I want to love Joplin (open source! markdown!) but I just can't get past how ugly it is. Its iPhone app is just a horrendous mishmash of colors and non-native UI elements.

Joplin is cool because you can add your own css to customize the desktop app. I realize not every is interested in doing that, but I’ve been an advocate once I tweaked the styles to my liking [0]. Agree with you that the mobile app styles are very rough, but the community is very active and open to suggestions / improvements [1].

[0] https://github.com/amandamcg/joplin-theme [1] https://discourse.joplinapp.org/

I'm only a week into using it, but check out Notion. I really love it so far. The UI has blown me away in both beauty and how it gets out of the way.

Notion is amazing, and they recently removed the cap on the amount of "blocks" you're allowed to use on the free plan[0].

No affiliation, just a happy customer. :-)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23236786

I wish Notion had a self-hosted version. I store a lot of things in Joplin (previously Evernote) that I'm just not comfortable having on 3rd party servers :(

Agreed, Notion is awesome.

I have even stronger feelings about Roam though. Notion is "better" than just abt anything else like it, whereas Roam is different -- there is nothing else like it.

Roam as in https://roamresearch.com/?

Yes!

What about org-roam

https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam

https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-server

Might be nice for Emacs / orgmode users?

Joplin looks really interesting - thank you for the recommendation!