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Thinktool
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Posted by Bernhard
May 2, 2020 at 02:42 PM
Will there be a self-hosted version that will work offline and stores its data locally?
Posted by Jonas Hvid
May 2, 2020 at 03:53 PM
Hey Bernhard,
> Will there be a self-hosted version that will work offline and stores its data locally?
So, this is something I’ve been thinking a lot about, and I already had part of
this post typed up; I apologize in advance for the rather verbose answer…
First of all, to give you the short version: Probably yes, but hopefully not :)
If it turns out that people like Thinktool, then I want to make money off it.
It’s hard to charge a subscription service for a fully offline app.
Currently, however, Thinktool is a side-project for me, and it has exactly one
active user - myself. If it turns out that I can’t make Thinktool good enough to
justify spending more than my free time on it, then I will make the project open
source, and at that point you can do whatever you want with it. Good news: 90%
of startups fail, so this is by far the most likely outcome :)
On the other hand, if Thinktool *does* become successful, then there are some
issues that I think other software-as-a-service isn’t doing a good job of
addressing, where I believe I can do better. Specifically, these are:
1. Privacy, i.e. “How do I know you’re not leaking/selling my data?”
2. Lock-in, i.e. “What can I do if something better comes around and I want to switch?”
3. Durability, i.e. “How do I know that you will still be around ten years from now?”
Many apps can get away with not really tackling these questions, but for a
note-taking app, I think these are pretty central, and even with zero users,
I’ve already starting working on them.
Privacy can be addressed by implementing end-to-end encryption. This would make
it impossible for a server admin to “spy” on the contents of your notes. This
will probably be implemented per-item, meaning that the connections between
items won’t be encrypted, but their contents will.
To deal with lock-in, I plan to add at least two export modes: One that exports
all of your data in a documented format that you can then convert into whatever
you need with some technical knowledge; and another one that lets you export
your notes to human-readable plain text, but perhaps not preserving all
information (e.g. transcluded items).
(Again, this is contingent on people actually using Thinktool. In the meantime,
I would be happy to help anyone manually export their data. You can already
download all of your data (in an undocumented JSON format) at
https://api.thinktool.io/state (after logging in).)
Finally, as for durability: Running the servers for Thinktool currently costs
$5/mo, and I’m only working on it in my free time. As such, there’s really no
reason for me to shut the service down. Even if I totally abandon the project, I
can’t see a reason why the servers couldn’t keep running.
Also, I made Thinktool because I personally couldn’t find anything that was
better for me. As long as Thinktool is the best option (for me), I will keep it
running. If something better does comes out, I will implement a way to export
your data to whatever it is.
Posted by Dr Andus
May 2, 2020 at 11:27 PM
Very interesting project, but I’m still struggling to get my head around it, wondering what would be the specific use of this.
I guess the clue is in the name, Thinktool? Is this approach supposed to help figure out some cognitive problems?
Posted by jaroet
May 3, 2020 at 09:40 AM
Looks interesting and also somewhat like Trilium Notes. As the subscription you mention that is an immediate No for me. I like to be in charge of my own data.
Good luck.
JaRoet
Posted by Jonas Hvid
May 3, 2020 at 03:36 PM
Thank you for checking it out and giving feedback, Dr. Andus! I’ll try to answer
your question.
Thinktool is mainly designed for people who do some kind of research or
learning, and use that in their creative outputs or just for personal growth. So
the core audience are students, bloggers, academics, writers, etc.
It is essentially a note-taking app, just like Workflowy or Evernote, but
Thinktool really shines when you have lots of notes that are linked to each
other, and you also need to add some kind of structure to them.
So for example, while I’m building Thinktool, I want to learn more about
note-taking approaches and other applications. In my Thinktool database, I have
a list of different note-taking tools, sorted by category (i.e. outliners,
personal wikis, etc.):
https://johv.dk/public/2020-05-03-170835.png
I don’t have to put any item in just one category; for example Thinktool is
listed both under “Outliners” and “Graph-based knowledge management tools”:
https://johv.dk/public/2020-05-03-171155.png
If I open “Outliners”, I can see that this item is mentioned somewhere else:
https://johv.dk/public/2020-05-03-171726.png
I can then follow that reference to see where it comes from - in this case a
comparison between Roam and Thinktool:
https://johv.dk/public/2020-05-03-171910.png
This item itself has links to a bunch of other items which I can open, and then
I can continue to explore from there.
Not sure if that explanation made sense. It can be surprisingly hard to explain
to other people why Thinktool is useful, perhaps because it seems so obvious to
me :) I’ll have to see if I can improve the homepage to make it more clear what
Thinktool is about.