In response to my post about Android phones without Google Play [1] I received an email recommending Joplin for notes on Android [2].
Joplin supports storing notes on a number of protocols including Nextcloud and WebDAV. I setup WebDAV because it’s easiest, here is Digital Ocean instructions for WebDAV on Apache [3]. That basically works. One problem for my use case is that the Joplin client doesn’t support accounts on multiple servers and the only released way of sharing notes between accounts is using the paid Joplin Cloud service.
There is a Joplin Server in beta which allows sharing notes but that is designed to run in Docker and is written in TypeScript so it was too much pain to setup. One mitigating factor is that there are “Notebooks” which are collections of notes. So if multiple people who trust each other share an account they can have Notebooks for personal notes and a Notebook for shared notes.
There is also a Snap install of the client for Debian [4]. Snap isn’t my favourite way of doing things but packaging JavaScript programs will probably be painful so I’ll do it if I continue using Joplin.
Joplin server is not free software and it has its own proprietary license. See https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/blob/dev/packages/server/LICENSE.md
L: Thanks for the information, I’ll look for another program.
If you can accept to use a imap server as a backend and then sharing notes with your devices but not with other people you can try imapnotes2.
Paolo: That’s an interesting concept. The IMAP protocol is designed for this sort of thing and I only want to share notes with trusted people not with the world at large.