A while ago, we read the book Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte (Figure 1). It starts with the idea that we are all a little overloaded and bombarded with information, and how overwhelming it can be to not be able to retrieve the information that we need at a later time. The foundation of a Second Brain is to increase the capture and cataloguing rate of information, and the book delves into lots of custom systems to tag, organise, prioritise, and retrieve information. This Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) idea feels similar to the ideas of David Allen and the older, but still brilliant, ‘Getting Things Done’ system.
At the heart of these PKM systems is the concept of ubiquitous capture: the idea that, as a start, we need to capture the information of interest. This is also an idea in journalling and is basically being proactive about note-taking. The question then is how to store these bits of information. There are lots of options.
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The catch with self-hosted PKM is never the capture part. Notes apps are a solved problem. The hard bits are retrieval and the "will my data survive" test. A folder of markdown files wins on longevity because it is just text, but loses on retrieval the moment you have more than a few hundred notes and no index.
The middle ground that has worked for me is keeping everything as plain files and using a separate indexer on top, so the notes themselves stay portable and the search tool can be swapped. That way the second brain does not become a hostage to whichever app or database format you happened to start with.
Sovereignty matters most on the boring axis: export paths, backup, and how ugly it is to leave. Fancy capture UIs come and go.