I have a graveyard of abandoned note apps. Most died because they made a quiet trade I only noticed months in: my notes were really living on someone else's server, in someone else's schema, and leaving meant an export button that lost half the structure. So when I sat down to seriously compare the local-first and privacy-respecting end of personal knowledge management, I gave each tool real time — weeks, not an afternoon — and I paid attention to the parts that only show up after you have a few hundred notes and actually want to leave. The three I kept coming back to were Capacities, Anytype, and Logseq. They are often lumped together as "the indie PKM tools," but they could hardly be more different under the hood. One stores your notes as plain Markdown files on your disk. One stores them as encrypted objects that sync peer-to-peer. One stores them in a polished cloud you do not directly touch. They represent three honest answers to the same question — how do you build a second brain you can trust?…