Hacker News Reader

Comment by lemonberry | Hacker News Reader

I tried Notion a few years ago. Definitely a slick and polished app. And clearly useful to a lot of people. But I'll never get used to the idea of putting that much of my life or business into a web app.

Between potential terms of service changes, potential security issues and now potential misuse via AI (and I LOVE AI) I just will never be comfortable having that much information in someone else's web app.

View on HN

That's why I'm working on a local-first with native-like performance Notion alternative using Qt C++ and QML called Plume[1]. It uses an advanced block editor[2] that I built from scratch. All notes are simply plaintext/markdown underneath. Advanced blocks (like Kanban, for example) uses very simple syntax, for example:

  {{kanban}}
  # Todo  
  - [ ] item 1
  - [ ] item 2
  # In Progress
  - [ ] item 1
  - [ ] item 2
  {{/kanban}}

[1] https://www.get-plume.com/

[2] https://imgur.com/NIgDLOU

From what I see, this doesn't compare to Notion. Notion is not typically used as a note-taking app, but rather as an internal wiki.

It will support inter-note linking. So you could build your own personal wiki using Plume. The main difference with Notion will be real-time collaboration (which Plume doesn't support).

Collaboration is definitely where all note taking apps go as soon as more people need to access your notes or participate in them as a group

There is still a huge market for personal note-taking apps. Obsidian, Joplin, Bear, Logseq, just to name a few. Plume will support sharing notes, and maybe some form of non-real-time collaboration (think git-like) in the future.

Personal note taking by no means is solved but lots of much better options coming out like the ones you mentioned.

Still, my personal knowledge graph is great but only so useful in the cases when it’s about more than me. Double entry and maintaining anything is a pain especially with a lot of notes.

I think the markdown notes as graph software may finally bring some good opportunities to sharing certain tags in certain ways and not others. If logseq and obsidian could do “plugin groups” instead of installing them individually that would be amazing

Even if something is documented for myself I might tag it shareable. One example is how much I’m proactively recording a loom for doing anything as I work instead of when it’s needed. Handoff or asking or help is much easier.

I didn't intend to undermine your efforts, by the way. I hope it becomes successful and thrives.

What is a wiki but a set of notes?

Are we discussing a personal wiki or an internal company wiki? There is a significant distinction between the two.

Your tool seems to be STRONGLY inspired by the MPL-2.0 licensed https://www.get-notes.com. And I mean STRONGLY. Down to the websites Favicon.

Haha, they're both my creation (: Plume is based on Notes (https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes). I believe I'll change the icon before Plume's release.

I feel the same way, I’ve never been steered wrong just using markdown and grep’ing my notes.

Obviously not advanced as notion but I’m just writing text here, it doesn’t need to be advanced.

The hardest part when writing is the act of writing itself, web apps just seem too bloated for my use case of simple text.

Notion doesn’t really shine when it’s used as a markdown alternative or an editor, though their editing experience IS excellent (though admittedly, for simple cases, no app can really beat the simplicity of Markdown).

The things you can do with dynamic content (database) really make it more than a wiki. People can, and do, plan their whole life in it. Project management, SEO-indexable pages, lots of surprisingly cool stuff. I used to use it quite frequently, though my ADHD causes me gravitate a bit more heavily towards organizational mechanisms like it to cope.

Using it to make impromptu priority lists that will do a lot of the reorganization for me as I slot new content in is really nice. It’s a bit of overhead but it’s often worth it for anything nontrivial. I keep a backlog in it and use it for scratch work and rough design docs (final copy goes in our actual deployed-from-markdown docs).

This is why I love using obsidian. It's just a directory of markdown files on my computer.

I agree but I wish it were finally open sourced. At this point the community and paying users must be plenty anyway.

While not as useful as Notion, I agree and use Obsidian as well. Check out their road map: https://obsidian.md/roadmap/ They do have plans to work on "Dynamic views - Create dynamic tables using data stored in note properties." which may give a more Notion like feeling to some things..

The biggest omission in Notion is that it does not have an honest or complete offline-first mode.

Internet connectivity can vary. People still fly and waiting on slow wifi or data is not acceptable. 30% slower internet speeds makes you work 30% slower.

I quite liked notion otherwise. I just think they will always fight this issue for a group of people who would pay and use it for a long time who may have previously outgrown OneNote, Evernote, etc.

I was using Notion, but I found Obisidian to be very similar, maybe less powerful out of the box, but feels much better to use. All files are written in Markdown and stored on device (or in iCloud or wherever), has a "marketplace" for user designed themes and plugins.

I like Obsidian too, but the one thing it really can't do that Notion does well is collaboration. And surprisingly I haven't seen any good plugins that solve this problem (to be fair it's not an easy problem).

I have some months ago messed around with writing a plugin that allows collaborative editing in some sense.

Basically, I realized that my notes are in nextcloud and nextcloud already has a collaborative markdown editor based on Y.js.

So my goal was to open a file from nextcloud in obsidian as a participant to the collaborative editor session of that file. Right now I'm a bit busy with exams but it was working pretty well and I may finish it sometime.

Yup. And experience[1] says that even if you think it's great and/or the team is great today things can change in such a way as to really suck in the future.

[1]I'm looking at you in particular evernote.

I took a look at it not so long ago, they were pushing AI features rather too aggressively, essentially turning the cursor into an advert for them.

I noped out very rapidly.

I found them okay, but then they really started pushing the useless AI crap and wouldn't let me unsubscribe from their spammy emails, so I dropped them completely

Fuck off, Ivan from Notion, I don't care about your useless AI offerings

You may want to try trilium, desktop app with the ability to self-host a sync/web server.

Are there tools you do trust? How broadly do you apply this approach to the use of web applications?

I'm not an authority on this stuff at all. For me, trust is on a spectrum. And whether I use a tool or not depends on what end of the spectrum it falls on and how much I need to use a service. For example, I really ought to find a new email provider.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com