Behind Moe Memos

There are hundreds of decent note-taking apps today. When something comes to my mind, I want to write down a memo as soon as possible. When learning new things, I tend to take quick notes before write down in other second brain knowledge bases.

I discovered flomo and became its pro member in 2021. It has a curated feature set, a powerful community and it’s the perfect tool for quick capture.

In the meantime, I’m transforming into a more niche digital life. I built a Homelab with a network-attached storage, an always-on mini PC and a Raspberry Pi for study and fun. I want to self host the services I rely on and store all my data at home.

Later I discovered ✍️memos from Awesome-Selfhosted. It’s a satisfying alternative for capturing ideas and it’s very easy to set up. After a month’s usage, I decided to build a mobile app for it.

So here it is Moe Memos. It’s an mobile app to capture thoughts and ideas. It has a minimal and delightful design and feels native to your device.

It’s open source and available for free on App Store, F-Droid and Google Play.

Moe (萌え) refers to cute, adorable and inspiring.

Why self-hosting?

Self-hosting means the user has complete control over their data. Through self-hosting, the user can learn more about how software and computer infrastructure work. I became proficient in Docker, Kubernetes, Flux CD and many tools via practicing myself.

For computer nerds like me, privacy advocates and whoever already have an open source router, a NAS, an used PC at home, or a cloud server thousands miles away, self-hosting is well suited and I wish you try ✍️memos and Moe Memos.

Supported Memos server versions

Current Moe Memos version supports Memos 0.21.0, 0.26.0 and 0.26.1. Memos updates may introduce breaking API changes. If you are using a version higher than 0.26.1, it is recommended to use Mortis to convert the newer Memos API to the Memos 0.21.0 API and re-login in Moe Memos.

Uploading images failed with “413 Entity Too Large” message

If you put your Memos server behind a proxy, please increase the maximum allowed size of the client request body. Here’s the nginx configruation for example:

client_max_body_size 128m;

Is there an Mac/Windows/Linux version?

While you can install Moe Memos on Apple Silicon Macs, for the best desktop experience the web version of ✍️memos is recommended, which can be installed as a Progressive Web App.

Can I use Moe Memos offline?

Please use the latest TestFlight (iOS) or GitHub Pre-release (Android) version for local on-device storage support, as well as offline-first syncing with Memos server support.

Be aware these versions are still in testing and you should backup your Memos database first.