Comment by jitl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jitl | Hacker News Reader

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(I work at Notion and built the html exporter during my hiring process work trial in 2019, opinion is my own)

I would love to two-way sync Notion <-> Obsidian vault. Notion is focused on online collaboration, Obsidian is focused on file-over-app personal software customization; there’s so much Obsidian can do especially with plugins that Notion isn’t able to address. If we can make the two work together even if it’s not perfectly seamless, it would extend usefulness of both tools by uniting their strengths and avoiding the tradeoff of their weaknesses.

If only I had an extra 24h per day I’d build it myself, but it needs some fairly complex machinery for change tracking & merging which would require ongoing support so it’s not something I can tackle responsibly as a weekend project.

At the least we could offer YAML frontmatter as an option for Notion’s markdown export feature. Maybe I can get to that today I have a few spare hours.

In the age of Claude Code having real-time collaboration + local-first markdown + easy to write custom plugins is the future. It makes no sense to lock up your documents in a saas product that gatekeeps your access to using AI on your own documents.

That's why I've been working Relay [0] - a privacy-preserving local-first collaboration plugin for Obsidian.

Our customers really like being able to self-host Relay Servers for complete document privacy while using our global identity system to do cross-org collaboration with anyone in the world.

[0] https://relay.md

We offer Notion MCP since most users prefer the ease of GUI, but agree that Claude code CLI + markdown files is handy. If we had the Obsidian md style sync we could sync to an obsidian vault in a Git repo just as well. We have lots of docs in Notion as you might imagine and having them synced into the git repo could improve their hit rate w Claude and all the other menagerie of code agents without needing to hook them all up w MCP and waste time on remote tool calls.

I love Notion but the API leaves a bit to be desired. To build a 2 way sync the API should allow the same functionality that the UI offers. Right now there are some easy things I can’t figure out how to do in the API:

- add a date tag to a text block

- create a code block longer than 2000 characters

- set a code block to wrap

This is based on very limited interaction but it feels like I’ve hit many snags early on. I imagine things get harder when you get into some of the more advanced or newer functionality.

Please invest in the API. I will only love Notion more.

Check out Notion's MCP. It's more capable in some ways than the existing JSON api, although documentation for humans is a bit scarce because it's brand new.

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