PKMS and Second Brain Toolings Journey
Let's talk about PKMS and second brain. PKMS is personal knowledge management system. As a knowledge worker, we are capturing information, learning things, journaling and occasionally looking up those information. In the past we use notebook. As we going more digital, we put the note in our computer, phone and eventually sometime, in the cloud. Second brain is concept introduced by Tiago Forte in Building a Second Brain book. If PKMS is the what, Second Brain is the how. I will write about Second Brain in the future. For today let's talk about toolings.
In the very beginning, I used Evernote. Some years later I switch to OneNote and exited to leverage handwritten capability via table with stylus. It also has infinitive canvas feature where you can just type anywhere without physical page limit. However as the time goes bay, I am not a really handwriting person. OneNote is also using proprietary format which make feel locked down. I switched to Notion. If I remember correctly Notion got its hype in the early days due to markdown support. It is plain text. It works fine for sometime. The issue which I feel later was we need to connect to internet because the note really not stored locally. I am not sure if anything changes since I moved away. It was just hassle that I have to wait couple of second to load the note in slow internet.
Around that day, Obsidian is gaining traction. It is local based. So all the notes are local file. I use it for sometime. It works great. Something that is missing was the sync. Notion sync note automatically and seamlessly because it is cloud based. But Obsidian synching needs a subscription which is fine because it is legitimate way for company to earn money since the core product itself is free. There is also multiple way to sync notes, like Google Drive or Syncthing. But another issue is the folder and file structure of Obsidian makes me thinking about structure too much instead of just making note.
During this time, I got to know outliner called Logseq. It is outliner because a note is not paragraph of plaintext anymore. Every item is a bullet. We can use markdown. Linking and backlinking is first class citizen. One can link not only to page, but also to sub outline. Logseq is really a knowledge graph that can connect different structure of your note to another part of the outline. To be honest I didn't really leverage this sophisticated feature so much, but it is there. Logseq is also just store the notes as local file. Until it isn't.
Logseq has been try to optimise the graph engine which is working fine until certain scale but start to broken down the more notes one have. In achieving this, they have to migrate from file first class citizen into some proprietary format they call DB version. It is such a dealbreaker in AI agent era because I have been using Claude code on my Second Brain in Logseq. Since it is plain text, LLM can just search in read with it easily. It will become less straightforward in the new DB version.
Logseq still keeping the file based version by branching out the code and name the original Logseq as Logseq-og and having it as version 1. The new DB based Logseq is named just Logseq with version 2.
This morning when I tried to do my my periodic brew upgrade I notited logseq version was jumping from 0.10.1 to 2.0.1 . I aborted the update because I don't my local Logseq forced to become the DB version. After googling I found that the file based Logseq is available in https://github.com/logseq/og. I tried to install 1.0.0 which is available in this repo but I found it unusable because somehow it is extremely slow. I can try to troubleshoot to figure out what is wrong but this inconvenience made me think on evaluating a better PKMS tool.
A quick LLM session bring me to https://silverbullet.md/. I installed in my VM and maybe will try to take sometime to explore this. But it looks interesting. It breaks one of my soft requirement to have the note in local. But the note is in my server and not in 3rd party. So I will try this and see.