Thinktool

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.