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Notion API – public beta

developers.notion.so

151–160 of 262 posts

Re: Notion API – public beta

#151
FWIW, my note taking app is github. Created a private repo, keeping my notes as "issues". I can label, link, search them, insert images, add comments etc. Can someone name a relevant feature that is missing from github?

Re: Notion API – public beta

#152

Big fan of notion. Not a fan of the data lock-in or haphazard security. For tools like this, SaaS will almost always beat open source just by virtue of elbow grease and a product direction. So I’m willing to forego the open source alternatives. But I really wish Notion gave me more options for how to host my data. AFAICT they offer no “dedicated storage” or “on premise” plan, even if you want to pay for it. In fact I…

(Cristina from Notion here) We shared a bit more in the past about how most of our user content was stored in a single database instance (see more here: https://www.notion.so/notion/Focus-on-performance-reliabilit... ). That is no longer true and we recently re-architected this database to scale horizontally. Totally understand that you want more options for how to host your data. Unfortunately, we don't have any pla…

>Totally understand that you want more options for how to host your data. Unfortunately, we don't have any plans on that front at the moment.

This is unfortunate. I tried Notion a few months back, and almost loved it enough to pay for a subscription. Once I saw that, I refunded the subscription and went back to markdown and git. I love your software, but the lock-in is frustrating.

Re: Notion API – public beta

#153

FWIW, my note taking app is github. Created a private repo, keeping my notes as "issues". I can label, link, search them, insert images, add comments etc. Can someone name a relevant feature that is missing from github?

Can you explain how this works in more detail - I’m intrigued!

Re: Notion API – public beta

#154

Big fan of notion. Not a fan of the data lock-in or haphazard security. For tools like this, SaaS will almost always beat open source just by virtue of elbow grease and a product direction. So I’m willing to forego the open source alternatives. But I really wish Notion gave me more options for how to host my data. AFAICT they offer no “dedicated storage” or “on premise” plan, even if you want to pay for it. In fact I…

This is the reason I use Obsidian. https://obsidian.md/ All of your data is locally stored markdown text files with no lock in. All of the amazing benefits of linked note taking without the downsides.

I absolutely love Obsidian except for one crucial flaw: no tabs. They've made every editor view a "pane", which means that on a laptop you can effectively only work on one or two files at a time. There's a plugin that adds tabs, but it's pretty awkward and not what you normally think of when you think of tabs. Otherwise, Obsidian is truly incredible.

Re: Notion API – public beta

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the reason I use Obsidian. https://obsidian.md/ All of your data is locally stored markdown text files with no lock in. All of the amazing benefits of linked note taking without the downsides.

It doesn’t work well for a team though, with a bunch of local markdown files - does it?

Admittedly harder when there is frequent concurrent modification required, but Syncthing works well for me to share between nodes.

Re: Notion API – public beta

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Cristina from Notion here) We shared a bit more in the past about how most of our user content was stored in a single database instance (see more here: https://www.notion.so/notion/Focus-on-performance-reliabilit... ). That is no longer true and we recently re-architected this database to scale horizontally. Totally understand that you want more options for how to host your data. Unfortunately, we don't have any pla…

My company had Notion hit us up for an Enterprise contract. When we asked if they offered enhanced security, single tenancy, or even they’d accept some sort of liability if they had a breach … the answer was no, no, and no. We ultimately decided to not go enterprise since it offers little value over their existing plan and keep sensitive data out of Notion. I hope Notion gets to a point where they can offer stronger…

Notion doesn't even need to offer these guarantees in their SaaS service. They can just ship to my Kubernetes cluster, and let me manage the ingress and storage, and that would be enough to make it mission critical software.

In the meantime, we end up using tools with a little bit less good UX, but we just can't share that data publicly. UX can't win over security, and I hate having to choose.

Re: Notion API – public beta

#157
post #144

Big fan of notion. Not a fan of the data lock-in or haphazard security. For tools like this, SaaS will almost always beat open source just by virtue of elbow grease and a product direction. So I’m willing to forego the open source alternatives. But I really wish Notion gave me more options for how to host my data. AFAICT they offer no “dedicated storage” or “on premise” plan, even if you want to pay for it. In fact I…

Do they still not support things like 2FA? At my previous company, we couldn't get buy-in from our security team due to them not supporting 2FA. The team loved Notion, but that was a deal breaker. Also, if I remember correctly, magic email links could not be disabled. There is no excuse for not implementing 2FA w/ an authenticator app -- it took me a couple days to implement it into my product. They've had people ask…

Maybe your security team could implement an authentication server with 2FA to cover those softwares that don't support it natively?

For example, https://www.authelia.com/ is open-source.

Re: Notion API – public beta

#158

So Notion is essentially a CMS now. I still wonder what one could realistically do with the API other than small quirky experiments

I'm using Notion as a CMS for a static site I've built for a grant-funded academic project. My collaborators edit the project page, which includes nested pages, tables, and even uploaded videos and images.

After they've updated it, they click a special link that triggers a Vercel build, which converts Notion into JSON for the site to build into static pages. I'm using this as my backbone: https://github.com/benborgers/potion and it's a lot more powerful than the Notion API... this reads tables and lets you show image attachments and more

Re: Notion API – public beta

#159
post #81

Thank you for the reminder that I should try converting from Evernote to Notion again. Last time I tried (~2 months ago), the automatic importer died after importing ~10% of my Evernote content. Though, based on some of the comments in this thread, maybe I _shouldn't_ and should try Obsidian instead.

Interesting, I was able to convert a couple of thousand notes spread across about 10 notebooks from Evernote to Notion and there didn't seem to be too many issues, apart from needing to reformat quite a few that had suffered from Evernote's formatting weirdnesses.

Re: Notion API – public beta

#160
post #139
post #69

Interesting that there's apparently no way to update databases. That's unfortunate, because otherwise this might be a useful Jamstack data API.

Whoops, apparently this isn't true! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27145301

I guess one could just stuff json in these properties haha...
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