I’m not saying proprietary software doesn’t also have problems, just that FOSS has problems unique to it that are rarely acknowledged.

Everything I implement at work is open source because I don’t want to wait for a purchase approval. But I’m also practically the only one interacting with those systems, so I’m the only one who’s affected if something breaks.

IDK, said laptop is from 2010.

Discord is an evolutionary culdesac if we’re talking about its role as a forum killer. It’s terrible for long term information storage and retrieval compared to the more permanent, and search engine indexed, forums it replaced. It’s a never ending waterfall of chat messages that’s hard to search, so the same questions keep coming up again and again.

I tried asking a question on Blender Guru’s discord about his doughnut tutorial, on the channel specifically meant for questions about the doughnut tutorial, and it flew off the top of the screen like a barrel going over Niagara Falls, never to be seen again.

Even if the age verification wasn’t a thing, I think the enshittification would set in eventually. So it’s not going anywhere for now, but I’m pretty sure the investors will want their money back sooner or later.

Mumble isn’t requiring you to submit your ID.

I second this. My gaming group probably won’t leave discord for the foreseeable future but Mumble is probably where we’d go if we did. IMO all these Discord alternatives are trying to do everything Discord does, when even Discord can’t pull it off sustainably at their scale.

I don’t want federation. I don’t want it to scale to infinite concurrent users. What I want is something simple I can plonk on a crusty old laptop running Proxmox or a Raspberry pi for a few friends.

I wrote a post a while ago comparing various wiki and wiki-adjacent offerings. I’ve settled on DokuWiki as it’s easy to host. The UI is dated (though I don’t think it’s outright ugly). The vanilla experience is a bit bare-bones but there’s a built-in GUI for searching and installing plugins. The only pain point I can foresee is upgrading and long-term management thanks to juggling so many plugins. If the newest version of the base software doesn’t play nice with a particular plugin, or if a plugin stops being developed, etc.

And this is exactly what I want, something easy to deploy and host for a small group of friends. It doesn’t need to scale infinitely or federate.

Judging by how productive I’ve been just in the last 8 hours, I’d say going from Mediawiki to Dokuwiki was a good choice. I’m not even sure why. DW still uses markup instead of a WYSIWYG editor, which I’m fine with. I think it’s the namespaces. MW does have them, but you have to set them up with a config file on the server, and adding and removing them cannot be done lightly. With DW it’s as easy as searching for new_namespace:some_new_article, and the namespace is created along with the article. So I have a scratchpad namespace where I can work on drafts, a stories namespace to put my attempts at creative writing, a lore namespace for, well, canonized lore tidbits, and so on. And I don’t need to worry about names colliding like I did with MW where lore articles and story titles often conflicted.

DW lets you use hierarchy when it works, and loose categories (tags) when it doesn’t (with the tags plugin that is). With MW you just have categories but no hierarchy. Bookstack is the opposite. It forces you to use its shelf>book>chapter>page organization system. It does have tags, too, but you can’t have pages outside of books, and the pages have an explicit order. You can fairly easily change that order, but it’s always there.

Back to DokuWiki, the blog plugin has proven invaluable over the last few days. I can jot down ideas as blog entries and push them to the main lore namespace if I think they’re worth keeping.

If I haven’t scared you away with my nonsense, the DW instance is now public. The link I provided earlier should point to the new server. https://constructed.world/

It’s behind the hamburger menu (3 horizontal lines on the top left of the page), at least with the latest default skin. You can also check out a list of all pages by searching Special:AllPages, and a list of all categories with special:categories The categories will in turn take you to lists of pages tagged with that category. It’s great for going on wiki walks.

The DW instance isn’t public (yet) but here’s a link to the currently public mediawiki instance.

https://constructed.world/

I never invested the time to make the content very discoverable, so you’ll have to make copious use of the random page and what links here features if you want to see what I’ve written.

Enjoy my stress-induced maladaptive daydreams.

Otter’s almost there. It needs a few things before I’d call it a wiki rather than just a documentation system, namely backlinks and a way to differentiate between links to existing and nonexisting pages, as well as a way to see what nonexisting pages are most wanted.

I’m currently migrating my worldbuilding and conlanging project to Dokuwiki. Right now I have an Obsidian vault used for brainstorming and drafting and a public Mediawiki for stuff I feel is worth showing off. Like Obsidian, DW stores everything as plaintext (it’s not markdown but it’s readable and the tables are better IMO). Like Mediawiki, DW keeps a version history so I can keep track of how my ideas evolve over time, which is crucial for conlang documentation. I keep tons of example texts that may reflect earlier phases of the grammar and vocab that I may need to reference. Unlike both Obsidian and MW, Dokuwiki has access control, so I can keep a private namespace for drafts and a public namespace for stuff I think is polished enough to show.

I’m not sure DW meet’s OP’s requirements for “out of the box” functionality though. I think it’s intended to be rather bare bones but be very easy to extend with plugins. The plugin browser is built in, so customization is a breeze. Plugins can be individually installed, enabled, disabled, and updated through the admin GUI.

Bookstack comes up a lot when “easy to use” is mentioned. It has a WYSYWIG editor by default and has a fairly simple install using a shell script on their docs website. Problems I have with it are it’s not really a wiki. You can’t link to nonexistent pages or see what other pages link to the current page (There are backlinks, I was mistaken. It’s under the “info” section on the right side of the page). It’s more of a documentation system.

But I’ve seen it out in the wild being used for your use case (Tunic game wiki)

UPDATE:

I see Bookstack mentioned a lot, so I decided to try installing it. I took the better part of a day and I still can’t get it working. Pity since it looks a lot nicer than Dokuwiki and has access control unlike Mediawiki.

XMPP doesn’t seem to be well supported in terms of Windows clients

Lemme tell ya somethin about Tiddlywiki. Actually a lot of knowledge base software has this problem (I’ve specifically encountered it in Trillium, Obsidian, and TW).

You have your body where you’re austencibly storing the meat of your information. But you also have configurable metadata fields. Obsidian has its YAML headers, and TW and Trillium have separate metadata forms. All three of these have scads of methods for sorting and querying and filtering the metadata but next to nothing for the actual note. But the note is already organized data. It has headings and subheadings and text under those headings. Why can’t that be queried? I got into this on the TW forums. Everyone was basically telling me to cram all of the actual data into the header, leaving the note itself virtually empty. Obsidian has its bases feature which does the same thing. Then why not just have a bunch of YAML files? A genuine question, I’d actually love a system for sorting and querying a bunch of organized YAML files almost like a noSQL database. But Obsidian doesn’t let you do that. It has to be markdown.

I got off track there, but there it is.

Was it the backend, maintaining the DB and juggling extensions and such, or was it organizing the wiki itself? I’ve heard lots of people complain about maintenance. My personal project currently uses Mediawiki with sqlite as the DB. I’m essentially the only editor and almost the only reader, so it’s more of a CMS than anything.

Because the wiki is public, I have to maintain a separate KB (currently Obsidian) for drafts and scratch notes and other “thinking out loud” such and such that I’m not ready to present to the public. That’s why I’m looking at something with access control. I’d like to consolidate all my work on this project to a single place, with notes and drafts accessible only to me, that I can publish when I’m satisfied. Dokuwiki with a crapload of plugins seems to be the closest.

logseq

Forgot about logseq. It’s an outliner first and foremost, so not what I’m looking for.

silverbullet

This one’s almost there. No version history. For accessibility reasons I’d like something that clearly separates the acts of writing/editing and reading/consuming. It works better with screen readers. In silverbullet, headings only look like headings, but they’re just undifferentiated text to a screen reader. Obsidian has the same problem). I get why people want a seamless editing experience, but it’s very important to me to keep track of how my ideas change over time, and Obsidian and Silverbullet are constantly saving your edits, making versioning difficult.

Helix notes (mentioned recently in another post) tries to get past this by having a “save new version” button.

QOwnNotes

Very very simple. I can see why some would be attracted to it but I’m not.