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Co-founder of Supernotes, Tobias, here! I thought I'd try to tackle some of most common questions in one go. To start Supernotes is very different from many ot

Co-founder of Supernotes, Tobias, here! I thought I'd try to tackle some of most common questions in one go. To start Supernotes is very different from many other note-taking apps – we are focusing on the social aspect of sharing knowledge with your friends via markdown notecards [1], rather than local-first note-taking apps of which there are many to choose from if that is what you prefer. As a small team of two, trying to do both ease-of-sharing and end-to-end encryption (E2EE) right is a mammoth task, so we wanted to do one right, the social side of things. E2EE has become a buzzword for marketing for the last few years, but what's most concerning is how misunderstood it is. That's one of the main reasons why we decided to publish this article as we regularly received support interactions from customers mis-understanding encryption, with some asking whether we have "end-to-end encryption in transit" and "two factor encryption". This article is here to help the average (less tech savvy than HN) user better understand how encryption works so they can make a more informed choice whether Supernotes is right for them. We are not saying there are no reasons to use end-to-end encryption — there are a lot and other people have explained the obvious benefits quite well! The question is whether the increased effort and friction are worth it for your use case. If you want to quickly jot down and share your recipes, restaurant recommendations and startup ideas with your friends then Supernotes is for you. If you'd like to write down passwords, trade secrets, or your deepest darkest desires then we suggest using an alternative. [1] https://supernotes.app/features/friends https://supernotes.app/features/friends

pclmulqdq 4y ago
I'm not sure that social sharing of knowledge is what I want from a "notes" app. That sounds more like a text-based social media app.
klabb3 4y ago
I for one liked the article a lot, and I applaud you for doing the research and sharing it even if it's a negative result, especially with the HN crowd. Much more respect than what the majority does - plaster on some "military grade encryption" when they mean they have FDE or some other standard encryption at rest where they control the keys. Even better, educating the public about this. For my own venture (large file transfers) I went through very similar thoughts, but have decided to keep e2ee, but it's going to take a lot of time to see if it actually benefits my users. I've found that "going against the grain" with offline-first, e2ee etc is mostly a problem of immature off-the-shelf tooling, protocols and libraries. I.e. you need to put in a lot more work to build an equivalent product. Do you think that with a more mature ecosystem, you would have come to a different conclusion?
orthecreedence 4y ago
I have a social notes app (Turtl: https://turtlapp.com/ https://turtlapp.com/) and it is end-to-end encrypted. It takes a bit of architecting, but the concept is completely doable.

pclmulqdq 4y ago

I'm not sure that social sharing of knowledge is what I want from a "notes" app. That sounds more like a text-based social media app.

klabb3 4y ago

I for one liked the article a lot, and I applaud you for doing the research and sharing it even if it's a negative result, especially with the HN crowd. Much more respect than what the majority does - plaster on some "military grade encryption" when they mean they have FDE or some other standard encryption at rest where they control the keys. Even better, educating the public about this. For my own venture (large file transfers) I went through very similar thoughts, but have decided to keep e2ee, but it's going to take a lot of time to see if it actually benefits my users. I've found that "going against the grain" with offline-first, e2ee etc is mostly a problem of immature off-the-shelf tooling, protocols and libraries. I.e. you need to put in a lot more work to build an equivalent product. Do you think that with a more mature ecosystem, you would have come to a different conclusion?

orthecreedence 4y ago

I have a social notes app (Turtl: https://turtlapp.com/ https://turtlapp.com/) and it is end-to-end encrypted. It takes a bit of architecting, but the concept is completely doable.