An introductory note.
I have been looking for a decent note-taking application for a while, although not with any urgency, as you can infer from the title. After trying software that was too complex and paper journals that were inadequately searchable, I found The Archive which suited me well in terms of simplicity but was not cross-platform. Then a second look at Joplin found the Goldilocks solution -- works on all my different Apple stuff, sufficient organisation, nothing to get in the way, especially after I added the tags plugin so I do not have to fiddle with a mouse or learn shortcuts.
Better still, I can host it myself on a Linux server so it is secure and "free" (albeit there is cost in my computing resources and maintenance). That seemed a bit unreasonable; in my experience developers need to eat to code, so I have contributed to the project today and all things being normal will do so annually.
My primary use is simply research notes or meta-commentary on other things I am (or might be) doing, semi-random stuff not worth an entire folder of content on disk but worth being able to track down easily. There is no publishing, no collaboration, this is personal use. I use another product for To Do items, although I do have a notebook ""Notes for action or inaction". where things might morph into a project one day.
I have no current support or feature requests to make so my presence is likely to be pretty unnoticeable, though I read the forum routinely. You never know what you will find.
Cheers
C.