Mikipage Blog

Mikipage Philosophy & Vision

Why I'm Building Mikipage

[1]

Daniel Zhou traces 25 years of note-taking — from a homemade Microsoft Access database in 2000, through Evernote and Obsidian, to building Mikipage — to explain why he felt compelled to create something new. His core insight: every note app he used was a better filing cabinet, but none ever did anything with the notes. The distilling of raw notes into useful, living knowledge always remained the user's job — and nobody ever gets around to it.

Mikipage's answer is a "miki": a wiki maintained by AI, fed by notes written by one or many people. The key principles he won't compromise on include: AI writes living pages (but never touches your notes), everyone can write into shared pages without stepping on each other, notes are fully portable and exportable, the product stays simple and affordable, and security is non-negotiable. He's building it primarily for himself and his family — and is doing so in the open, in alpha.

What I Don't Use Mikipage For

[2]

As a counterpart to the founding vision post, Daniel outlines exactly what Mikipage is not for — arguing that a tool good for everything is just a filing cabinet with more drawers. Mikipage does one loop: write notes → AI organizes them into pages → share those pages.

The six things explicitly excluded are:

1. Lists & todos — ephemeral by design; use Workflowy or similar.
2. Long formatted documents — presentation artifacts; use Word or Google Docs.
3. Photos, voice memos, diagrams — text-first is a deliberate design choice; files can attach but text is the substance.
4. Research papers & citations — a solved problem; use Zotero.
5. Development docs — belong in the repo, next to the code.
6. Calendar events — a coordination protocol, not a note; use Google Calendar.

The dividing line: if it's ephemeral, it's a list; if it's about presentation, it's a document; if a purpose-built tool already owns it, use that tool. What remains — durable, textual, personal writing you'd want your future self to have — is Mikipage's territory.