I love what Remnote promises and could become, but I loathe the fact that I just can't rely on it at the moment

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#1

I love Remnote, and I love the team and their creative ideas. And I can see they are working hard. But the way things are progressing now, it reminds me of a predicament the guys at Clickup had not too long ago. Where they were shipping out tons of new features but the customer had to force them to slow down and focus more on fixing the long list of bugs that were just getting bigger with every new feature.

The revolutionary feature Remnote introduces are not of much use when you are sitting down trying to revise for an exam and the image occlusion feature starts to play up and deletes all the occlusions youā€™ve been working on.

Unfortunately, so far I have tried to rely on Remnote multiple times, but Iā€™m always faced with some kinda weird bug that completely throws my whole workflow of.

As an example check the latest problem I am facing, where I canā€™t save anything on my desktop app and it doesnā€™t sync and these weird ghost child rems show up which I canā€™t indent, no matter what I try!

I believe that because of the creativity of the Remnote team, they have attracted a large community of amazing like minded people here on this forum, who are constantly coming up with groundbreaking new features, and I believe this, in reality, is causing Remnote to seem more like an exciting experiment then a reliable product people can trust to take care of their second brain.

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#2

Couldnā€™t agree more. RemNote is a great app that promises a lot of amazing features but the reality is that almost all of the features in RemNoteā€¦ kind of work.

Thatā€™s why I switched to local version on desktop only. Syncing - the critical feature if you want to have your app available on multiple platforms - simply doesnā€™t work thus far despite being ā€œfixedā€ in many updates. I have removed all of the rems completely from my online account multiple times, but even to this day when I log in on phone or web app or desktop to my online account I see zombie rems popping up out of nowhere. Just makes you wonder what kind of mess it creates when you use your knowledge base on multiple platforms.

But of course I understand the situation: with such a small team of developers (or even one person?) itā€™s impossible to deliver so many features AND test them thoroughly before the release. So instead the user base is used as ā€˜testersā€™. Just wonder how far this strategy can work.

Nothing would make me more happy then seeing in the next update just bug fixes and no new features at all. I would much appreciate one new small tiny feature that actually works instead of ton of things that kinda work but not really.

15 Likes
#3

Developer here (joined 2 months ago). I feel you guys! The feature-focused past of RemNote has led to relatively hard-to-maintain code, that weā€™ll need to clean up in the next time. This is only natural in my opinion, since RemNote has been a hobby project that outgrew itā€™s original purpose along with a very ambitious community.

Iā€™ve been pushing this overall stability issue for a while now and this thread will lead to yet another discussion. While I canā€™t promise you anything specific, we are definitely on it! Thank you for your patience, and please keep up these posts - they really do make a difference! :slight_smile:

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#5

Welcome and hope to see your guys more active around here!

Itā€™s great to see someone from the team acknowledging issues like these and that the forum is not just an echo chamber among users. Cheers to a more ā€˜full-timeā€™ team to keep up with the very ambitious community. :beers:

10 Likes
#6

Great post OP, fully agree. I love Remnote and what it represents, but donā€™t feel that I can truly trust it with my data yet.

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#7

I couldnā€™t agree more with what has already been said in this thread.

RemNote current status leads me to put using RemNote as much as I want/need as my primary PKM tool ā€œon holdā€.

Love the reactivity and hard work of the RemNote team. Keep up with the good work, you are definitely onto something!

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#8

same hereā€¦ Iā€™m sorta playing around with RemNote for some months now, instead of pushing all my data into it fully - just reluctant to trust it that muchā€¦ I have to admit, though I switched to pro lately, I have been looking for alternatives or alternative setups already. Unnecessary to say there arenā€™t any really at the same level of functionality, but nonetheless. I was even ready to put up with a lot less functions and more clumsy workflows.
I think the developers will indeed have to put a lot of effort in soon to win back the trust of users. No question RemNote rs a genius concept - but to serve as a knowledge tool it has to be ultra-stable and as reliable as a concrete wall.
Imagine you wake up one morning and your brain is in some not working state, permanently losing things you knew before. The same applies as well for the first as also for the second brain.

In the end itā€™s all about trust - and as it seems the trust fades quickly and massively. I guess for the developers itā€™s really time to act, right NOW.

6 Likes
#9

Agreed. There is a decent amount of access to manipulate the product to make up your own features. I think itā€™s safe to focus on bugs without worrying that people wonā€™t see the effects of the labor. I donā€™t think folks are going to be upset to wait for features.

1 Like
#10

Agreed! many bugs havenā€™t fixed yetā€¦

#11

Completely agreed to what you said. I have also not able to fully use the functionality of remnote on account of bugs. The team is really trying hard to get the bugs removed but I think it will take time. For a student like me notes and other data that I put up in a particular tool is very crucial as lot of time is spent in creating what we call PKM. And if bugs pops up in this journey then this is really a dampener for a student like me. Somebody rightly said that a tool for learner like remnote must be extra stable and bug-free. I hope instead of going for new features now the dev team at remote should focus on making it a bug-free system so that we learner use this as a primary tool for our knowledge system.

7 Likes
#12

I am interested in knowing how the local mode works for you? In my case, the saving of the files only happens sporadically and not when I make the changes. That is, if I make a change and then look at the local files I can see that the last change was 3 hours ago. That causes me great uncertainty.

I really wish there was a way to force local sync or rather file save in the same way as pressing Ctrl + S on any notepad.

#13

I am having similar thought, and I donā€™t even use any of the space repetition feature, lol. I mean itā€™s not completely unreliable to me, but the design of this app just lacks robustness. e.g

  • You canā€™t really export then import a document into a different kb if it has above certain number of rems and references in it
  • export entire local knowledge base as full raw backup json, import to another local knowledge base, all images are lost lol
  • there is no way to search for certain file type you put in your kb e.g images, and hence if some images are broken, there is no way to locate them
3 Likes
#14

I have had the same issues when it came to the images. For me that is normally when things fall apart

Glad you shared your thoughts here as I was starting to think I was an edge case with my friction for images. Nice to know I am not alone

I am exploring some options with images but I feel your pain

2 Likes
#15

As a newcomer to RemNote, Iā€™m very impressed by what I see in terms of features and potential. Love the direction the team seems to be heading in.

What held me back from delving into RemNote until now though was seeing posts on social media with similar sentiment to this thread. So, 6 months since the last post I just wanted to check in.

To what extent have these concerns been resolved? Do you feel confident things are heading in the right direction with regards to stability and reliability?

2 Likes
#16

i really wish the ios beta would be commenced as it is the greatest source of all the friction - i work primarily on an ipad as I need pen drawings. using remnote from the browser will always be dreadful compared to a hopfeul app. it doesnā€™t need to be perfect to beta, only better than the browser.

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#17

I personally havenā€™t noticed much improvement in the overall flakiness of RemNote over the past year. Iā€™ve never lost any data, though.

1 Like