But none of these will ever touch the Evernotes of the world. I think the big step ahead here will be decentralization. Today, my notes are at the mercy of Evernote/OneNote/Keep.
Some newer options like StandardNotes [1] are taking this head-on. But even here the focus seems to be on easy import/export, which is a positive action that will have to be taken by the user to hold on to their data. One thing we know about user behavior is they they will not do anything that has friction.
A decentralized storage engine (like IPFS[2]) would be the ideal storage, which would allow copies of notes to automatically exist, and the user would not even have to worry about their storage provider going away.
Another point I want to make is that most notes don't have to be private.. anecdotal-ly speaking, most notes would benefit from being public, in that others will enhance whatever data/research you're collecting. So the next generation of note-taking will be about majority public, and a few private notes.
If anyone's interested in discussing this in a bit more detail I could setup a mailing list to discuss a bit more on the potential architecture of such a system.
How is that true? Not citing it's not, just asking.
In my understanding of IPFS, longevity of something is just a byproduct of it's popularity. If you're writing unpopular notes, then it would inherently have no longevity, right? Ie, if no one else has read your note, then when your storage goes down so does your note.
One way could be to have a more cooperative-like application. Let's say you join the cooperative by signing up to the application, and everyone agree to automatically help seed each others notes.
Another way could be to have small cooperatives inside the application, based on groups/organizations. So you sign up, apply to an group and everyone in the group help seeding each other.
Yet another way could be when you sign up, you'll just seed your own notes. However, if you pay 1 Euro per month, the maintainer(s) of the application will help you seed it. Or combine this with the group-idea and have groups announce their re-seeding possibility on the network, and pay the group.
Neither of the ideas are perfect and serve just as examples of what could be possible.
Btw anilgulecha, I would interested in participating in a discussion about it, and you might want to raise it as an issue on https://github.com/ipfs/notes, lot's of people who care about the same thing there.
You can charge a continuing fee like $1-2/yr for updates for the self-hosted software. This would bring in more users because it's self hosted and they don't have to worry about them losing their notes on your website or you spying on them. And you're obviously not looking for a lot of money since you're not asking for much.
One actual suggestion is to offer more fonts in the premium in case you want to go ahead with this business model.
That's in addition to supporting that number of customers with bug fixes and updates and newsletters and a website and such. These grow with number of users. If it's a business, it's better to charge real money because doing so will validate (or invalidate) the business quickly and provide the revenue for making it a real business.
If it catches on, the creator can always increase the prices and grandfather in the old customers. You might've noticed that the only mention of pricing was for $5 and it talked about simple features for premium users. So I felt like that amount was a good deal since no one would blink before saying okay to a couple dollars a year deal, but have a one time fee, some people won't take the leap of faith.
