Knowledge Base Networking
About the missing features for a new era of Social Networks for nerds.
Body
I started my journey as a developer motivated by my desire to have the possibility of managing all my pdf, presentations and websites coming from a single source of truth. I initially got in love with Pandoc and Ruby Jekyll. As time went through, started using OrgMode and later Obsidian.
I found that to be the great resource available to do what OrgMode only dreamed of: having all your life and projects managed over plain-text.
Text-based queries
Recent advances in markdown creation and rendering set MDX as the most viable option for writing awesome content. At the same time, the principles that run Obsidian and Logseq opened up a bunch of possibilities for writing in a structured way.
Who would have thought that by simply setting a standard pattern to log your time would suffice to get metrics about your productivity? That's what Knowledge Base plugins brought to the table.
Interoperability at the core of Knowledge Base Management
Old ideas that founded open source communities have finally wrapped up in these kinds of software. The SSR era brings the right amount of interoperability to make it possible: markdown with frontmatter as plain text, configured content, and a server that builds it.
In Ruby on Rails, view_components and Hotwire have made this possible.
However, we are still missing a few social features for those inner-life second brains: collaboration, notifications, sharing, search, and tags that understand the knowledge graph.