This looks like it has great potential, but what I really want is an open source "notion" with a well considered plugin & schema model. I desperately want to sync back all my data into a single cohesive graph; notes, reading list, messages, exercise activity in a more compute friendly format than MD files.
There's a ton of these right now. I did some research the other day and found at least five "open source" (to various degrees, all of these are not strictly speaking open source but open core) notion alternatives, and they're all in some ways better, in some ways worse than notion. I settled on AFFiNE [0] because it felt the snappiest, but they've got a lot of telemetry and tracking so I forked to remove that and use my telemetry-removed frontend as a PWA.
We're building a new multiplayer IDE but for docs/tasks [1]. Local-first, real-time collaborative and end-to-end-encrypted sync. Not open source but self-hostable with a single binary and hackable with plugins (custom properties, views, code, etc).
I use Zim wiki for everything just now and I don't like it. I'm in the market for a replacement, and would even pay like with how Immich does it.
Unless the source code is available or you put it into legal escrow for when you go bust/abandon the software†, I will not invest my time and data into a system where I am entirely dependent on another organisation or service.
† And you will go bust or abandon the software before I die!
It's definitely a work in progress, but AnyType has a lot of functionality similar to Notion. I haven't used it in a while, so I don't know whether there are plugins in any meaningful capacity.
From past experience, it's even pretty simple to host your own sync server to get away from their account/storage limits.
Fair enough, it's protocol is open source and the apps are source available. Modifications can be made by individuals for their own uses, though. I think it's as close as you can expect to get with a mostly full-fledged Notion competitor.
In any case, I don't particularly enjoy AnyType, despite coming back to it a few times to test it out (and still maintaining my own sync server, despite not actively using it, in case I go back to try it out again after some demonstrably updates). Just pointing out that it's a less restrictive alternative.
I'm still happy to use it. It's not like they can rug pull on the data or even the existing app binaries.
I'd really like to see the team get rewarded for their work, too. I'd be sad if it went 100% open and they didn't so much as draw a market salary from it.
I think if it went open, they'd get nothing. That's the one thing I strongly dislike about open source is that only hyperscalers really economically benefit from it.
99.9% of the internet is closed source and we don't ask for it to be opened. From our ISPs, to Google, to the hyperscalers.
If anything, I think we should be asking those things to be open. If we're only asking the little guys, the big guys with trillion dollar market caps skate by. This is exactly how they want it. Fewer gradients for small players to grow.
> It's not like they can rug pull on the data or even the existing app binaries.
This.
I spend 6 months to export 100K notes from Evernote mostly because they intentionally throttle the exports to a limit and you can extract it only in their proprietary format that truncates some data.
You might be interested in Graphiti: https://github.com/getzep/graphiti.
With a self-hosted Graphiti MCP, you can connect ChatGPT or Claude to build a knowledge graph from all your data. You can then query and update the graph directly through conversation & by ingesting data and visualize the graph using tools like the Neo4j Explorer.Don’t know if that could fit your use case but that could be a fun way!
Last year after a thread around Obsidian and the downhill of Evernote I took almost 6 months to migrate more than 100K clippings and notes and it's so refreshing to have your own data in sync in your terms and not be in any proprietary format, that I do not image myself going to anywhere that I cannot push/retrieve my notes in my own terms in a portable format.
Notion is a great product for corporations, and I get why companies are jumping on this bandwagon so fast; however, as a consumer, I wouldn't consider it or any option based on seat (like Outcrop) or any that wouldn't give me a binary that I can use in whatever machine that I want.
I recently started looking for a new(er) laptop, because it often felt slow. But I started looking at when it was slow, and it was mostly when using things like GMail. I guess my feeling was "if my laptop isn't even fast enough for email, it's time to upgrade". But doing things I actually care about (coding, compiling) it's actually totally fine, so I'm going to hold on to it a bit longer.
Obviously not with Gmail/Facebook, in that case it's just 100% incentive misalignment.
The others, probably, VCs are incentivized to fund the people who allocate the most resources towards growth and marketing, as long as the app isn't actively on fire investors will actively push you away from allocating resources to make your tech good.
You would be surprised at how bad the “engineering culture” is at meta. There are surely people who care about page load latency but they are a tiny minority.
Looks promising. Where I think Notion really succeeds is letting people easily make attractive live documents. Where they've meandered off imho is trying to shoehorn in an RDBMS. If you can enable people to make pretty pages, and keep your document format simple, you'll be off to a very good start.
While it's possible to develop a more convenient version of Notion, I think it's only suitable for practice, since we can't compete with companies that monopolize the AI note-taking industry.
This looks like a tidy little out of the box fts system. I’d use it as a tantivy interface basically. And I’d pay for it if it had good and simple document ingestion and metadata search semantics. Not the intended use case really but this doesn’t exist.
It certainly looks like the author has given careful thought to making this performant, but I am skeptical about it at scale. While OT means there should be fewer updates than CRDT, you still wind up with a fair amount of them, and you have to periodically rebuild the base document from accumulated steps, which can be quite large.
Assuming your backing store is Postgres, I’d experiment a lot with the various column storage strategies, at various sizes of documents and varying amounts of writes. The TOAST overhead can become a huge bottleneck.
I see a big amount of naiveness on his post, I tried to view it with a positive mindset, but I can't help myself and think how naive his perspective on that is.
First, lots of server-side code is IO-bound, writing it in Rust vs. Java/C# would barely show any difference in a Monitoring tool, in a real-life scenario.
His authorization system is very limited in scope, of course it can be fast! Get real users and we will see if that will still be fast.
When you are running it in production, even if using Zanzibar's approach of loading everything into memory, you'd still need to handle many aspects he didn't think of, like updates to such permissions, and dealing with sharding etc. Things are always more complex in real life.
And last not but the least, Notion is really fast as it is. I never knew it was slow.
Without bringing any new concept to "Notion", I find it hard to believe this will ever work.
I hope he finds happiness building it though, building is fun!
Unless its open source I can't really see the point with bragging about it being in Rust. Its just another product, and its either faster or its not - the underlying language or platform is pretty irrelevant.
> Each seat will cost around €/$10. If you see yourself using this product, consider sponsoring Outcrop today for €/$100; you’ll get €/$200 as credits on launch.
What are they? The thing I value the most is the collaboration and the relational part, allowing to build pages that are essentially views on other data.
The only one I'm looking forward currently is the next version of Logseq which will enable collaboration on their existing block-based authoring model.
This looks like it has great potential, but what I really want is an open source "notion" with a well considered plugin & schema model. I desperately want to sync back all my data into a single cohesive graph; notes, reading list, messages, exercise activity in a more compute friendly format than MD files.
There's a ton of these right now. I did some research the other day and found at least five "open source" (to various degrees, all of these are not strictly speaking open source but open core) notion alternatives, and they're all in some ways better, in some ways worse than notion. I settled on AFFiNE [0] because it felt the snappiest, but they've got a lot of telemetry and tracking so I forked to remove that and use my telemetry-removed frontend as a PWA.
[0]: https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE
You should look at https://github.com/TriliumNext/Trilium. It's what I use every day for the things that you mentioned.
Thanks for sharing. Are you using it on mobile? How is the experience?
We're building a new multiplayer IDE but for docs/tasks [1]. Local-first, real-time collaborative and end-to-end-encrypted sync. Not open source but self-hostable with a single binary and hackable with plugins (custom properties, views, code, etc).
[1] https://thymer.com
No open source, then I'm not playing.
I use Zim wiki for everything just now and I don't like it. I'm in the market for a replacement, and would even pay like with how Immich does it.
Unless the source code is available or you put it into legal escrow for when you go bust/abandon the software†, I will not invest my time and data into a system where I am entirely dependent on another organisation or service.
† And you will go bust or abandon the software before I die!
It's definitely a work in progress, but AnyType has a lot of functionality similar to Notion. I haven't used it in a while, so I don't know whether there are plugins in any meaningful capacity.
From past experience, it's even pretty simple to host your own sync server to get away from their account/storage limits.
AnyType is not open-source.
Fair enough, it's protocol is open source and the apps are source available. Modifications can be made by individuals for their own uses, though. I think it's as close as you can expect to get with a mostly full-fledged Notion competitor.
In any case, I don't particularly enjoy AnyType, despite coming back to it a few times to test it out (and still maintaining my own sync server, despite not actively using it, in case I go back to try it out again after some demonstrably updates). Just pointing out that it's a less restrictive alternative.
Like Obsidian?
Obsidian isn't open source
I'm still happy to use it. It's not like they can rug pull on the data or even the existing app binaries.
I'd really like to see the team get rewarded for their work, too. I'd be sad if it went 100% open and they didn't so much as draw a market salary from it.
I think if it went open, they'd get nothing. That's the one thing I strongly dislike about open source is that only hyperscalers really economically benefit from it.
They've done a remarkable service for all of us.
I used to be very against closed source products but changed my mind recently. One of the founders of Obsidian makes some great points here: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/open-sourcing-of-obsidian/1515/1...
> The cost to benefit ratio is very low for our small team of 2, and our plate is already full.
Wow, I didn't know the team was so small - go them!
This is a great rebuttal.
99.9% of the internet is closed source and we don't ask for it to be opened. From our ISPs, to Google, to the hyperscalers.
If anything, I think we should be asking those things to be open. If we're only asking the little guys, the big guys with trillion dollar market caps skate by. This is exactly how they want it. Fewer gradients for small players to grow.
> It's not like they can rug pull on the data or even the existing app binaries.
This.
I spend 6 months to export 100K notes from Evernote mostly because they intentionally throttle the exports to a limit and you can extract it only in their proprietary format that truncates some data.
I was surprised at how similar Trilium looks to Obsidian when it was suggested in a thread somewhere: https://triliumnotes.org/
It's open source and as far as I can tell uses a database.
Logseq? (Though it uses md)
AppFlowy ?
Isn't really (ie fully) open source, is it?
You might be interested in Graphiti: https://github.com/getzep/graphiti. With a self-hosted Graphiti MCP, you can connect ChatGPT or Claude to build a knowledge graph from all your data. You can then query and update the graph directly through conversation & by ingesting data and visualize the graph using tools like the Neo4j Explorer.Don’t know if that could fit your use case but that could be a fun way!
Last year after a thread around Obsidian and the downhill of Evernote I took almost 6 months to migrate more than 100K clippings and notes and it's so refreshing to have your own data in sync in your terms and not be in any proprietary format, that I do not image myself going to anywhere that I cannot push/retrieve my notes in my own terms in a portable format.
Notion is a great product for corporations, and I get why companies are jumping on this bandwagon so fast; however, as a consumer, I wouldn't consider it or any option based on seat (like Outcrop) or any that wouldn't give me a binary that I can use in whatever machine that I want.
This is great, I wish tech giants focused more on latency.
Gmail, Notion, Facebook, are painfully slow on my high-end laptop with gigabit ethernet. Something is wrong in our modern engineering culture.
I recently started looking for a new(er) laptop, because it often felt slow. But I started looking at when it was slow, and it was mostly when using things like GMail. I guess my feeling was "if my laptop isn't even fast enough for email, it's time to upgrade". But doing things I actually care about (coding, compiling) it's actually totally fine, so I'm going to hold on to it a bit longer.
I think the problem is a lack of "engineering culture".
People experience latency but if you “saw like a corporation” you could only see throughput and never latency.
Obviously not with Gmail/Facebook, in that case it's just 100% incentive misalignment.
The others, probably, VCs are incentivized to fund the people who allocate the most resources towards growth and marketing, as long as the app isn't actively on fire investors will actively push you away from allocating resources to make your tech good.
You would be surprised at how bad the “engineering culture” is at meta. There are surely people who care about page load latency but they are a tiny minority.
Mono Avalonia Not i on 1 No te
Is this the new "I built a Twitter clone in a weekend"?
The prosemirror port would make for a nice OSS library if OP is willing to put it on crates.io.
Looks promising. Where I think Notion really succeeds is letting people easily make attractive live documents. Where they've meandered off imho is trying to shoehorn in an RDBMS. If you can enable people to make pretty pages, and keep your document format simple, you'll be off to a very good start.
Irrelevant, but "a faster", not "an faster".
Looks like the original title was "an actually faster" and HN stripped out the "actually"
Automated or not, editing titles is not cool. What an odd double standard.
It's actually an faster if they used rust
'an' precedes a vowel sound, 'a' precedes a consonant sound.
While it's possible to develop a more convenient version of Notion, I think it's only suitable for practice, since we can't compete with companies that monopolize the AI note-taking industry.
This looks like a tidy little out of the box fts system. I’d use it as a tantivy interface basically. And I’d pay for it if it had good and simple document ingestion and metadata search semantics. Not the intended use case really but this doesn’t exist.
It certainly looks like the author has given careful thought to making this performant, but I am skeptical about it at scale. While OT means there should be fewer updates than CRDT, you still wind up with a fair amount of them, and you have to periodically rebuild the base document from accumulated steps, which can be quite large.
Assuming your backing store is Postgres, I’d experiment a lot with the various column storage strategies, at various sizes of documents and varying amounts of writes. The TOAST overhead can become a huge bottleneck.
prosemirror in rust? I'd like to see something like that!
Will this also be available on the web via WASM compilation, in addition as a desktop app?
Really cool stuff. I will spend some time here digging into the details.
I've built a Cursor for business users in Rust. Spreadsheets, slideshows, and an agentic loop.
If you're up for it, it would be nice to chat and share stories and vision.
Email is andy at inboard dot ai
I see a big amount of naiveness on his post, I tried to view it with a positive mindset, but I can't help myself and think how naive his perspective on that is.
First, lots of server-side code is IO-bound, writing it in Rust vs. Java/C# would barely show any difference in a Monitoring tool, in a real-life scenario.
His authorization system is very limited in scope, of course it can be fast! Get real users and we will see if that will still be fast.
When you are running it in production, even if using Zanzibar's approach of loading everything into memory, you'd still need to handle many aspects he didn't think of, like updates to such permissions, and dealing with sharding etc. Things are always more complex in real life.
And last not but the least, Notion is really fast as it is. I never knew it was slow.
Without bringing any new concept to "Notion", I find it hard to believe this will ever work.
I hope he finds happiness building it though, building is fun!
Obsidian is much better
Unless its open source I can't really see the point with bragging about it being in Rust. Its just another product, and its either faster or its not - the underlying language or platform is pretty irrelevant.
Whats your pricing? Will early access be free?
> Each seat will cost around €/$10. If you see yourself using this product, consider sponsoring Outcrop today for €/$100; you’ll get €/$200 as credits on launch.
From the linked blog.
Another Notion-like app. But it's already many FOSS alternatives
What are they? The thing I value the most is the collaboration and the relational part, allowing to build pages that are essentially views on other data.
The only one I'm looking forward currently is the next version of Logseq which will enable collaboration on their existing block-based authoring model.
https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan.
Here's an alternative.
Have you seen https://anytype.io/?
Loved the thought processes in this post, so definitely interested. Notion always feels half-baked.
Interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing.