What I’ve seen and read about the ‘Fediverse’ is quite promising, because I believe it could encourage something of a return to the kind of online communities that were common before social media, and that, I’ll argue, is objectively preferable. The ‘Fediverse’ is essentially a network of relatively small online communities, built on standards that enable the sharing of content between servers, and potentially those online communities could be designed to be superficially similar to the old phpBB-styled forums.
Emacs is very often mentioned in the context of something called ‘Org-Mode’, which is some kind of journal and ‘personal knowledge management’ solution - it’s not ideal for most use cases, but apparently it’s popular. I’m not sure what Emacs Org-Mode does that other editors can’t do, but I’m giving it a try anyway.
First thing is we need to add org-mode to Emacs, and this is possible using the integrated package manager.
Having become accustomed to the Vim editor in the ~16 years I’d been using Linux, I hadn’t really bothered with Emacs, though I’d come across numerous mentions of it, and many commenters on Hacker News say it’s their go-to editor.
Vim is considerably more lightweight (about 300MB more lightweight), and it has many things that apparently aren’t included in the default installation of Emacs - syntax highlighting, code folding, tabs, symmetric encryption, etc.
I don’t know why I haven’t given this a proper look before. Essentially Joplin is a markdown editor application that enables the creation of multiple notebooks, supports tagging and enables the synchronisation of notes between multiple devices. Currently I have it installed and working perfectly between my laptop, smartphone, tablet and Linux VM, with all notes synched flawlessly. One of the main things I like about Joplin is it’s perfectly usable as a standalone application, without having to register an online account or upload anything to a third party server.
