> Obsidian seems, from what I've seen, focused on the ability to graph notes, which I don't really care about. I want note-taking, list-making, and markdown friendly.

FWIW I use obsidian for "note-taking, list-making, and markdown friendly" and have not bothered with note graphs etc and it none of such features have gone on my way ever.

The good thing imo about obsidian is that it is perfectly possible to keep it all dead simple if that is what you want. The only "advanced" feature I use is rendering a slides-based presentation out of a markdown file (and setting up a css file for this). For any other notetaking or knowledge management tool I have spent more time configuring/learning to use it than actually taking notes.

For my uses, notion is unnecessarily complicated.

Note-taking, list making, and markdown friendly kind of describe obsidian. You can organize the files however you wish.

Zim wiki is brilliant. I've been using it for years. It's very extendable

> Zim handles several types of markup, like headings, bullet lists and of course bold, italic and highlighted.

OK, I think this may be a bit less powerful than Notion and Obsidian.

A good bit less powerful yes. But the simplicity is a huge strength when it comes to long term tech. I started using it in 2012 I believe.

The most important thing in any note taking app is to use it consistently and use it for years. And bring it with you as you change jobs.

Sometimes simple things that work in plain text files that can be exported and imported easily is what you need for long term note taking.

> I want note-taking, list-making, and markdown friendly.

I feel like you just described Obsidian. You can do more with tagging and linking but you definitely don't have to

Obsidian is a markdown editor. The graphing is not pushed, and can actually be disabled in the app settings. Very customizable. Worth a try!

I made the jump to AFFiNe (https://affine.pro/) a few months ago and have really liked using it. I am able to self host and have found it to be a _nearly_ 1:1 replacement for Notion. Affine's database implementation isn't nearly as nice though - but they are workable and they are improving.

My biggest gripe is that the OSS project is very oriented around a hosted product rather than the self hosted - so things like AI configuration is tricky at best and ive had to manually manipulate my account in the db to remove "free" user limitations.

I have the same set of requirements you’re describing and Obsidian is perfect.

You can disable the graph feature and never link any notes.

Obsidian's plug-in ecosystem is fantastic. I've used Obsidian for three years as a replacement for Notion, and I have never used the Graph mode. My Obsidian plugins enable automatic task synchronization with TickTick (where I manage my tasks) and allow me to set up features like templates. I strongly recommend giving it a spin.

The only downside for me is the inability to use it from a web browser. This isn't a major issue for my workflows.

What are you using to sync with TickTick?

Obsidian has all of that and more if you go for some of the advanced extensions. It's not about "graphing notes" as much as connecting a note to another. It's really not that different from inserting a page into the text of another page in Notion

Silverbullet?

https://github.com/silverbulletmd/silverbullet

if you’re open to something outside the browser, anytype runs natively on linux. local-first and e2e encrypted by default. you can sync via p2p or through backup nodes. markdown, lists, note-taking all covered - just no browser version yet

Joplin

Have you tried affine?