I'd switch to self hosting, but the owners a real lazy son of a bitch

Hey congrats! If you're exploring, I've had great success with the free tiers on sync.com (cloud storage) and notion (notes). I also have the iOS sad re:syncthing, which I use almost exclusively now.

If you want to try sync get yourself an invite from an existing user for free extra gigabytes. They're a solid, sensible company and their free tier is more than enough for the few things I need handy on my phone.

I tried both notion and obsidian and for some reason notion just stuck for me. I like that I can share notes with coworkers. Ever note went down the tubes a few years ago, which was a drag.

Edit: reading that back I sound like a fucking shill. I do not get kickbacks lmao. Just wanted to share the programs that help when I can't self-host.

For notes, I really like Joplin, fwiw.

I personally use Hugo as a static site generator. Another good one is Publii. Publii is one I would choose over Hugo because it has a desktop app and it might even have a mobile app. Changes are pushed to the server via sftp.

I'm still using Hugo mainly for the theme called Beautiful Jekyll that I use. Publii though has some distinct advantages. I just haven't had enough of a pain point to switch

What do you do this off-site backup?

Dropbox keeps hounding me to upgrade to a paid level - back when they were incentivizing sign-ups with free storage for the inviter and invitee, I spin up several throwaway accounts and VMs to give myself bonus storage (I'm just over 21GB).

It's plenty for some critical secondary backups of wedding photos, docs, and an encrypted volume or two - but I absolutely cannot see myself paying for even their cheapest tier.

Check out AnyType for notes. I'm really surprised by it so far. It seems really powerful and I'm still working out what can be done.

I think its going to replace notes, task list, and become like a local pintrest for me.

The main compromise I’ve had to make is on the iOS experience.

Me too. I've all my computers syncing with Syncthing to a local machine and access the data on iOS using FE File Explorer Pro via a SMB share pointed to the Syncthing data dir.

How is Tailscale different from ZeroTier in this setup?

Good work 😄 welcome down the rabbit hole

If you are looking for FOSS, I highly recommend joplin. It's simple but works well. I used it for many years until recently I switched to Obsidian. I dislike that Obsidian isn't FOSS but I'm using the free tier and the community plugins really make it so much more powerful than Joplin. They both store things in Markdown so I'm not locked down to their ecosystem which I think is a requirement for any note taking app.

Syncthing is amazing. I had it keeping a dir of files synced on my LAN for a good stretch, but ended up replacing multiple devices with a single MBP and some external displays. I'll look to it again if that changes in the future. Can't recommend it enough.

I have been looking at markdown editors for a couple of weeks and I settled on Flatnotes in Docker. It is so simple and elegant and I just mount the notes repository to an NFS share on my NAS

I know this won't help you add notes on your phone (unless you open the server up to the outside world so you can access the web interface) but I recently have been messing around with a Trilium sync server at home. I've been using Obisidan for a while but swapped back to Trilium on a whim. So far i've been loving it.

Another service worth looking at is cryptpad for things like notes. Collabora has a LibreOffice like feel in the cloud.

I’m using a combination of iCloud and Syncthing. iOS syncs to my Mac with iCloud and Syncthing picks it up from there. For me it was about having a second copy, that I completely control, and not so much about getting rid of all Cloud services there. If, however, Syncthing could get into the depths of iOS file system, I would consider getting rid of iCloud.

I've looked at Obsidian but have you looked at Zettlr? I think I prefer it over Obsidian.

Nice to see that you're getting your own thing going.