Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Colanode, open-source and local-first Slack and Notion alternative

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 55 posts

Re: Show HN: Colanode, open-source and local-first Slack and Notion alternative

#31

Post by sameasiteverwas »

hakanshehu wrote: post #25
itomato wrote: post #22

These products are neat, but what about the data? Notion is a tragedy when it comes to export or migration. I didn’t see any bragging about the exportability of content from this one, but that’s the main thing I look for now.

Hi, thanks for bringing this up! We don’t have export or migration features in place yet, but we are planning to add them. Which export formats would be most useful to you? And when you mention migration, are you thinking about moving data from similar tools into Colanode or vice-versa? If so, which specific tools would you like to be able to migrate to/from?

The first export type implemented should be as minimal and human readable as possible (text files for most content, maybe w/ minimal markup). If that's not possible for all data, then standard formats like html or pdf.

After that, go after your biggest competitor. If people know they have a path back to a familiar shore they're less scared to swim in new waters.

Re: Show HN: Colanode, open-source and local-first Slack and Notion alternative

#32

Post by frizlab »

hakanshehu wrote: post #20
frizlab wrote: post #7

Hello! How does this compare to Huly?

Hi, thanks for the question! I haven’t used Huly extensively to provide a detailed comparison, but from a quick look (and a test I did some time ago) it seems to take a more opinionated approach: features such as issues, projects, and overall layout are pre-defined. Colanode, by contrast, works like Notion, giving you flexible building blocks so you can model your own workflows and knowledge structures. Huly may be q…

Nice!

An issue I’ve had with Huly self-hosted is upgrading, which is very hard because it is not documented (as far as I know).

How are upgrades handled on your project?

Re: Show HN: Colanode, open-source and local-first Slack and Notion alternative

#33

Post by esperent »

hakanshehu wrote: post #12
esperent wrote: post #8

This looks great, it's a crowded field but there's still a lot of room for improvement. The most important question before I'd try this is, do real time cross platform notifications work? If yes, how did you solve this for people self hosting?

That's a great question! We didn't come to it yet, because we are focused only in desktop app for now. This is definitely one of the challenges we need to solve once we start working on the mobile apps. The self-hosting use case makes it tricky (and probably fun challenge to solve).

Having used several real time self hostable apps with chat (Nextcloud, Odoo, Rocket chat) this is the hard problem to solve.

Rocketchat uses it as a way to funnel you into paying. You'll get a low number monthly for free. They say 10k month but with a team of 5 people lightly using it we used that in 4 days. Or you can do it yourself, but you'll need to register your own version of the app in both the Apple Store and Play Store. For Apple apparently this is close to impossible so I didn't try.

Nextcloud runs their own server for free, but you have to accept that you'll be sending data via their server. But I've spent the last week hacking away at setting up a Nextcloud in my spare time. Got it mostly set up in a day, then the rest of the time has been trying to get notifications working on mobile. Still not working.

Odoo, I don't think I ever got notifications working.

I have researched other apps: Mattermost does something similar to Rocketchat, using notifications as a sales funnel. Element is similar to Nextcloud, they host their own free server, although I think you can self host that too.

From this experience, I would never try a new app until they have this feature solved, clearly documented, and with proof that it works and isn't a sales funnel.

Re: Show HN: Colanode, open-source and local-first Slack and Notion alternative

#34

Post by alok-g »

Looks nice! Would wait for the documentation to learn more.

How does this compare to Notesnook? I have found that to be the best in terms of getting the details right (However, the last I checked, the documentation for self-hosting was unclear, and there were bugs in data exporting).

https://notesnook.com/

Re: Show HN: Colanode, open-source and local-first Slack and Notion alternative

#35

Post by mdaniel »

hakanshehu wrote: post #5
mdaniel wrote: post #3

Congratulations on your launch, the animation makes it seem like a neat product! I don't think I've ever seen a "coming soon" pricing page before https://colanode.com/pricing/ > For my curiosity, your readme mentions Valkey but the docker compose uses Redis - is that on purpose? https://github.com/colanode/colanode/blob/v0.1.3/docker-comp... You will also almost certainly want to either use the Apache 2 version of Mi…

Thank you! We're still working on the hosted offering, hence the "coming soon" pricing page. Regarding Valkey, I included it as an example of a Redis compatible alternative, but you're right, it's probably better to use it in our Docker Compose file as well. Thanks also for pointing out the licensing considerations around Minio, will definitely look into that.

I tried booting it up and two things:

- this is just evil. Pure. evil. https://github.com/colanode/colanode/blob/v0.1.3/apps/deskto...

If that's the kind of error handling that you believe in, one should have religious backups of any data placed into this

- It seems to actually puke if one doesn't provide it a live, TLS enabled, SMTP server[2] which (a) WTF (b) isn't present in the docker-compose

Thankfully replacing .verify with return new Promise(() => true) at least let the server start

2: https://github.com/colanode/colanode/blob/v0.1.3/apps/server...

Re: Show HN: Colanode, open-source and local-first Slack and Notion alternative

#36

Post by mdaniel »

plextoria wrote: post #11
plextoria wrote: post #4

I'm excited to try this out! (seems to have some bandwidth issues, currently downloading at 24KB/s) Is SSO implemented or planned in the near future? I feel that colanode would be a great fit for our start-up

sadly, app doesn't run on Intel Macs

Maybe the pre-built one doesn't, but $(npm ci && npm run -w '@colanode/desktop' dev) boots up just fine on my 12.7 2015 MBP

Re: Show HN: Colanode, open-source and local-first Slack and Notion alternative

#39

Post by hakanshehu »

badmonster wrote: post #37

Have you thought about adding programmable logic or automations between nodes?

We have been thinking for some automation/workflows to be executed on specific events. Do you have any example/use case that you might be interested in?

Re: Show HN: Colanode, open-source and local-first Slack and Notion alternative

#40

Post by hakanshehu »

mdaniel wrote: post #35
hakanshehu wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! We're still working on the hosted offering, hence the "coming soon" pricing page. Regarding Valkey, I included it as an example of a Redis compatible alternative, but you're right, it's probably better to use it in our Docker Compose file as well. Thanks also for pointing out the licensing considerations around Minio, will definitely look into that.

I tried booting it up and two things: - this is just evil . Pure. evil. https://github.com/colanode/colanode/blob/v0.1.3/apps/deskto... If that's the kind of error handling that you believe in, one should have religious backups of any data placed into this - It seems to actually puke if one doesn't provide it a live, TLS enabled, SMTP server[2] which (a) WTF (b) isn't present in the docker-compose Thankfully replacin…

Thank you for taking the time to test it and call these issues out. Both points slipped through our refactor/cleanup checklist.

- We’ll replace the current error handling for server sync with something safer and more graceful.

- We’ll make SMTP optional, expose TLS verification as a configurable setting and update the docker-compose.

We’ll make these improvements soon, thanks again for the heads-up.

Post reply on HN