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Yeah; I have the same reaction to products like Notion or Figma where someone is footing the bill to keep servers on. And if those servers ever turn off, I lose

Yeah; I have the same reaction to products like Notion or Figma where someone is footing the bill to keep servers on. And if those servers ever turn off, I lose access to my stuff. Either I'm paying for a product, and as soon as I stop paying, I've lost access to my stuff (Figma, Notion). Or the product is free, and someone is somehow intending to make money from me being their user. They'll either start charging down the line, or they're selling my data or my attention to advertisers (tiktok, twitter, etc). I don't think I like using SAAS products because its never really free. At least not in the same way the web is free or vim is free.

yinyang_in 4y ago
Really looking for notion alternatives, notion works for me, but no good alternatives. If you’ve some, do share those
- psadauskas 4y ago
  Obsidian
- aidos 4y ago
  An open source alternative to Notion is Outline. I’ve only looked at it, not used it in anger so I can’t offer much other guidance. https://www.getoutline.com/ https://www.getoutline.com/
chrisweekly 4y ago
In stark contrast to those 2 examples of Notion and Figma, consider Obsidian. With its massive OSS plugin ecosystem, it approximates their combined capabilities, but has a foundation of offline-first, local markdown files.
- sunbum 4y ago
  In what world does Obsidian come even close to having any overlapping features that Figma has?
  - chrisweekly 4y ago
    This one, the real world, where Excalidraw and Canvas in Obsidian provide a fair amount of overlap with Figma.
    - josephg 4y ago
      Honest question from someone who’s never used obsidian: Does obsidian have anything like Notion’s multi-view databases?
      - chrisweekly 4y ago
        TBH I'm not sure; I used Notion for a few months a couple years ago but unsure about "multi-view dbs" in particular. But I will say, the breadth and power and extensibility of Obsidian w/ its massive OSS plugin ecosystem is hard to overstate. If you like a Notion feature, I'd bet heavy it's doable in Obsidian.
MattRix 4y ago
It’s ok to pay money for things that are useful to you! Often most free alternatives have drawbacks or downsides of their own. Sure, there’s a chance they will eventually get shut down, but that almost never happens without warning. And it’s always a good idea to make backups of your important data for any kind of tool or service. I think a lot of people in this community get caught up with “owning their own data” just in case, but in reality there are almost always ways to migrate your data when you need to.
- josephg 4y ago
  > It’s ok to pay money for things that are useful to you! I do pay money for useful software! For example, I have no problem paying for intellij. With intellij, my data isn't trapped behind my subscription. If I stop paying for intellij, the software I've written is still on my computer. It still works, and I can still edit it just fine using vs code or something. Likewise, I don't have a problem paying for Procreate on my ipad. Now that I've paid for procreate, I own it forever. And I can backup all my procreate documents onto an external hard disk (though the process is awkward) and they're mine forever. Thats important. I even don't mind paying for Fastmail. All my data is stored on their computers, but because its email, I can at least get all my data off fastmail's servers if I ever want to. And then I can migrate my custom domain somewhere else, and I won't have lost any of my data. But programs like Notion are no good to me. If I do creative work in notion, as far as I know my data is trapped. Does Notion even have a data export tool? Can anything even read notion's data format? Not that I know of. Google docs has the same problem (though at least thats free for personal use). And Figma. (I just checked - you can export notion data to HTML & PDFs. But you can't get the raw data. Presumably, notion databases and things are all lost. I'd have to copy+paste into another tool losing all my formatting and start again.) I don't like my creative work being trapped like that. I don't want to be lose access to my own work because the only tool which edits that data gets shut down or aquihired. I don't want to pay a monthly subscription fee to continue to have access to my own work. I bought MonoDraw years ago (an ascii art drawing program). The developer has stopped working on it, but the software still works great. If it were a web app, I'm sure the website would have stopped working or gone down a long time ago. Just like Google Wave did. Or LiveJournal. Or hundreds of other sites over the years. > in reality there are almost always ways to migrate your data when you need to. So long as they put up an API that lets you get your data out. And the data you can get out has the full data model (lots of sites don't provide this!). And you personally remember to back it all up before the site goes down. (Oops - I've failed at this before). Even then, you can't really interact with your data any more except through 3rd party tools. Sounds like a bad deal.

yinyang_in 4y ago

Really looking for notion alternatives, notion works for me, but no good alternatives. If you’ve some, do share those

psadauskas 4y ago
Obsidian
aidos 4y ago
An open source alternative to Notion is Outline. I’ve only looked at it, not used it in anger so I can’t offer much other guidance. https://www.getoutline.com/ https://www.getoutline.com/

chrisweekly 4y ago

In stark contrast to those 2 examples of Notion and Figma, consider Obsidian. With its massive OSS plugin ecosystem, it approximates their combined capabilities, but has a foundation of offline-first, local markdown files.

sunbum 4y ago
In what world does Obsidian come even close to having any overlapping features that Figma has?
- chrisweekly 4y ago
  This one, the real world, where Excalidraw and Canvas in Obsidian provide a fair amount of overlap with Figma.
  - josephg 4y ago
    Honest question from someone who’s never used obsidian: Does obsidian have anything like Notion’s multi-view databases?
    - chrisweekly 4y ago
      TBH I'm not sure; I used Notion for a few months a couple years ago but unsure about "multi-view dbs" in particular. But I will say, the breadth and power and extensibility of Obsidian w/ its massive OSS plugin ecosystem is hard to overstate. If you like a Notion feature, I'd bet heavy it's doable in Obsidian.

MattRix 4y ago

It’s ok to pay money for things that are useful to you! Often most free alternatives have drawbacks or downsides of their own. Sure, there’s a chance they will eventually get shut down, but that almost never happens without warning. And it’s always a good idea to make backups of your important data for any kind of tool or service. I think a lot of people in this community get caught up with “owning their own data” just in case, but in reality there are almost always ways to migrate your data when you need to.

josephg 4y ago
> It’s ok to pay money for things that are useful to you! I do pay money for useful software! For example, I have no problem paying for intellij. With intellij, my data isn't trapped behind my subscription. If I stop paying for intellij, the software I've written is still on my computer. It still works, and I can still edit it just fine using vs code or something. Likewise, I don't have a problem paying for Procreate on my ipad. Now that I've paid for procreate, I own it forever. And I can backup all my procreate documents onto an external hard disk (though the process is awkward) and they're mine forever. Thats important. I even don't mind paying for Fastmail. All my data is stored on their computers, but because its email, I can at least get all my data off fastmail's servers if I ever want to. And then I can migrate my custom domain somewhere else, and I won't have lost any of my data. But programs like Notion are no good to me. If I do creative work in notion, as far as I know my data is trapped. Does Notion even have a data export tool? Can anything even read notion's data format? Not that I know of. Google docs has the same problem (though at least thats free for personal use). And Figma. (I just checked - you can export notion data to HTML & PDFs. But you can't get the raw data. Presumably, notion databases and things are all lost. I'd have to copy+paste into another tool losing all my formatting and start again.) I don't like my creative work being trapped like that. I don't want to be lose access to my own work because the only tool which edits that data gets shut down or aquihired. I don't want to pay a monthly subscription fee to continue to have access to my own work. I bought MonoDraw years ago (an ascii art drawing program). The developer has stopped working on it, but the software still works great. If it were a web app, I'm sure the website would have stopped working or gone down a long time ago. Just like Google Wave did. Or LiveJournal. Or hundreds of other sites over the years. > in reality there are almost always ways to migrate your data when you need to. So long as they put up an API that lets you get your data out. And the data you can get out has the full data model (lots of sites don't provide this!). And you personally remember to back it all up before the site goes down. (Oops - I've failed at this before). Even then, you can't really interact with your data any more except through 3rd party tools. Sounds like a bad deal.