from Hacker News

Are we making the best notion open source alternative?

by entherhe on 1/20/24, 8:32 PM with 15 comments

• by zamalek on 1/20/24, 10:30 PM

  Anytype doesn't _require_ cloud storage or a subscription - each device I have is an E2E encrypted replicated backup. Cloud storage is merely extra peace of mind (your free tier is more generous). While I understand that you're trying an open source business model, Anytype is extremely hard to beat; especially from a data sovereignty perspective.

  P2P sync is a must.

• by georgespencer on 1/20/24, 10:03 PM

  Excited to try this!

  A few years ago someone gave me the excellent advice that I should stop saying “no” to fractional roles I was unenthusiastic about, and instead price them accordingly.

  The first thing I did was to stipulate a $500 daily surcharge for any gigs expecting me to use Notion.

  I won’t recapitulate the miserable design of Notion’s janky non-native desktop app for macOS, but just this week, my calendar (cron) asked me to “refresh to update the app”.

  After that it asked me to restart the app.

  After that it had disappeared from my dock, and apparently my entire Mac.

  Turns out Notion acquired it, and thought the best way to tell me was to use the update to silently update the app, install a new binary (???) and delete the old one.

  Except it crashed half way through, so I had no idea.

  Everything those people touch—from “the concept of an enumerated list” to “a popular indie calendar”—seems to be rushed in execution and badly designed from the start.

• by rubymamis on 1/20/24, 10:47 PM

  I'm creating a Notion alternative based on Qt C++ and QML called Plume. In my benchmarks, it is the fastest block editor there is. It's based upon my previous open source note-taking app. But I will most likely make Plume either close source or open-core (not entirely sure about it). I made a short video showing the new Kanban feature I've been working on https://www.loom.com/share/b40009316f6b420b9ece15a1f99e987c

  Some people recently said I'm over promoting my app, but I can't see how this will be considered spam if it's exactly the ballpark of my app. Therefore, I'm reluctant to share any more links here. So based on the comments, I'll update this post.

• by ccakes on 1/20/24, 10:22 PM

  Also has a self-hosted version however it’s a bit out of date with their SaaS product

  https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE#self-host

• by nathan_phoenix on 1/20/24, 10:01 PM

  Debated if to click the link after reading the clickbait headline, but after playing around with it for a few mins seems actually quite decent!

  Obviously missing some features compared to Notion, but surprisingly not that many, especially compared to the other Notion alternatives. And style wise seems quite polished.

• by pedalpete on 1/20/24, 11:00 PM

  I'm curious about your pricing. Is that $8 (does anybody actually do the x.99 crap anymore?) per user? If so, you need to make that clearer. What happens when I have more than 10 users?

  Also, why have an exact copy of the notion design? Is it possible there is a missed opportunity to do something better?

• by acheong08 on 1/20/24, 10:19 PM

  Sync server appears to be open source as well! Much better than Logseq/Obsidian when it comes to that. Thank you!

• by kelsolaar on 1/21/24, 12:58 AM

  Obsidian all the way, markdown means it can be edited anywhere by any text editor, even online, e.g. Github.

• by darkmuck on 1/21/24, 11:58 AM

  unfortunately there's no mobile support at all yet