A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Bookstack comes up a lot when “easy to use” is mentioned. It has a WYSYWIG editor by default and has a fairly simple install using a shell script on their docs website. Problems I have with it are it’s not really a wiki. You can’t link to nonexistent pages or see what other pages link to the current page. It’s more of a documentation system.
But I’ve seen it out in the wild being used for your use case (Tunic game wiki)
Thanks for the example! The reasons you mentioned were why I wasn't looking into it more (using it for my local docs as well).
I love wiki.JS Spun up several sites with it.
Maybe skim this recent post? https://lemmy.world/post/43616899 Lot of folks chimed in about their opinions on many different wiki approaches, my takeaway was that Bookstack looked like something I'd wanna use in the future, but there's a lot of stuff covered in there.
+1 for Bookstack. Very simple and easy to learn.
I have been rolling bookstack for many years for all things that I keep for myself, it's great, been pretty much bulletproof also
Only caveat is that bookstack is very opinionated (even said so by its creator) so be sure it's what you want.
Thanks, I missed that.
i like moinmoin and dokuwiki, mediawiki always felt too complex.
As someone from Northern Germany, I'm obliged to check out MoinMoin!
you're gonna get a LOT of opinions here. Try some out and find what you like the best. Personally, I run Dokuwiki, mostly because i can just zip the whole directory, and move it to another server or back it up a LOT easier than something like MediaWiki.
I use mediawiki. It is not as complex as it first might seems
I use Dokuwiki for my small fantasy wiki project. I use many plugins to achieve the functionality and style that I want, but it works well for my needs. None of the others I looked at could do quite everything I wanted.
I'm currently migrating my worldbuilding and conlanging project to Dokuwiki. Right now I have an Obsidian vault used for brainstorming and drafting and a public Mediawiki for stuff I feel is worth showing off. Like Obsidian, DW stores everything as plaintext (it's not markdown but it's readable and the tables are better IMO). Like Mediawiki, DW keeps a version history so I can keep track of how my ideas evolve over time, which is crucial for conlang documentation. I keep tons of example texts that may reflect earlier phases of the grammar and vocab that I may need to reference. Unlike both Obsidian and MW, Dokuwiki has access control, so I can keep a private namespace for drafts and a public namespace for stuff I think is polished enough to show.
I'm not sure DW meet's OP's requirements for "out of the box" functionality though. I think it's intended to be rather bare bones but be very easy to extend with plugins. The plugin browser is built in, so customization is a breeze. Plugins can be individually installed, enabled, disabled, and updated through the admin GUI.
If you wouldn't mind sharing, I'd love to take a gander at what you're cooking up!
The DW instance isn't public (yet) but here's a link to the currently public mediawiki instance.
I never invested the time to make the content very discoverable, so you'll have to make copious use of the random page and what links here features if you want to see what I've written.
Enjoy my stress-induced maladaptive daydreams.
Thanks for sharing! I don't have a ton of experience with MediaWiki and cannot figure out how to go to a random page lol
It's behind the hamburger menu (3 horizontal lines on the top left of the page), at least with the latest default skin. You can also check out a list of all pages by searching Special:AllPages
How did you approach finding the proper plugins?
I considered functions that I wanted (for example, tags) and looked to see if there was a plugin that did what I wanted. Dokuwiki's plugin browser was very useful for this.
MediaWiki’s probably overkill for basic wiki functionality, but I use it for the sake of Semantic MediaWiki and associated extensions. But SMW has more of a learning curve, so it might not be worth it for a casual-use wiki.
Yeah it seems like it's doing too much for me.
Do you need to host it yourself? https://miraheze.org/ may do hosting for you
Need? No
Want? Yes
I settled on mediawiki myself due to basically how trustworthy mediawiki and mediawiki skins look. I use https://github.com/CanastaWiki/Canasta-DockerCompose myself but the default includes caddy, which I just overrode in the docker compose override. I believe Canasta is mainly driven by someone who works on a wiki farm.
I also know of https://github.com/nasa/meza.
However, I want to repeat my recommendation of miraheze. When I run into an issue or need an extension, I just look at what miraheze does or what people associated with miraheze do. I also believe that due to the nature of mediawiki it's a better use of resources to have a wiki farm as opposed to many separate instances. If they will host your wiki, I think they're the best choice.
Someone just posted their own short reviews of a slew of wiki options in this community so maybe go take a peek at that.
Personally I'm finding I like Otterwiki quite a lot though I've not yet dug deep into it.
Otter's almost there. It needs a few things before I'd call it a wiki rather than just a documentation system, namely backlinks and a way to differentiate between links to existing and nonexisting pages, as well as a way to see what nonexisting pages are most wanted.
There are so, so many options here.
I've found alternativeto.net to be a great way to investigate alternative software:
https://alternativeto.net/software/mediawiki/?license=opensource&platform=self-hosted