Is Joplin ok?

Lounge
1

Hello everyone,

I am a long-time user of Joplin. Convinced by the tool, I pushed for its integration within my company about a year ago via the Joplin Cloud solution, following very positive discussions with the team at the time.

Today, after daily corporate use and actively following the project's updates on social media, I feel that for the past three months or so, the application has been taking a rather worrying turn.

I would like to share our feelings with you and get the community's opinion on a few specific points:

1. The development direction: where did the simplicity go?

For us, Joplin's strength has always been in its DNA: a practical, simple open-source note-taking app, focused on sharing and equipped with well-thought-out core features.

Unfortunately, I feel like the current development is losing its way. We are seeing the addition of many features that, besides being barely noticeable in daily use, don't seem fundamentally useful. Instead of perfecting the core tool, the team seems to be scattering across various topics. Where exactly are we heading? Are we still here to improve the core application, or just to pile on secondary features?

2. Unrecognizable communication

For years, the project ran on a classic open-source model (Forum, GitHub, Mastodon) with a genuine, human communication effort. I'm thinking specifically of the YouTube videos that allowed us to train over 50 employees internally.

Today, it's the exact opposite:

  • Communication seems to be 100% generated by artificial intelligence.

  • The visuals don't even represent the app anymore, and the Joplin logo is sometimes distorted or randomly generated. To be completely transparent, I think this is a shame for a project of this scale.

  • There is no longer any real community management or authentic presence.

3. Customer support and worrying turnover

This is the point that is making us lose trust. As Cloud customers, we wanted to upscale our solution to a more advanced tier. However, we have received absolutely no response to our various emails.

Since I had the direct number of our former sales contact, I took the liberty of calling him. He informed me that he had left the company. This turnover, coupled with the current team's radio silence, is not reassuring at all. From the outside, we get the unpleasant impression that humans have been replaced by AI, both for social media management and customer relations.

What are your thoughts?

For those of you who are at the heart of the community and closer to the technical side:

  • Do you think Joplin is still on an upward trajectory since the beginning of 2026?

  • Or do you also have the feeling that the project is losing its soul and running out of steam?

In any case, this is our perception within the company based on our usage and the image the project is projecting today. Thank you in advance for your feedback!

2

Personally, what I have seen is refinement, squashing a lot of the peculiarities and annoyances of the application, and then a lot of littled polish items. As for new features … Joplin lives within a competitive landscape. It can't ignore the featuresets of its competitors.

Trajectory since 2026? 2026 is 7 months old. Can't comment on that.

Support: I dunno. I found a very nasty bug this year for example. Filed it. And went back and forth with developers on it. And they resolved it. Other support? I just haven't had major issues so, I can't comment. And I certainly don't have the corporate perspective that you do.

3

I've been using my own VSCode plugin, and its main features haven't changed fundamentally for years, so I have no idea what new features Joplin has added. That said, given the impact of AI, I wouldn't be surprised if Joplin started laying off staff.

4

For email please use this one:

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And no, no change to technical support or social media, still human. We do have a new social media manager who does things differently. Not everything's perfect as she's just starting but I like what she does overall, and we are going to adjust a few issues I noticed in the past few weeks

5

i agree Joplin is going in a new direction and I absolutely love it. Much more polished, but retaining fantastic speed, and the AI integration is starting to look very impressive. An indispensable tool increasingly the central hub of my workflow.

Keep up the great work :+1:

6

I understand you're worried about software you care about. I do too.

However, unlike you recently I've seen very positive trends in Joplin. Joplin is changing and becoming more mature stable solution. It's finally good enough to be recommended well outside of notetaking world. Joplin Web Clipper is the best of the industry. Import from proprietary formats are so good, users of other notetakers put it in their guides.

Looking at the GSoC initiatives, you can tell that the team is absolutely flooded by code reviews. Now there are dozen times more code to review than few years ago. But for a user it's great news since a lot of this code is paying off technical debt and fixing years old bugs.

Yet, despite the overload, they're religiously pursuing safety of data, ease of adoption and everyday use. This might look like not the core for your team, but I bet each of individuals in that team would appreciate focus on their personal efficiency.

More than that, for the team there are many useful features in the works. Case in point this merged PR is to add publishing notebooks with all its subnotebooks. The feature is particularly useful for publishing wiki like notebooks among the company.

To address AI: in my opinion, Joplin is very practical and critical of AI adoption. People develop Joplin plugins with AI and for AI. There are already multiple unique implementations of AI features in plugins. Here, Joplin is trying merely to standardise what plugin AI devs already putting in their work.

I don't know about your experience of communication, but in my view Joplin devs don't use AI to talk either to community or to each other. They discourage others to generate documentation and ask newbies to rewrite verbose ai-like paragraphs.

I empathize a lot with your search of simplicity in software. And, in fact, I see it in Joplin developers too. That makes me think that Joplin is doing so much better than just "ok" :wink: