There's a moment every self-hoster knows: the day a service you relied on changes its pricing, its features, or its mind. Notes are a bad thing to have in the blast radius. They're small, they're personal, and ten years of them is irreplaceable.
The good news is that notes are also the easiest thing to self-host. No GPU, no cluster, no database server. NemoMemo runs as one container with one data volume:
docker run -d -p 5230:5230 \
-v nemomemo-data:/app/data \
ghcr.io/davidallmon/nemomemo:latestOpen localhost:5230, create the first account — that account becomes the reef keeper, with the admin keys — and you're writing memos. That's genuinely the whole setup.
What you actually get
- A private Markdown timeline. One box: type, save, move on. Tags like
#homelabor nested#bio/midtermorganize things later, if ever. - Your data in two artifacts. An SQLite database and an uploads folder, both inside that one volume. Backing up is copying files; leaving is taking them with you.
- Notes that clean up after themselves. Mark a memo as a Dory memo and it deletes itself in 24 hours — the parking spots and confirmation codes never become archaeology.
- Room for your people. Invite accounts, share memos with per-memo visibility, or hand out expiring share links.
What it runs on
Anything that runs Docker: the Raspberry Pi in your closet, a NAS, or the cheapest VPS you can rent. NemoMemo is a small Node process in front of SQLite — it does not need much of a machine.
From there, the deployment guide covers the details — ports, data location, and running it behind your reverse proxy.
Start with one memo. It doesn't even have to be a keeper. 🐠