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Focalboard – a self-hosted alternative to Trello, Notion, and Asana

focalboard.com

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Re: Focalboard – a self-hosted alternative to Trello, Notion, and Asana

#152

It's easy to miss that this is by the same people making Mattermost, the open-source self-hosted slack alternative you might have heard of. https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard

So should we expect them to roll out some community edition lacking essential features to kind of force people to use the (paying, closed-source) entreprise edition ? Some basic features have been wanted for years in the mattermost CE edition, while being implemented in the EE edition, like the capability to prevent users to kick other users from channels ( https://forum.mattermost.org/t/users-can-kick-other-users-of…

I'm curious about something: would there be any hidden gotchas involved if someone forked the Mattermost repo, and added features like that? I understand not wanting to spend the effort on implementing and maintaining these changes, I'm just trying to figure out if there's any other reason for not doing it. From what I can see, the license is APL 2.0, which I think shouldn't forbid that, but IANAL (or expert on working in open source).

Re: Focalboard – a self-hosted alternative to Trello, Notion, and Asana

#154
post #54

Note: this, although self-hosted, appears to transmit your usage data without consent (just like the selfhosted Mattermost server from the same people): https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/blob/main/server/se... Anyone want to offer me odds on the likelihood of a patch removing this spyware getting accepted by the maintainer in this “open source” project?

Thank you for posting this.

I was very interested in this. There's no way I'm using it now. I'll never trust anything from Mattermost.

Maybe it still counts as open source but with this, plus their complex licensing, I feel it runs very counter to what the FOSS community actually wants

Re: Focalboard – a self-hosted alternative to Trello, Notion, and Asana

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the problem with fragmentation? I guess you're thinking of wasted effort, split mindshare amongst users. But for me, fragmentation is one of the key benefits of open source. Let thousands of alternatives bloom!

Also confusion and decision paralysis for new users, as well as limiting new features to only a subset of users unless someone takes the time to re-implement them. And lots of FOSS projects end up as abandonware, and consolidation can increase the share of users whose software is actively maintained. Split mindshare is also a big deal for applications with strong network effects, though probably not for something lik…

So, reductio ad absurdum, we shouldn't have bothered with Ruby when we already had Python. Or Linux since we had Unix. Or React since we had Angular.

I agree that launching similar products has its own downsides, but the upside is that competition acts like evolution - it strengthens the best products, and destroys the weak ones.

Re: Focalboard – a self-hosted alternative to Trello, Notion, and Asana

#156

I have not significantly used Notion, but this isn't really a replacement for it is it? Notion seems to be focused on wiki and notes, with built in structured data allowing you to setup things like boards and task lists. This seems to just be the boards and task lists without the free form notes and wiki? It pretty clearly replaces Trello and Asana. Notion seems like a stretch from the 5 minutes I poked around in it.

I see it as a "faster" altrrnative to the kanban widget in Notion, clearly not a replacement. I use Notion to collect bookmarks, quotes, code, media, every bit of information I need for a project and despite its relative slowness and the lack of offline mode is serving me well.

Re: Focalboard – a self-hosted alternative to Trello, Notion, and Asana

#158

I love Notion but the speed, or rather lack of, is killing me daily. Last Friday I was taking some notes, and suddenly the page refreshed and everything was gone. Went on twitter to see, I wasn't alone .. i feel like hosting my own notion clone is the way to go forward to use Notion...

I am not sure Focalboard has the features you are looking for, but outline wiki is a cool notion like wiki and pretty fast.

Re: Focalboard – a self-hosted alternative to Trello, Notion, and Asana

#160
post #41

> Download Focalboard from the Microsoft App Store. I am life-long Windows user and I am yet to meet someone who uses Microsoft App Store. A standalone regular installer is an absolute must.

I became a Windows user recently and I install everything I can from the Microsoft Store, so I don't have to individually and manually get updates for all the apps I installed.

Just FYI, there are several CLI tools that more closely resemble a Linux package manager that you can use. Scoop and chocolatey come to mind (I'm a scoop user myself). I think NuGet is supposed to be a CLI software repo tool by Microsoft, but I'm only tangentially aware of it so I might have that wrong.

I mostly dislike the Microsoft Store because it requires an account, even for free downloads. I'm a little loathe to hand Microsoft control over a higher layer of my stack, for fear that they do some kind of "you can't control when you patch" thing like they did with Windows. I've also got a little bit of leftover disdain because it used to basically only have Metro apps, which were awful. That's not a good reason, but I won't lie and say it doesn't exist.

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