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

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

#41

Post by hakanshehu »

alok-g wrote: post #34

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/

Thank you! I haven’t used Notesnook personally, but from their description it focuses mainly on note-taking. Colanode, by contrast, also includes collaboration features such as chat, file sharing, and databases. One other difference is that Notesnook offers end-to-end encryption, whereas Colanode does not (at least for now).

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

#42

Post by hakanshehu »

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

Thanks for pointing it out. Will check our build and release process to fix it.

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

#43

Post by pcthrowaway »

esperent wrote: post #33
hakanshehu wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I have researched other apps: Mattermost does something similar to Rocketchat, using notifications as a sales funnel

Can you elaborate on this? I manage a Mattermost instance and there are some features missing from the OSS self-hostable community edition, but notifications seem to mostly work, even on mobile where notification delivery does rely on their gateway

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

#45

Post by salahuddin_dev »

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…

[flagged]

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

#46

Post by savolai »

hakanshehu wrote: post #39
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?

My 2c: A particular thing about notion that bugs me is that hn page content get imported as simple. tables and in notion there is no automated way to delete all empty cells of all tables on page, that make it unreadable, or just to convert tables automatically into text

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

#47

Post by yencabulator »

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…

Here an example of it taking arbitrary input and blindly casting it to a type; anything after this point can blow up. There seems to be no input validation anywhere.

  const input = req.body as SyncMutationsInput;
https://github.com/colanode/colanode/blob/9e69f29858a2ced6b1...

And the database use looks racy, sometimes not using transactions at all but having a read-modify-write cycle, no GET FOR UPDATE seen anywhere in transactions. Somebody is going to figure out how to do nasty things to the data.

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

#48

Post by esperent »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #43
esperent wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I have researched other apps: Mattermost does something similar to Rocketchat, using notifications as a sales funnel Can you elaborate on this? I manage a Mattermost instance and there are some features missing from the OSS self-hostable community edition, but notifications seem to mostly work, even on mobile where notification delivery does rely on their gateway

When hosting and using their free notifications service, you're basically using their test server with no uptime guarantees. I agree that there's only so much you can expect from a free service, but unreliable notifications make a chat app 100% useless for any serious work.

If you pay, it's $10/user/month for the basic service. Where I live that's about 3x Ms Teams, 2x Slack. And you still have to self host.

Self hosting the service has the same issue as Rocketchat: you need an Apple dev account, a firebase account and an endless amount of free time. It's going to be far harder and more time consuming than just hosting the app.

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

#49

Post by terpimost »

esperent wrote: post #33
hakanshehu wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

https://zulip.com is decent. Self hosted free plan hasmMobile notifications for organizations with up to 10 users

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

#50

Post by pcthrowaway »

esperent wrote: post #48
pcthrowaway wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have researched other apps: Mattermost does something similar to Rocketchat, using notifications as a sales funnel Can you elaborate on this? I manage a Mattermost instance and there are some features missing from the OSS self-hostable community edition, but notifications seem to mostly work, even on mobile where notification delivery does rely on their gateway

When hosting and using their free notifications service, you're basically using their test server with no uptime guarantees. I agree that there's only so much you can expect from a free service, but unreliable notifications make a chat app 100% useless for any serious work. If you pay, it's $10/user/month for the basic service. Where I live that's about 3x Ms Teams, 2x Slack. And you still have to self host. Self hos…

We haven't had any issues with the free notification service. They did release the code to host your own but I think you'd also have to rebuild and release their mobile app to use it, and that sounds like a massive hassle.

I'm using it for a nonprofit, so $10/month per user is out of the question. Self-hosting and open source are critical to us also.

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