Privacy

Standard Notes went out of their way to make it harder to self-host extensions a couple years ago, which IMO was pretty tasteless on its own.

I didn't dig into this change exhaustively, but it looked like the old approach wasn't very secure or scalable?

They could have charged for the convenience of providing a syncing server with extra storage, but instead they were basically repackaging and selling subscriptions to JavaScript code which was mostly made by third parties who weren't even aware Standard Notes was using their stuff.

I dunno if you're aware, but 95-99% of the Javascript that has ever run in your browser is open source frameworks or packages, or their sub-dependencies, or their sub-dependencies sub-dependencies, ad infinitum... That's how open source came to dominate the web!

And then, more recently, they decided to shut off web app access to third-party servers entirely.

As in, you can no longer load the web app and point it at your own server?

"FOSS" only means so much when they dictate what goes into the source code. Unfortunately.

All FOSS projects have a team of dictators that decide the direction of the project and what gets merged. If you don't like it, you can fork it or move to another product.

I'm not a huge fan of SN, but nothing you described is different to Proton, who don't let you use your own servers with any of their clients, and have no extension functionality whatsoever.