I use a tool called zim wiki. Its less of a wiki and more of a notes app with a tree sidebar for navigation and linking between pages. Everything is stored as txt files which works awesome.

I would love an alternative that is free/and or possible to self-host.

However, I do not see how this compares to Notion. How do I edit this HTML file on my phone? How do I add bookmarks to it via a hotkey? What is the equivalent of Notion's databases? Does it have Slash commands? This list of questions could go on for much longer. I really don't want to sound like a Notion shill, especially since I also use other tools (e.g. GitLab) for my knowledge base, but many of the suggested alternatives lack basically all the features that I describe in my post.

I am not sure you understood how Tiddly Wiki works.

>How do I edit this HTML file on my phone?

Open https://tiddlywiki.com/, click the pencil icon on any of the entries. Edit away. The edits can persist with a self-hosted solution. Or you can just download the edited HTML file.

>Does it have Slash commands?

You probably mean "keyboard shortcuts". Yes, a plenty. Get started here:

https://tiddlywiki.com/static/KeyboardShortcuts.html

This doesn't cover all of it; there are shortcuts in the editor (Ctrl+B, for example to make text bold), and they are fully customizeable. Everything can be customized.

>How do I add bookmarks to it via a hotkey?

TiddlyWiki is tag-based. You can add tags with a keyboard. Tags define all the structure (table of contents and search).

>What is the equivalent of Notion's databases?

I am not familiar enough with Notion to answer this. If you ask "can I do ____ with TW", I can tell you.

>but many of the suggested alternatives lack basically all the features that I describe in my post

Sure, because they are different products. Feature-by-feature comparison doesn't make sense; if you want Notion, you need Notion.

If you want to organize your knowledge, Tiddly Wiki is one very fine tool to do that.

TW is not a CRM, it is not a Calendar or Google Sheets alternative (as Notion claims to be). It is not an all-in-one tool.

What it is, it's a personal knowledge base tool - and that's what the title of your post says. At that, it can do better than Notion. Or worse. User's call.

>This list of questions could go on for much longer.

The same can be true going from the other side. Here is one:

How do you access your knowledge in Notion 10 years after Notion-the-company goes the way of the dodo?

With slash commands, I do not mean keyboard shortcuts. The lack of customized keyboard shortcuts is one of my issues with Notion, but their slash commands are great.

It basically means that you can access all kinds of features by just typing ahead after a '/' without knowing a precise shortcut. E.g. if I want my text to appear blue I would type /blue. I would also get there with /color or even by just starting to type either of those words and Notion will make suggestions. Slack, Confluence, and others do it in a similar way.

I think I do understand Tiddly Wiki works, as I have quite a bit of experience with Wiki systems, didn't use TW in particular though.

Some of the features you put aside as not needed for personal knowledge management are actually very nice for personal knowledge management. You might want to look a bit into my post to see what those databases can do ;)

> How do you access your knowledge in Notion 10 years after Notion-the-company goes the way of the dodo?

This is a very valid concern, that was also raised by some other commenters. In my opinion, Notion's exporting capabilities are quite good and I use them regularly. However, I do hope that we will get more automated and sophisticated third-party backup solutions when they have an official API.

How do you recommend running it? The install guide lists a half-dozen different possibilities including PHP, Node, Ruby which all look to be vastly different solutions.

You just download the HTML file and open it to 'run' it. Then, once you've made changes, use your browsers "save as" feature to save a copy. Everything is in browser.

Other options do things like public hosting.

Personally, I just use the HTML file with the Timimi Firefox plugin installed for autosaving the current file.

> use your browsers "save as" feature to save a copy

> Don't attempt to use the browser File/Save menu option to save changes (it doesn't work)

It looks like TiddlyWiki doesn't recommend that exact method anymore.

I use TiddlyDesktop and open with it the HTML file that I downloaded from the site. The desktop app takes care of saving the file when you finished editing a post and save it.

Sorry for the confusion. There's a button you press in Tiddly Wiki that generates a new HTML.

You "Save As.." that.

I would recommend just downloading the HTML file and using that.

To save changes, click the red checkmark, and "save as..." the updated HTML over the old copy.

Switch to other possibilities if you use it enough to justify that.

That's the save method I'm using since one year now. It perfectly fits my needs as a single user of this wiki. No infrastructure to set up, it works out of the box. As a former ikiwiki user I won't go back.

I run it in docker.

https://github.com/djmaze/tiddlywiki-docker

How well does Tiddlywiki scale? Would this single file support a large knowledge base accumulated over decades?

Jeremy Ruston the creator, says a 100MB TiddlyWiki works fine on a 2013 era laptop, and that browsers are some of the best optimized VMs available to work on (in the video I linked in another comment).

Most of knowledge is text, maybe a picture here and there.

I, a lifetime worth of knowledge in reasonable HTML of Tiddly Wiki would take less toll on your PC then the current CNN front page.

you can use tiddywiki with a node backend.

https://github.com/djmaze/tiddlywiki-docker

if you want to host on arm device, https://github.com/djmaze/tiddlywiki-docker/issues/15

I strongly support this recommendation. Tiddly Wiki has enough features and extensibility that I wasn’t tempted to write my own bibliography management system after discovering it. Yes, I know there is dedicated software for that but they didn’t fit how I want to structure my notes.

This, together with github plugin. You edit/create a post, press save, the whole website is committed back to github. In a single html file. Painless

I use tiddlywiki with noteself on a self-hosted server.

I've been doing the same for a couple of months now, and I love it. Can access it from various devices through the browser and it syncs well.

Big thumbs up from me so far.

The hardest part was setting up a CouchDB instance for the backend, but I found some instructions and fiddled with it until it worked.

Link: https://noteself.github.io/

how do you secure it, is it a long obfuscated URL?

My setup requires a username and password to be entered, which I think is the intended authentication method, since it uses a database at the backend.

Joe Armstrong of Erlang fame was a fan of Tiddly Wiki, and there's a video of the Tiddly Wiki creator and him enthusing about it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uv1UfLPK7_Q