Trilium Notes is an application for hierarchical note-taking. While we largely prefer nonhierachical programs like Obsidian and TiddlyWiki, Trilium is useful for us because it makes it easier to keep personal notes and journals. Both Obsidian and TiddlyWiki call notes by the name you give them (unless you use metadata or a plugin for aliases) so people can't have separate private notes with the same name. Trilium keeps track of notes by an ID number instead. Trilium supports interlinking and putting one note in multiple places in the hierarchy, as well as a note graph/map, so you don't have to rely entirely on the folder tree.

You can also encrypt only specific notes and folders, in case you want some information to be easier to find regardless of the inactivity timer.

Our Notes

Our folder structure is something like this:

• Notes for anyone to look at
  • Task manager (to-do list script that came with the program)
  • Shared journal
  • Bulletin board: Similar to the shared journal, but specifically for conversation. Every folder is just a note with child note links and previews embedded at the bottom, so child notes can work like replies.
  • Public journals are made around specific themes or purposes, and are often owned by specific people, but aren't private.
  • Fandoms, etc. We keep media to check out, fancontent links, and checklists for our goals in games here.
• Private journals
• Outside life things, for accessible information-keeping without personal commentary
• Reading List (comes with the program)
• Note statistics (comes with the program)
• Customization
  • CSS themes
  • Scripts that came with the program that we don't use but didn't want to delete

Synchronization Server

This was our first experiment with self-hosting. We used the Docker release on a Raspberry Pi. It seemed to have issues initializing an empty server (the server couldn't return a handshake before being initialized), so we made a new database on the server, imported our notes into the web application, and then synced it back to the desktop client. The server was able to successfully sync between multiple devices once that first connection was established.