Do you ever feel like there’s a mountain of information you’d love to master, but you have no way to cram it all into your brain? You’re not alone. I’ve been fascinated by Personal Knowledge‑Management (PKM) tools for years, trying to find a system that is both powerful and respectful of privacy.
Trillium Notes
The earliest PKM platform I tried was Trillium Notes. It is a hierarchical note‑taking app where each page can link to any other page, making it easy to build a web of connected ideas.
I’ve used Trillium for years, and it has served me well—but just as a repository for information.
What works well:
Editor—The WYSIWG editor for Trillium notes is amazing, making it a good option to write books or long form content.
Self‑hosting—You can run the server on your own hardware, keeping data under your control.
Extensible plugins—You can write JavaScript plugins for additional features.
What falls short:
No mature mobile app—Accessing your notes on the go is clunky at best.
Lacks advanced project‑management tools—There is no built‑in kanban board or interactive displays of lists.
Because I needed a smoother mobile experience and stronger project‑management support, I started looking elsewhere.
AFFiNE
Next up was AFFiNE, marketed as the “ultimate Notion killer” with a privacy‑first spin. At first glance it seemed promising, but deeper digging revealed two major issues:
Telemetry leakage—The app sends usage data back to the vendor, defeating its privacy claim.
Sync lock‑in—Even the self‑hosted edition requires a paid subscription to sync notes across devices.
After weighing those drawbacks, I moved on.
Anytype
My latest discovery is Anytype. It hits several of the pain points that have plagued other PKM solutions.
Cool things:
Offline—All of the apps work offline without needing to sync, and you can also have your devices sync within your local network without connecting to the outside world.
Zero personal data required—No email, no phone number—just an encryption key that you get as a seed phrase.
Source‑available & self-hostable—The code is publicly viewable, so you can verify what it does. It’s also self-hostable (although this is not easy).
Free storage on a private IPFS node—The base tier gives you 100 MB of encrypted storage hosted on a decentralized network, making data retrieval fast on both desktop and mobile.
Highly structured—You create custom “types” (e.g., contacts, locations, videos, to‑do lists) and then populate instances of those types. This makes the system ideal for storing and visualizing structured information.
Drawbacks:
You get unlimited storage for text content, but if you’re pasting images or uploading files you’ll run out of space at 100MB—that’s not a lot, and going past it requires a paid subscription.
Anytype isn’t a full‑blown project‑management suite, but its flexibility lets you design your own workflows without surrendering privacy.
The biggest downside is that Anytype is funded by VC firms including: Balderton↗Inflection↗Square One↗Script Сapital↗Protocol Labs↗System.One↗Connect Ventures↗Techstars↗Acequia Capital↗Early Grey Сapital↗Tiny Vc↗New Forge↗Foreword Vc↗S16VC
While it’s difficult to find products that capture knowledge and let you manage, Anytype has been working well for me so far.
What are you using for your PKM? Let me know!
This is a segment from #TBOT Show Episode 20. Watch the full episode here:
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