A Family's Shared Memory Can't Live on One Laptop: Why Mikipage Is Cloud-First

Author: Daniel Zhou · Date: September 30, 2026

There is a strong current in note-taking right now, and it runs toward local-first. Plain files on your own disk. No server in the middle. No company that can go under and take your writing with it. Obsidian is the flagship, and I spent years in it happily — I still recommend it to people.

Mikipage goes the other way. It is cloud-first: your notes live on our servers, and the browser is the app. That is a deliberate choice, not a shortcut, and people who care about their notes deserve to hear the reasoning. So this post covers three things:

Why cloud-first, and not local-first.
The thing that decided it: a group second brain, which local-first can't do.
How Mikipage borrows the real strengths of local-first to cover the weak spots of being in the cloud.

Why cloud-first

Your notes, anywhere

With a local-first tool, your notes live on a machine. To have them somewhere else, the app has to be installed there, the files have to be synced there, and the two have to agree. That works for a laptop you own. It falls apart on the family computer in the living room, a work laptop you're not allowed to install things on, a borrowed iPad, a school computer, a new phone you haven't set up yet.

Cloud-first flips it around. Open a browser, sign in, and everything is there: every note, every page, the search over all of it. There's no app to install on the new phone, no vault to point at, no sync to wait on. It's just you and your notes.

I wrote in [1] that my first notes database was a Microsoft Access file that ran on exactly one PC, and when I moved countries it stayed behind. "Tied to a machine" is how I lost a decade of my own writing. I don't want to be tied to a machine again.

You write; we handle the technology

A local-first tool gives you the parts and leaves the assembly to you. Want semantic search? Pick a plugin, choose an embedding model, wire it up, tune it — and do it again on every device, and again when an update breaks it. Want AI summaries? Another plugin, another API key, another monthly bill. Updates, versions, compatibility between plugins — all of it becomes your job.

Some people genuinely enjoy that, and for them it's a feature. Most of us just want to write a note. The technology is the boring part standing between us and the writing.

In Mikipage it's all built in and already running: search that understands meaning and not just keywords, AI pages that organize your notes for you, sharing, publishing. Nothing to install, nothing to configure, nothing to update. We take on the dull technical work so you can spend your attention on what you're actually writing.

The third reason is the one that settled it, and it gets its own section.

A second brain for the group

At Mikipage we believe sharing is part of note-taking, not an add-on to it.

Plenty of what you write is only for you. But a surprisingly large share of it — for me, somewhere between a third and a half — is something you eventually want other people to see. A recipe you finally got right. A summary of a book you loved. A travel log. What you learned fixing the dishwasher. These are exactly the notes worth keeping, and they are worth more when the right people can read them: your family, your friends, a business partner, colleagues, co-authors. Some of them you'll even want to publish to the world.

That's a second brain, but not a personal one. It's a group memory — a shared second brain.

And it runs in both directions. It isn't only about what I share out; it's about what's shared with me. I want to read my wife's recipes. I want my kids' travel logs. I want my father-in-law's advice on home maintenance and his tax tips, written down once and findable the next time the water heater makes that noise — not lost in a phone call from three years ago. The receiving end of sharing is half the value, and it's the half most note tools ignore completely.

Why local-first can't do it

Local-first is built around a single person and a single copy of the files. That's its strength, and it's exactly what breaks when a group gets involved.

Other people's comments. Where does my wife's question about my recipe live? Not in my file — she can't write to my disk. A conversation needs a place both of you can reach.
Synthesis across people. A Miki page that draws on the whole family's notes — "everything we know about the house," built from what four people independently wrote — needs all of those notes in one place, readable by the AI, with each note still credited to its author.
Different ways of organizing. My tags aren't your tags. In one shared folder, someone's system wins and everyone else's loses. A shared memory has to let each person keep their own way of writing and still come out coherent.
Who sees what, and when. This is the big one. Every note sits somewhere along a line: just for me; shared now; shared later, once it's ready; readable by others; a page we maintain together; shared with my family but not my coworkers; published to everyone. Local-first expresses this with folders and copies — a private vault, a shared vault, a "publish" copy — and you become the person who keeps them in sync by hand. That's not sharing. That's bookkeeping.

In Mikipage, each note is written once and has one owner. You decide which groups it's shared with, and you can change that at any time. Shared notes are readable and commentable by the group, but only you can edit them — nobody rewrites your words. Each group has its own Miki pages, synthesized from everything its members share, which any member can refresh. Make a group public and its notes and pages are published to the web. No copies, nothing to keep in sync. See Notes, Pages, Groups, and Spaces for the whole model.

None of that is possible when the source of truth is a folder on one person's laptop. It needs a place in the middle that everyone can reach — which is to say, the cloud.

What we borrowed from local-first

Being in the cloud has costs, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Local-first is good at three things:

Privacy and security. Nothing leaves your machine, so nobody else can read it.
Ownership. Your notes are files you hold. No company can take them away, lock them up or shut them down.
Customization. A plugin ecosystem gives you endless room to tweak the tool into exactly what you want.

These are real strengths, and we didn't want to give them up just because we chose the cloud. So here's how Mikipage takes each one on.

Privacy and security

Mikipage runs on Amazon Web Services, and your data is encrypted whenever it travels and wherever it is stored. Nobody on our team reads your notes as part of running the service; the work that touches your data is automated. In the rare case a person has to look at production data to fix a problem, a two-person rule applies — a second person approves the reason and the scope first. We never sell your data or use it for advertising. And we keep our own private notes in the same system, under the same rules.

I'll be precise about one thing, because it matters. Encryption at rest protects against someone who gets hold of a disk; it doesn't stop our servers from reading your notes, and they have to read them to search and organize them for you. For the handful of things you want nobody else able to read — the safe combination, the bank logins — there are protected notes. A protected note is encrypted in your browser, with a password that never leaves your browser, before it's saved. What reaches Mikipage is scrambled text that nobody at Mikipage, and nothing in Mikipage, can turn back into your words. For those notes, you get local-first privacy inside a cloud app.

The details are in Security and the commitments in our Security and Privacy Pledge.

Your notes are yours

Mikipage is an open data platform. Your notes are stored as plain Markdown and free text, not in a private format; our wikilinks and tags use the same syntax as Obsidian. You can download all of your notes and pages as Markdown files, with their attachments, at any time, without asking us. Everything you can do on the website you can also do through the API, including reading every note you own.

We also back that up with commitments you can check us against: no venture capital pushing us toward a sale, infrastructure that costs little to keep running, and — if we ever did shut down — at least 90 days' notice with export working until the last day. But the strongest protection is one that doesn't depend on us at all: keep your own copy. That's all in our Longevity Pledge.

Customization, with Obsidian

We don't build a plugin system, and we won't. Keeping Mikipage small is how it stays simple to use and cheap to run. But we don't have to, because the best plugin ecosystem in note-taking already exists, and it gets along with us fine.

The Mikipage plugin for Obsidian syncs a Mikipage space with a folder on your own computer, in both directions. Your notes land in Obsidian as ordinary Markdown files, where every Obsidian plugin works on them as usual — graph views, templates, custom queries, whatever you like. Mikipage stays the shared, anywhere, AI-organized home for your notes; Obsidian becomes your local workshop. And as a bonus, that folder is a live copy of your notes sitting on your own disk, which is local-first ownership in its most literal form.

Cloud where it counts, local where you want it

Local-first is a great answer to the question it asks: how does one person keep their own notes safe and under their control? It's the wrong shape for the question I care about most, which is how do the people in my life build up a memory together?

So Mikipage is cloud-first, because a shared second brain needs a place everyone can reach, and because nobody should have to become a systems administrator to write a note. But we borrowed what local-first gets right: privacy you can lock down with protected notes, notes you can always take with you, and the whole Obsidian ecosystem whenever you want to tinker.

Write a note. Share it with one person. See what comes back.