Posted by shibaobun 4/12/2025
It is not trivial to run locally at least for me.
I felt like the most difficult/frustrating setup step would be signing up for a SMTP service like mailjet, mailgun, etc in order to get emails working, but I haven't had many people try to set it up before and talk to me about it :)
Oh I also almost forgot, if you'd like a reverse proxy that's easy to setup, I'd recommend Nginx Proxy Manager [1]
How does it scale? Would 200.000 notes be a problem? Does it handle pdf, epub or enex?
and most importantly
Search, what does it have and how good is it? (Is it better than evernote)?
I also haven't really stress tested it, this was really more of a personal wiki that I wanted to create specifically with the hierarchical linking/backlinking that I didn't see any other notetaking applications having just the way I wanted. But since the application is relatively simple, I think Postgres should be able to handle the load.
It uses fulltext search built into Postgres for all the searching capabilities though, so hopefully it is good!
When I press Cmd-+ to zoom into the page in so I can actually read it, exactly the opposite of what I want happens: the image SHRINKS even smaller as the surrounding text grows to push it into a black hole! So I reset by pressing Cmd-0 and then try un-zooming by pressing Cmd--, and the image STILL shrinks even smaller.
What is the point? Did a Vibe Coding Anti-Accessibility LLM do this, or was it actually intentional? That first impression makes me completely uninterested in looking at the rest of the project, rightfully afraid that it might be as purposefully badly designed and inaccessible and contemptuous of users at the first readme page.
Why would anyone bother to go to so much effort to make an image of inaccessible unlinkable extremely low contrast tiny unreadable text wasting huge amounts of horizontal and vertical white space with no usable links (so you have to type in the contact email address with the keyboard, below an ironic unclickable but button-like call to action "read more on how to use memEx": no thank you!), and then put that at the very top of the page, when it's only a few lines of all lower case pointlessly centered but otherwise unformatted text, and there's no reason at all and extra effort to do that? It would have been less effort to post a blurry cell phone photo of a Word document displayed on a laptop screen. Is this some kind of Andy Kauffmanesque trolling? Vannevar Bush would roll over in his grave.
As We May Think: “Consider a future device … in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.” By Vannevar Bush
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...
Vannevar Bush believed the scientific record had become "inadequate for [its] purpose" due to outdated methods of access and review. He warned that "the summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate," yet we still relied on systems from "the days of square-rigged ships." He criticized indexing as "artificial" and noted that it forced information into "only one place," making retrieval cumbersome. Instead, he advocated for “selection by association,” enabling users to “snap instantly to the next [item] suggested by the association of thoughts.” His proposed memex device embodied this principle—designed to be "consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility," storing vast personal libraries with the ability to “build a trail” of connected ideas, permanently linking and instantly retrieving them.