Developing a self-hosted alternative to Google Keep

[email protected]

Hi! I'm a software developer working on a suite of collaborative self-hostable apps to replace proprietary services I couldn't find a good replacement for.

I am writing this post to seek opinions and ideas now that I am still in the early prototyping phase, before it's too late to change track.

My idea is to develop a collection of simple single-purpose apps that do one and only one thing. The first app will be called Simple Notes (mirror), a replacement for Google Keep. Every operation is encrypted locally on the client, and the server never sees plaintext data. I am investigating federations models to let users connect to other instances and work collaboratively, much like Lemmy.

So, my goals in order of priority are:

No compromises on privacy and security
Completely FOSS
Read-time collaboration between users
Asynchronous collaboration (work offline, sync when back online)
One account to operate on all apps in this suite
Web UI / desktop UI / mobile UI
Minimal interface which my grandma can use, no feature-bloat
No anti-features such as advertisements, tracking, etc...
Self-hosting
Federation

After Simple Notes, I plan to keep developing other simple apps, some ideas on my list:

Simple Notes - Replacement for Google Keep
Simple Split - Replacement for SplitWise
Simple Chat - Replacement for WhatsApp/Slack/Meet/Teams
Simple Docs - Replacement for Google Docs
Simple Draw - Collaborative drawing app
Simple Calendar - Replacement for Google Calendar

Initially I started writing my own protocol (mirror), operating quite differently from Lemmy's, but then I realized that someone else already has developed a protocol for this purpose: Matrix. It is (optionally) E2EE, it's FOSS, and it's federated. So yeah, it sounds like the perfect choice to me. Also, if I pick Matrix, Simple Chat will just be a reskin of Element, so development cost is almost zero.

So, a questions for the developers on the Lemmy Selfhosted community: do you think piggybacking the Matrix protocol would be a good choice? Do you know any alternative that might be more suited for this purpose?

And a question for all Lemmy Selfhosted users: is there a simple app that you would like me to add to the list?

Bonus question: do you know of any Lemmy community where I could repost?

Thank you very much for the time you spent reading my post!

--

Link to source code on my server and GitHub mirror.

[email protected]

This sounds great. I would definitely love a splitwise alternative in particular!

You may want to think about using another name for your app suite though. Since it may bring confusion with the simple mobile tools (https://simplemobiletools.com/index.html) which for example also have a "Simple Notes" app.

[email protected]

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!

[email protected]

Naming software is one of the hardest problems in all of software development.

[email protected]

Sounds nice. I would use it. Keep is one of the last Google services I still use.

[email protected]

Could you maybe work with someone together, or get inspiration from something like the docs project from the european union https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/ ?

Moreover, I'm an "advanced user" and I want to write with markdown and/or typst. A wysiwyg typst editor would be amazing

[email protected]

Just take a common word and remove a vowel or too. That's still hip, right?

[email protected]

Why not use Joplin? Open-source, very flexible, I run it on a bunch of devices and sync it via a EU cloud provider over S3 in an encrypted bucket…

? Offline

This.. I also would love for all of this to happen but a name change is a must.

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

IMO, the more self hostable options we have for services, the better. This sounds like a good idea to me.

Good luck with your project and thank you for taking the time to contribute to the free and open source community.

[email protected]

For notes, I have moved to Joplin with the option to synchronize my data using a WebDAV server. It works really well, and it has both a mobile and desktop app. If you're interested in developing your project, maybe you can have a look at the options this provides. For example, I really like the ability to separate notes between groups, assign tags, create drawings, and the possibility to use Markdown.

Good luck with your projects! To mirror @enemenemu's suggestion, I would also look into collaborating with the people trying to push the EU Docs alternative. Not sure if that will work, but it's worth a shot if you're interested

[email protected]

I've specifically been looking for a self-hostable keep alternative for a while now. This sounds amazing, will be following the project!

[email protected]

Nextcloud Notes or Joplin (nevermind all the other features Nextcloud provides) tick most of your boxes. They're more productivity focused than privacy focused, it doesn't do "zero knowledge" encryption the way you're describing, but I don't really understand the point of that when you're self-hosting and the server host belongs to you anyway. 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.

[email protected]

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!

[email protected]

@ShouldIHaveFun @bruce965

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

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

Simpel. Simpal. Simpol. Etc....

[email protected]

At, that's why the UI looked familiar! I have some of their apps on my Android

[email protected]

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!

agnos.is Forums

Developing a self-hosted alternative to Google Keep