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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
Logseq? (Though it uses md)
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 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.
AppFlowy ?
The prosemirror port would make for a nice OSS library if OP is willing to put it on crates.io.
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 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
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.
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!
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.
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
prosemirror in rust? I'd like to see something like that!
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.
Interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing.
Loved the thought processes in this post, so definitely interested. Notion always feels half-baked.
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/?