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# Review of Memos. A Notebook on Your Own Server
- URL: https://en.blog.themarfa.name/review-of-memos-a-notebook-on-your-own-server/
- Published: 2025-10-20T12:31:36.000Z
- Updated: 2025-10-20T12:31:36.000Z
- Description: Memos is a minimalist, Twitter‑style note‑taking app with open source code, but it requires manual deployment via Docker and is only suitable for very simple notes.
- Author: Konstantin Dokuchaev
- Tags: review, web, Memos

Some solutions are ultra‑complex, offering footnote creation and bibliography management. Others are extremely lightweight, designed for a quick jot‑down. Today I’ll talk about a Twitter‑style notebook for keeping a journal.

### What is Memos?

[**Memos**](https://www.usememos.com/) is an open‑source note‑creation service that can be self‑hosted on your own server.

### Installation

Memos provides no binaries for any operating system. The whole service is accessed through a web browser, but the real issue is that you have to spin up the server image yourself on your PC or a virtual server.

The easiest way to do this is with Docker:

```bash
docker run -d \
  --name memos \
  --publish 5230:5230 \
  --volume ~/.memos/:/var/opt/memos \
  neosmemo/memos:stable

```

You can also try the demo at <https://demo.usememos.com/>.

### What Memos can do

To be honest, it’s not a lot. All of the app’s features are visible in the screenshot below.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/31/c7/31c7da9c-f519-464c-9a3b-2d4144b557a6/content/images/2025/10/image-30.png)

The interface is split into two panes.

- **Left** – a navigation panel with a search bar, calendar, labels, and tags.
- **Right** – a Twitter‑style feed of notes.

That’s how you’re meant to work with information, so building a complex, hierarchical knowledge base with Memos would be quite troublesome.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/31/c7/31c7da9c-f519-464c-9a3b-2d4144b557a6/content/images/2025/10/image-31.png)

In a note you can add:

- Tags
- Attachments
- Links
- Geotags

Formatting is provided via Markdown. A finished note can be pinned, linked to, archived, or deleted.

To get any semblance of structure without folders, you can use labels. That’s not trivial at first: a label requires a name and a search condition that determines which notes appear under it. You’ll need to consult [the instructions](https://www.usememos.com/docs/guides/shortcuts) to figure this out.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/31/c7/31c7da9c-f519-464c-9a3b-2d4144b557a6/content/images/2025/10/image-32.png)

You can also:

- Search notes
- Pick a note’s date from the calendar
- Open notes containing links, to‑do lists, or code
- View all notes for a particular tag
- View all attachments from all notes

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/31/c7/31c7da9c-f519-464c-9a3b-2d4144b557a6/content/images/2025/10/image-33.png)

### Conclusions

Honestly, it’s hard to picture who would find Memos useful. If you didn’t have to run your own server, it would be a decent option for a simple journal or quick note‑taking. But with everything requiring manual setup, it’s usually better to use a full‑featured knowledge‑base service.

[Try Memos](https://www.usememos.com/)