Show HN: MdSilo – A knowledge silo that runs in your web browser

Hi, hackers and writers:<p>Excited to introduce mdSilo on Hacker News, it is a Zettelkasten note-taking app runs entirely in your web browser, free and open source.<p>We believe connection is good in thinking. mdSilo supports [[BackLinks]], ((Block Reference)) to connect everything in writing. On top of that, we also believe that the digital garden is better not a walled garden. So mdSilo opens a window and builds a bridge for each digital garden. We can connect with each other via {{ PubLink }}. Just like links to liaison points between private digital gardens, a liaison point can be a shared wiki page of any systematic knowledge generated from different digital gardens spontaneously.<p>Here are some of the features that mdSilo offers:<p>- WYSIWYG editor, Markdown support, Live Preview like Typora;<p>- PWA and Local File System Access support to make it functions as same as native app on desktop;<p>- Side menu, Hovering toolbar, hotkeys, Slash command to make writing and formatting fun;<p>- #HashTag and nested notes to help organize your writing;<p>- View your writing in different ways: Page Stacking View, Graph view, Chronicle view, Task view...;<p>- Connect everything in your writing by BackLink, Block Reference, Direct&#x2F;Indirect Mentions, etc.;<p>- Import or export your notes at any time as Markdown files or Json;<p>- Full-text search;<p>Like an online IDE, mdSilo is a vscode.dev for notes, a good free and open source alternative to Obsidian, Roam Research and more.<p>mdSilo puts privacy first. No registering is required, no installation is required, You are writing locally, you fully own and control your data even the code(it is open source, anyone can inspect it and make it even better together).<p>Official site and demo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mdsilo.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mdsilo.com&#x2F;</a> The source code repo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;danloh&#x2F;mdSilo-web" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;danloh&#x2F;mdSilo-web</a>

Hey, the creator of Notabase [1] here, which it looks like MdSilo was based off of.<p>Your project looks cool! Always interesting to see how other people tackle note-taking. Thanks for keeping it open source.<p>I&#x27;d encourage people to check out Notabase as well, which offers an alternative vision and UI which some people might like better. You can use it hosted, or self-host it yourself -- the code is open source [2].<p>Best of luck with MdSilo! :)<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;notabase.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;notabase.io</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;churichard&#x2F;notabase" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;churichard&#x2F;notabase</a>

I was wondering if&#x2F;when Firefox would implement the File System Access API. Mozilla&#x27;s official position [0] implies: Not anytime soon, as they consider it harmful, mostly due to security considerations.<p>&gt; There&#x27;s a subset of this API we&#x27;re quite enthusiastic about (in particular providing a read&#x2F;write API for files and directories as alternative storage endpoint), but it is wrapped together with aspects for which we do not think meaningful end user consent is possible to obtain (in particular cross-site access to the end user&#x27;s local file system). Overall we consider this harmful therefore, but Mozilla could be supportive of parts, provided this were segmented better.<p>The GitHub issue discussing this position is now closed [1].<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mozilla.github.io&#x2F;standards-positions&#x2F;#native-file-system" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mozilla.github.io&#x2F;standards-positions&#x2F;#native-file-s...</a> [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wicg.github.io&#x2F;file-system-access&#x2F;#security-ransomware" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wicg.github.io&#x2F;file-system-access&#x2F;#security-ransomwa...</a>

I recently started using Obsidian after playing with several others. I think I&#x27;m going to stick with Obsidian as it has good number of people around on an active basis. Your product looks pretty fast and sharp but it is hard to trust browser-based workload for such a personal and subjective activity.<p>The note-taking market is very crowded. I think note-taking has already delivered its original slice bread. Pretty difficult to continue to reinvent the same and expect a different result. However, I do think, that going back to the basics of HTML (instead of continuing with the markdown) may break the ceiling a little further.<p>Any case. Good luck with your offering. It looks good and acts well.

Is there a way to make it display dates as YYYY-MM-DD or DD-MM-YYYY? I&#x27;ve never been keen on the US date format.

Although throwing this in is quite late: This discussion shouldn&#x27;t be left wihtout mentioning <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logseq.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logseq.com&#x2F;</a> which I and many others utilized as my place for notes, sources and texts. There is a lot of activity around it - promoting, extending and developing this toll further<p>Having had only a short view on MdSilo I&#x27;m not able to distinguish all similarities or differences. Logseq is clearly defined as an outliner (every block is a bullet point) but all the other features look pretty similar.<p>Especially that Logseq as well as MdSilo are living in (chromium-alike) browsers working on local files (accessible as plain text) is a feature which I can&#x27;t underline enough as this allows to use your notetaking environment idependently of user privileges.<p>Is anybody able to add something for a contrasting juxtaposition? With now 1000+ pages generated during heavy usage of Logseq during the last weeks it is unlikely for me to switch but might be helpful for other users.<p>Indirect Mentions seem to be worth a closer look. Do we see this feature in Logseq as well?

The landing page should probably make it clear that this is FOSS and not SASS. I saw the &quot;Pricing&quot; link at the bottom and closed the tab. I only saw that it was FOSS when I came here to comment about only wanting things that I can host myself for knowledge management.

Hey, this seems really nice.<p>I&#x27;ve been using Obsidian to keep my Japanese dictionary clip, so I did a quick test.<p>The import feature is working well, the .md renders perfectly.<p>But somehow, pasting is not working normally:<p>- Pasting into empty note is not working at all.<p>- If I type anything, then select it then paste, I can paste my clipboard into it, but urls are missing.<p>This is what I paste: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.toptal.com&#x2F;developers&#x2F;hastebin&#x2F;nuhavenuge.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.toptal.com&#x2F;developers&#x2F;hastebin&#x2F;nuhavenuge.md</a><p>BTW, I&#x27;m wondering how well does the graph view performs when there are, like, 1000+ notes?

Other than pricing and being able to write without an account, what would you say is the biggest difference between this and Notabase?<p>Has anything with the format changed since the fork that would prevent people from moving data between them?

Looks nice. However I don&#x27;t like custom extensions like [[BackLinks]] or ((Block Reference)), because they translate badly to other markdown tools. I like my markdown files to be independent of the applications I use to edit them.<p>[[BackLinks]] seem to be common in the md-knowledge-base space, less so (()) and {{}}. I&#x27;d prefer standard markdown links with support from the editor to insert them faster and add backlinks and stuff like that.

Reminds me of HackMD (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackmd.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackmd.io&#x2F;</a>)

Sounds interesting. How is keeping a reading list tackled? I currently use Obsidian.

Is there a way of self hosting the application in a server and have it access the data stored on that server file system? (aka runnings it in the cloud).<p>Thanks for distributing the fork and contributing to the note taking apps landscape!

Does actually data sitting under local folder, but seems isn&#x27;t there web browser automatically update changes to the notes when edit notes same folder with vscode?

Looks cool! Does Json-import mean it can import from Roam? Does it support Attributes and Attribute-Tables (like Roam)?

WYSIWYG markdown editor is such a rarity.<p>How do I run it locally&#x2F;on my server?<p>Is it possible to make some of my notes public but RO?

there&#x27;s a lot of good stuff happening in this space. Nice to see another option out there.

Any plans for Latex by any chance?

And works on local Markdown

Seems nice. I am using tiddlywiki with tiddlymap plugin nowadays.

Alomost perfect tool! Please add support for Markdown tables.

Is this an alternative to Obsidian?

This comment is not about MdSilo itself... but the design style on the linked page looks too much like certain splog-like landing pages I&#x27;ve come across (namely &quot;this domain is for sale&quot; pages.) Since I opened a bunch of Hacker News links all at once, I almost closed MdSilo&#x27;s tab when I came across it, out of instinct.<p>Depending on how you spread the word about MdSilo, that may not be a problem. If it is a problem, though, you may wish to address it.