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Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

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Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#321

Post by paulgb »

slowtrek wrote: post #143
KronisLV wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, even if this software wouldn't be 1:1 capable of replacing the established players, it still feels like a good idea. With how much people (rightfully) complain about how open source is underfunded and with how often we're forced into borderline exploitative dealings with the established players in the market (the likes of MS Office, Adobe products, Atlassian products, even some Oracle stuff), funding the…

Notion is not an example of delightful software and it is very much one of the most reproducible apps ever. I don't know how they managed to make it fashionable amongst startups, but it's certainly not because it's an innovative product.

When it came out, block-based editing and always-on wysiwig were novel, and Notion was definitely more delightful than the existing “internal wiki” software category (Confluence etc.)

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#322

Post by dtkav »

Terretta wrote: post #141
jjice wrote: post #98

It feels like notetaking/wiki software have gotten a resurgence in the last few years. Not that it was ever not a thing, but like a new generation of people realized wanted to build new tools for it. Personally, I think the variety of tools is very interesting, and while I like Obsidian and plain markdown file, I do love to see different options in the space with hosted options and different capabilities. Notion feel…

If you're familiar with the space, ever heard anything that ticks all these boxes: (a) git versioned (b) CRDTs (c) WYSIWYG but Markdown (esp GFM) (d) front matter + markdown able to be SSGd (e) comfortable UI for not-devs (f) native (Swift) MacOS app, else Tauri/Electron self-hosted client+svc (g) if online, OIDC / SAML SSO Appears this can be cobbled leveraging Obsidian plugins, but unstable due to git vs. CRDT issu…

Dev of the Obsidian Relay plugin [0] here.

We support most of this (you'll need to also use Obsidian Git), but haven't released OIDC (please reach out of you need it!).

[0] https://system3.md/relay

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#323

Post by ryanSrich »

rvense wrote: post #317
ryanSrich wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's insane yes. What an incredible waste of tax dollars.

When your health sector is being shaken down by foreign monopoly for software licenses whose prices increase for no reason, making your own word processor suddenly doesn't seem very different to training your own doctors.

They could try innovating and actually supporting an economy of entrepreneurship so individuals are incentivized to build better tools in their home country instead of coming here. Too bad VC _almost_ exclusively exists in the US. What Europe calls VC is a joke.

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#324

Post by rvense »

ryanSrich wrote: post #323
rvense wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When your health sector is being shaken down by foreign monopoly for software licenses whose prices increase for no reason, making your own word processor suddenly doesn't seem very different to training your own doctors.

They could try innovating and actually supporting an economy of entrepreneurship so individuals are incentivized to build better tools in their home country instead of coming here. Too bad VC _almost_ exclusively exists in the US. What Europe calls VC is a joke.

The world would be much better without much of what American venture capital has created over the past twenty years. Ad tech mass surveillance, Uber eating labour protections, "Unicorn" worshpping monopolization of basic utilities.

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#325

Post by sylvinus »

piokoch wrote: post #294

"Simple collaborative editing without the formatting complexity of markdown" It is incredible that nowadays Markdown is considered "complex".

Well I think that most of our users have never typed a "[" character... So for them, Markdown is definitely complex :)

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#326

Post by virdev »

mkl wrote: post #312
virdev wrote: post #296

Hey everyone! I'm the PM working with the Docs team. Thanks a lot for the kind words, we're as excited as you to be working on such a cool project. We didn't expect to get posted so soon on HN. We still have a lot to do in terms documentation and reusability. But we'll be working a lot on that next week. We'll keep you posted here. Again thank you everyone!

Do you have plans to add structure to the document collection? E.g. group documents into projects, put documents into order and hierarchy (docs holding chapters, sections). I would really like a system that lets you have projects with a document per chapter or section and has a chapter/section outline on the left panel of the document editor. Comments and custom styles would also be great.

Hey! Yes we do, we plan to release sub-docs before the end of the month. That will allow you to create trees of docs (with as many child / grand-child as you want) all inheriting the user rights of the parent.

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#327

Post by virdev »

alephnerd wrote: post #306
virdev wrote: post #296

Hey everyone! I'm the PM working with the Docs team. Thanks a lot for the kind words, we're as excited as you to be working on such a cool project. We didn't expect to get posted so soon on HN. We still have a lot to do in terms documentation and reusability. But we'll be working a lot on that next week. We'll keep you posted here. Again thank you everyone!

Great work by the Suite Numerique team! Are you guys looking at adding localization support for languages beyond French as well (eg. English, German)? It would be a great alternative to multiple disjointed OSS offerings like Mattermost or Appflowy. Also, I found the DIPT to be fairly intruiging. How much inspiration did the org get from Gov.uk, and are there some resources, papers, or books you could point to about t…

Hey! Thanks! Yes we do plan to support more languages, we want the project to be usable by the many. Translations are here : https://crowdin.com/project/lasuite-docs (just added turkish tonight ;)

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#328

Post by amyjess »

crazygringo wrote: post #276
lioeters wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Docs and Word are both generic words that need a qualification like Google Docs or Microsoft Word. Otherwise they could be Open Docs or Open Word (not sure if that exists, maybe Libre Word?). Same with Books. It could be Google Books, Facebook, or Open Books.

> Otherwise they could be Open Docs or Open Word (not sure if that exists, maybe Libre Word?). No, they couldn't. That's why there isn't any Open Docs or Libre Word word processor. That's very specifically why it's Libre Writer . Why it's FreeOffice TextMaker . Why it's FocusWriter and Writemonkey and whatever else. A major part of trademark law is likelihood of confusion. Both Docs and Word are associated so strongl…

KWord is a thing, and the only reason it's not still under active development is because enthusiasm for development dried up after the acrimonious KOffice/Calligra split. In fact, it was the only part of the KOffice suite that was allowed to keep its name after the split.

And there's also AbiWord, which is still under active development.

Or speaking of which, all the gazillion office suites with Office in the name.

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#329

Post by somat »

kellpossible2 wrote: post #277
slowtrek wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notion is not an example of delightful software and it is very much one of the most reproducible apps ever. I don't know how they managed to make it fashionable amongst startups, but it's certainly not because it's an innovative product.

please name some open source (or lower priced) alternatives that support: comments on documents, database functionality to a similar level, publishing websites, scripting for properties. I'm very curious!

The unix operating environment.

I was going to say git, but really you need the whole environment.

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#330

Post by CountGeek »

remark5396 wrote: post #283

There are already quiet a few softwares that claim to be Notion alternatives or seem to be: - AppFlowy: https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy - AFFiNE: https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE - SiYuan: https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan - Trillium Next: https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes - AnyType (only clients are source available): https://github.com/anyproto/anytype-ts

And Docmost - https://github.com/docmost/docmost
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