Here is why

loose-leaf is an app pri­mar­ily for sit­u­a­tions when you are in a rush or have an im­pulse to write some­thing down while it’s still hot. Or when you need to quickly save some­thing you’ve found be­cause you might for­get or lose it. The thing is, I find that jot­ting is in­spir­ing, use­ful, and nec­es­sary, es­pe­cially when notes are ex­tremely chaotic and dis­or­ga­nized.

There are many pow­er­ful note-tak­ing apps. In fact, I use Obsidian, but I re­al­ized that quick and dirty note-tak­ing works much bet­ter, as blank-page writer’s block is real. As time went by, I started jot­ting in the most mal­adapted place of all — in mes­sen­gers, in chats with my­self. When I open a chat to write an idea down, it feels nat­ural, as if I were writ­ing to a friend with­out think­ing too much about how to for­mu­late it; it’s ac­cept­ing and gives con­fi­dence. But apart from how in­se­cure this is, a stream of no­ti­fi­ca­tions, pop­ups, and ban­ners rushes in, and I quickly lose fo­cus. To make the ex­pe­ri­ence more tol­er­a­ble, I built rou­tines that work for me. I don’t like read­ing a 12-page es­say on mo­bile, so I send the link to a chat, then open it on desk­top and read. Or a friend sends me a link, a song, a video, a book, and I need a big­ger screen, bet­ter speak­ers, more fo­cus to check it.

At the same time I have a beef with both mes­sen­gers and com­plex knowl­edge/​pro­duc­tiv­ity sys­tems. I don’t want an app gam­i­fy­ing me to the max so I can feel the flare of pro­duc­tiv­ity track­ing things I might even don’t need to track. And mes­sen­gers are get­ting worse and worse. They are ei­ther free and mine your data, or paid and still try to squeeze the most out of you. They are clumsy, non-cus­tomis­able, and un­in­ter­ested in your use cases. They are also prime tar­gets for third-party at­tacks, be­cause the most sen­si­tive and close-to-the-heart in­for­ma­tion lives there. They also ef­fec­tively own data, one way or an­other, lock­ing users in. Sometimes it’s pos­si­ble to ex­port, but it’s not clear what to do with that backup or how to use it. You of­ten can’t just use the app while keep­ing your data off servers.

That’s how loose-leaf came to life. It might seem strange: I need so many words to high­light what may be just a tech­ni­cal dif­fer­ence. But in the fu­ture there will be more apps like this: lo­cal-first and end-to-end en­crypted. While end-to-end en­cryp­tion is in­creas­ingly adopted and dis­cussed, lo­cal-first is yet not so widely known.

Common apps are de­signed to work with cen­tral­ized servers and can’t work at all with­out them. It might not seem like a big is­sue — we are used to real-time col­lab­o­ra­tion — but if it’s just you or a group of friends, why pay ever-ris­ing fees for cloud stor­age? Especially know­ing that you could own it on your de­vice for free? Why be con­stantly on­line?

Local-first has al­ways been around, but it has boomed dur­ing the last two years. Simply put, it means you own your data. But more than that, it means loose-leaf is just a tool for tak­ing notes and is not cen­tered around a plat­forms, ac­counts, data min­ing, or en­gage­ment har­vest­ing. It does not mat­ter whether you have an ac­count or not — it does not need to send any­thing any­where to work — to keep notes on your de­vice.

But loose-leaf is not just a fancy notepad ei­ther: it can sync data across de­vices as well. Almost in real time and en­crypted. How is that pos­si­ble? The loose-leaf server is ba­si­cally a data-ag­nos­tic re­lay — a tem­po­rary data­base that stores and shares en­crypted data, sync­ing it to clients if they pro­vide the cor­rect cryp­to­graphic keys. That’s why never lose ac­coun­t’s 24-words, it’s su­per-se­cure pass­word that al­lows adding new de­vices or restor­ing ac­count on an old one.

On free plans re­lay keeps data within 50mb limit for 60 days. It means if none de­vices go on­line dur­ing 60 days, re­lay will purge the data. But if de­vice goes on­line af­ter that, it will sync data again all right. So this only means that if you have only one de­vice and it is lost and you want to re­store your notes on a new one, you have 60 days from the last time the lost de­vice was on­line to re­store your ac­count. In all other cases it should be fine and just sync with­out is­sues.

I aimed to make loose-leaf a store for every­thing, so or­gan­i­cally that in­cludes pho­tos, videos, and other files. This is pos­si­ble on paid plans where you re­ceive much more re­li­able and per­sis­tent stor­age. More on pric­ing here.