Show HN: We want to displace Notion with collaborative Markdown files | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We want to displace Notion with collaborative Markdown files

moment.dev

29 pointsantics14 comments

Hi HN! We at Moment[1] are working on Notion alternative which is (1) rich and collaborative, but (2) also just plain-old Markdown files, stored in git (ok, technically in jj), on local disk. We think the era of rigid SaaS UI is, basically, over: coding agents (`claude`, `amp`, `copilot`, `opencode`, etc.) are good enough now that they instantly build custom UI that fits your needs exactly. The very best agents in the world are coding agents, and we want to allow people to simply use them, e.g., to build little internal tools—but without compromising on collaboration.

Moment aims to cover this and other gaps: seamless collaborative editing for teams, more robust programming capabilities built in (including a from-scratch React integration), and tools for accessing private APIs.

A lot of our challenge is just in making the collaborative editing work really well. We have found this is a lot harder than simply slapping Yjs on the frontend and calling it a day. We wrote about this previously and the post[2] did pretty well on HN: Lies I was Told About Collaborative editing (352 upvotes as of this writing). Beyond that, in part 2, we'll talk about the reasons we found it hard to get collab to run at 60fps consistently—for one, the Yjs ProseMirror bindings completely tear down and re-create the entire document on every single collaborative keystroke.

We hope you will try it out! At this stage even negative feedback is helpful. :)

[1]: https://www.moment.dev/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42343953

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What is the pricing strategy. I really like this concept and have been looking for something like this but would love to know where this is going commercially

The problem with the mission statement mentioning Notion is that notion is too big of a product and you are probably only aiming to displace a small part of it.

Secondly, if a server cant be spun up alongside this that serves markdown editing, that others can access immediately without going through a setup process, for guerilla collaboration, then it is not replacing notion. It is simply a different medium.

Notion is a lot of things; pages, triggers, actions, databases, and agents. You are focusing only on pages.

Not 100% sure I understand, but, if you opt into sharing a doc, we do spin up a collaboration server on your behalf, and editors do not have to set anything up to use it. The bulk of the work we've had to do is to make this seamless and good.

For the other points: yes, we aspire to do all of those things. :)

Are those other points, something you can do in Markdown? DB in markdown?

Our approach, which is behind a feature flag right now, is to allow users to attach "assets" to jj change IDs (these are sort of like stable git commit SHAs). This is how we will power inline comments, and it's how we'll power Notion-style SQLite-based databases. We already have, checked in, an implementation of IVM built on top of SQLite, specifically for this purpose. I don't see how we could be a Notion competitor without them.

I liked the idea and the headline got me to click. But then I got confused with the Postman capabilities… So this is beyond markdown—it’s helping you build live dashboards with Markdown.

Why would I reach for that instead of Claude code building a dashboard with HTML/CS/JS?

Great question! We support live collaborative editing and publishing what you build to the web, all within the app.

We think Claude Code is great for single-player, but it breaks down when you want to share with your team.

Author here, speaking only for myself, sometimes you're right, and I do want to create a new Next.js app, deploy it to our internal Kubernetes cluster behind our corporate intranet with all the credentials and so on.

And sometimes I don't! Sometimes I just want to add a graph of customer churn from a ClickHouse query directly into a PRD, and just say who has access to run it, so the proxy can enforce it. Or I want to put a release button into the document that documents the release process. Sometimes I want a collaboratively-editable document that just happens to be enriched with a little bit of personalized UI.

I'm not understanding the value here. If I'm writing markdown and avoiding notion, what does this provide my team that git does not?

I can easily write the markdown docs and they will render fin in most git forges.

Moment is distinctive because (1) it's natively programmable, and (2) has a native, high-performance, live collaborative editing.

For (1), programmability is why our templates[1] are generally so rich. See, e.g, our NES emulator[2] or our SQLite Explorer[3], both of which would be vastly harder to accomplish in Notion. It's even much harder in Obsidian, which is Markdown-first! Both templates took ~30 minutes of work with `claude`, and to do something similar with their respective extension APIs would have take orders of magnitude more time, especially to publish.

For (2), actually-working live collaborative editing is pretty hard to come by on Markdown-based docs editors. If you don't think you need this, the offering will be less compelling. My opinion is that many people who think they don't need this in a team setting end up being surprised how big a barrier this is when they try to use Obsidian as the central knowledge base for a team setting. Notion is extremely buggy and sometimes very slow, but in almost all cases I've seen, that ends up being worth the trade-off of not having to write code or get everyone to use the exact same extension set. Just my 2 cents though.

[1]: https://www.moment.dev/templates

[2]: https://www.moment.dev/templates/75ovowgp6jnv6lofwu60bx1d1

[3]: https://www.moment.dev/templates/4m8zt4ne0bnqfb4hjtcwm2fob

You can make a NES emulator, that's neat! I'm probably not your target audience it seems. I don't know why a large amount of programmability is beneficial for a knowledge document system. Then again, I don't generally like my notes to be much fancier than text when possible so I can read it on any device or platform.

So Retool but for using agents. Neat.

brother you should be competing with jupyter notebooks, you know the python and the math nerds who do data viz and all that sass

the average notion user is a brain dead idiot who doesnt even know what markdown means

I think responses like this are a good reminder that technology is most leveraged when it's useful to both people who are technical and nontechnical. For the first time in the the 70+ year history of software, the cost profile of "integration software" is approaching cents per app. A child can magic up an NES emulator from the ether; semi- and non-technical users can instantly create something personalized to their use, which is useful to their specific team and their specific company.

I'm not going to be the one to shut them out of this change. We will work to help both of these audiences.

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