a way to use Matrix for it. Thanks for the explanation.
Man, I loved the google docs realtime collab functionality, they pretty much nailed it day 1 in my eyes. It’s so easy. If your project works/takes off it should be a lot more straightforward for FOSS projects to incorporate it. Hype!
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bruce965@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Well… if a FOSS project wants to incorporate collaborative work they could already do it, well… through Matrix for instance.
They might (depending on how the application works) also need to implement additive changes and possibly also a conflict resolution UI if they want to support synchronization from offline changes. But I’m afraid both these things might be very application-specific.
I’ll be honest, I don’t think much of what I have in mind would really be adoptable by existing projects. But I’ll do my best to keep everything relatively modular just in case.
Thanks (again) for the encouragement!