I love Notion, the tool/product, but I want something exactly like it but open source and where I can store my data where I want it. I guess I should get started...
Go help the folks working on Focalboard!
Notion API – public beta
221–230 of 262 posts
Re: Notion API – public beta
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sigh, it is a paradox. As a consumer, I want my software on-prem. But as a producer, I want to deploy as frequently as possible, so that I could iterate without friction, and I would try to avoid platforms/techs that are not hot upgradable. As a consumer, I want no data tracking. But as a producer, I want data-driven growth, so that I could understand where I did wrong and how to improve it. And data comes from track…
Why do you want your software on-prem and be responsible for deployment and monitoring,”?
Sorry I wasn't being clear about this part. What I meant is a comparison:
If there is an on-prem option, the release, the update/migration, the installation environment, and the documentation on deployment should be carefully crafted. All of these not only require more effort, but also require people to keep in mind not to stomp on things. And even worse, they have to search for potential problems with their imagination because they don't have access to the data with edge cases they're dealing with. If people are not careful, it's very easy to seriously screw things and lost some customers forever. On top of that, if fixes are required, the team usually needs to fix multiple versions over and over, of which the codebase might have drastically changed. The teams are usually less and less "brave" as time goes by.
For most SaaS without on-prem options, people can just focus on the functionalities and deploy many, many times a day. For non-critical issues, people don't need to worry about them, just debug what's going on and respond fast, and the issues are very likely fixed in hours. Plus they can use components like Kafka, Elastic Search, or even other SaaS as needed, without having to choose between re-invent things or ask everybody to install a zoo of components in their on-prem solutions.
That's one of the key reasons why web application is so popular nowadays compared to what we've done in the 90s desktop applications. Because it enables the "move fast and break things" mentality because more things are fixable in web applications. On-prem is like 90s desktop applications in disguise. Just try to imagine how horrifying if someone breaks the upgrade functionality. Or if one needs to fix a bug in Windows 10, they also need to fix it from like Windows Vista to Windows 10, where the codebases are drastically different.
In conclusion, on-prem sounds applaudable to the audiences on HN, but the reality is it doesn't work well for most for-profit businesses.
Re: Notion API – public beta
#223I used to use Trello for my personal life system inspired by the Getting Things Done method.
I get hooked 3 months ago by one of the Notion's ambassador August Bradley who make an incredible system and course avalaible for free on Youtube.
I'm excited about the API and all automations i will make by scripting for my own use cases (like an easy way to add a new item on a certain database from my CLI, or a mail adresse hooked to a database).
But all your comments freak me out. As a developer, i dont't know if i have to do my own markdown system hosted locally. Notion is a great product, and guys like August Bradley open my eyes for everything i can do with it.
Re: Notion API – public beta
#224I too tried notion for a while and I noticed that it's just getting slower and slower with each release. Even on my M1 mac it's not a very performant app which is sad. It's a bit of a jack of all trades, while doing nothing especially well.
Just recently I tried using it again for a small project (3-4 people) and it quickly got chaotic and messy (used for simple task board, wiki, blogpost drafts).
Right now, I recommend:
- Craft (http://craft.do/) for collaborating on documents, information sharing, knowledge (can't do tables and other fancy things yet, but is native and veeeery nice)
- Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/) for personal knowledge database (although it's also electron...)
- DEVONthink (https://www.devontechnologies.com/) for digital office
Re: Notion API – public beta
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if the offer is appealing, this is unlikely to happen. Confluence who used to offer it, has stopped and soon everyone would need to use the cloud version. The thing is that for a collaborative tool like Notion (and others) being Saas, and in the cloud is kind of mandatory. As you need your tool to integrate with other services and thus, can't be static. The only possibility left is "dedicated storage". That work…
Atlassian tools still offer on-prem, but you need a data center license now and they doubled the price of that. Unfortunate, but they'd be losing some huge customers that cannot run in the cloud not just as a matter of policy but technology. The entire IC developer platform is using the Atlassian suite, for instance, but on JWICS, a classified network with no connectivity to Atlassian's cloud. What's going to end up…
Well, the comment still stands. You can't /reasonably/ deploy Confluence on premise any more when weighing up the cost feasibility of using the on premise service for Data Centre vs Server.
The idea of using their cloud service (Atlassians) wouldn't be that daunting if it wasn't for the consistent feed back I see here and else where that performantly, it absolutely sucks.
Re: Notion API – public beta
#226Earlier 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.
Obsidian is not a replacement for Notion tho, no databases, a lot of custom configuration, no nice templates, etc... I can't take how slow Notion is, and I'm looking for a self-hosted replacement, but Obsidian is just not there yet, except for the note taking part, that I dont care about.
> no databases
You can query Markdown files with the (third-party) Dataview plugin. Wrote about it here[0], very simple query syntax. Only tables and lists, but tables is the one I've used by far the most in Notion.
> no nice templates
Well you can always create your own. There's a first-party templates plugin[1] and a similar third-party one that also allows custom variables and has a showcase[2] (think: you can curl the weather and add it to your journal).
Having wrote that, your "a lot of custom configuration" definitely applies.
[0] https://input.sh/replicating-notions-tables-with-obsidian-pl...
[1] https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/Templates
[2] https://github.com/SilentVoid13/Templater/discussions/catego...
Re: Notion API – public beta
#227Notion is probably the most prominent startup to make .so (somalia) domain more acceptable. I've seen plenty of .io and .ai, but .so was new for me when I first saw it. I thought it was a scam when I tried Notion 3 years ago.
They also own notion.com but the things I people like .so better.
Re: Notion API – public beta
#228I've recently started using Notion and I'm surprised at few things that I find incredibly annoying with it so far. Since it seems there are some Notion staff here I'll take this as a change to give some feedback to hopefully improve the product. * No read-only mode. I like to have documents default to a read-only mode so I don't accidentally typo random characters, or delete something when try copying. etc. * No floa…
> No floating table of contents.
I built a browser extension which does this plus many more customizations like full width for all pages, scroll to top button etc.
Notion Boost: https://gourav.io/notion-boost
Re: Notion API – public beta
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many regulated organizations do, though. Single reason we didn't adopt notion is lack of ability to self host.
Out of curiosity what do you use for documents and email? Not using Office365/Google Docs/Outlook/Gmail at all?
In my experience, you will find this kind of org uses Office365/Outlook, and not Gsuite/Gmail, as they have in place a commercial agreement with Microsoft which covers regulatory requirements put upon them (and some they put upon themselves).
Of course they could _try_ to get an agreeable contract in place with Google, but Microsoft is Enterprise-friendly and can make this happen much more readily.
Re: Notion API – public beta
#230Notion is a clever front end that does not need to be backed by a cloud service.
IT departments should be able to setup whichever backed storage they want; s3 buckets to postgres.
I’m so done with propping up every wannabe unicorn. This app will never be a thing at my company.
Two or three devs could make a living off this UX as a standalone client. This isn’t a Google scale engineering need.