Support Laurent. Really. Do it now

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Do you use Joplin?

Has Joplin changed the way you do things? Has it become one of those go-to applications that you turn to time and again?

Do you value open source, free protocols, open formats, and things like end-to-end encryption and self-hosting your data securely . . . synced across platforms?

Then it also needs to be supported. It needs to be supported financially, and it needs to be supported technically. It even needs to be supported via evangelism (like with this post).

Financially

I know times are weird and many of us have income challenges ahead of us (I am self-employed, for example, and the downturn greatly concerns me very directly), but if you can afford it, and I know many of you can . . . help support @Laurent and the work he has been doing with Joplin (and rsync-time-backup for that matter). Send him a few dollars per month. Currently, you can do that via . . .

  • Sign up for Joplin Cloud. Really! You will thank me.
    ... alternatively ...
  • Send him a few dollars per month. Currently, you can do that through Paypal, GitHub, or Patreon. Visit the Joplin donation page for more information and suggestions for other ways to contribute.

Technically

@Laurent has his helpers. He has his testers. And he even has folks who have contributed code. He needs more help. Especially with bugs. He needs help fixing bugs, but he also needs help taking badly written bug reports and confirming the issues and better articulating them. He needs help identifying which issues are truly bad and which are less critical (triaging). He needs help merging issues that are identical (dupes). He needs help converting non-techy bug reports filed here into techy bug reports filed on GitHub. He needs help finding bugs in the documentation and improving that documentation. Etc. Etc. Heck, we need someone competent enough to take over if @Laurent gets hit by a bus or throws up his hands and quits. :slight_smile: We need a more robust technical community surrounding his wonderful application.

Evangelism

I know evangelism sounds like a bad word, but in the world of open source, it is not. It is a reference to grassroots marketing. If you love Joplin, you need to market it to your friends, family, and co-workers. Do you have a blog? This would be an excellent topic. More people using Joplin will make Joplin a better thing. It means it will receive better coverage and testing on various operating systems. It means @Laurent will get more help in all these areas.

Laurent has created an awesome thing. To be frank, there is no other application out there that really captures what it does. It needs to be supported by you. Yes, you! And you over there. And yeah, you, . . . that guy.

Thank you for your time. I'm now proudly supporting this project and hope you will as well. -t

UPDATE: I was supporting his efforts for years via monthly GitHub sponsorship. As of 2022-08-25, I just signed up for Joplin Cloud (way overdue).

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I will when I’m sure I will migrate ; soon I think
I can help with documentation perhaps for now

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Thank for your support @t0dd, much appreciated!

I think the bus factor in this project is not too high since there are several admins with full access to the GitHub repo for instance and to the forum too. For admins it's also possible to push desktop and CLI releases to CI. So even if I suddenly vanish, the important parts of the project should still be accessible :slight_smile:

Did you know Joplin doesn’t have a Wikipedia article? I plan to fix that. I will update this discourse topic once it is written so I can get help improving it.

That would be great, and I think the app indeed meets Wikipedia's notability criteria, in particular due to the articles in several reliable sources. If you need some links to source the article let me know.

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<conspiracy_theory> Evernote Black-ops team? </conspiracy_theory>

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@laurent

Do you have any estimate / guesstimate as to the size of the Joplin userbase? I’m not dreaming up some crazy scheme, just curious…

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You will need to collect together articles about Joplin, and make sure you do not fall foul of their Original Research rule.

I did find a couple of blogs on Joplin. In addition to one mentioned in a nearby thread.

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For reliable sources, I guess these ones could be used too:

There’s also the two articles in the Linux Format magazine, and several other articles in non-English language websites (There was lots of traffic from Chinese and Japanese websites in particular at some point).

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No idea to be honest, although I assume some numbers could be derived from the download stats: https://joplinapp.org/stats/ and from the number of downloads in the iOS and Android app stores.

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Just another source:

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@laurent
Wikipedia article draft is under review. May take two months, it says. Oi. But … pretty good, I think. If you see ways to improve it, lemme know.

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Still a source:

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That’s great, thanks @t0dd. If after 4 weeks it’s still not reviewed it may never be (some articles sit there forever), in which case you can always try to create the article directly and see what’s the community’s feedback.

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I donated money almost immediately after finding the project. I hadn’t even decided to switch over from Evernote yet. But I recognized the effort, so I did. And you should too. It doesn’t have to be much, and you should know how encouraging even just a cup of coffees worth is. Don’t get into a mindset thinking it’s not enough. Just do what you can.

Great post Todd

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Awesome! I found a small typo though:

Joplin 1.0.218 running in the GNOME Desktop Environment on Fredora Linux 32

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Okay folks. I edited it a bunch more. Added a few more links. And I fixed up the images to be Wikipedia legal (had to add metadata and a license to each). Fixed a few typos. Etc. etc.

@Tessus, I changed text for that image. I am not sure if I fixed your typo and I am not sure what typo you are referring to. I just noticed your message so … Lemme know if I solved it.

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I meant Fredora. I'm pretty sure you meant Fedora. :wink:

Btw, it's still there.

Update: I fixed it.

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@tessus Ah ha!!! That's because until you pointed at it directly, my brain refused to see it. :slight_smile:

@laurent As for the 4 week thing. We'll see. But there are pages like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_note-taking_software that you can't add Joplin to until it is blessed by the Wikipedia Gods. We'll see. Let's be hopeful. I think I was rather rigorous.

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Some ironic, OpenSource project, and the lowest downloads score :smiley:

Windows 60% vs macOS 23% vs Linux 17%

Source | Joplin statistics | Joplin

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There is no contradiction between liking open source and using Windows

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Still higher than the 0% of Evernote :slightly_smiling_face:

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