5 ms·

Notion experiencing issues (over 6 hours)

25 points by fastest963 3y ago

xmprt 3y ago
Incidents like this are why it's so critical to have offline support as a first class citizen.
- dangus 3y ago
  I think that’s an unrealistic expectation for a product that exists to connect hundreds of employees across global networks and present dynamic information. Somewhere in that equation there’s going to be downtime, whether that service is cloud managed or self-hosted. It has minimal value offline because its entire purpose is to exchange information online. It’d be like saying that World of Warcraft should have an offline mode.
  - BillinghamJ 3y ago
    Despite that, Notion actually does work okay in unstable/briefly offline connectivity situations. It syncs changes when it reconnects.
  - remkop22 3y ago
    You could make the exact same argument for something like git. Yet everybody would be totally fine if their remote/origin is down for a couple of hours. Offline support is about bridging smaller periods of being unconnected while still enabling the user to be somewhat productive.
    - BillinghamJ 3y ago
      Git has much more explicit conflict resolution though, which covers a lot of the risks involved
      - junon 3y ago
        And CRDTs already solve this, which is what I assume notion uses.
        dunham 3y ago
        No, it was not using CRDTs when I last checked (more than a year ago). If you're designing for online-only, you can cheat a little and be "good enough". Setting properties is a last write (to the server) wins (set path foo on block XXX to Y). So text changes overwrite the entire block. The contents of a page are a list of block ids. The operation is "insert id XXX after YYY", and if YYY is not found (deleted/moved), it's placed at the end of the list. But the biggest impediments to offline for Notion (again when I last checked) were that it doesn't have a full copy of the data and some of the operations are executed server-side (autocomplete dropdowns, search, and some bulk operations). I was hoping they would deal with the former, because it'd make it easier to backup and process my data. But I ended up moving on. I think they've dealt with some of the search operations, but are still not syncing all of the blocks.
        junon 3y ago
        Interesting, that actually surprises me. Thanks for clarifying!
        BillinghamJ 3y ago
        I don't think there's truly any technical solution to "two users edited the same piece of text" tbh. You can try to be smart about it in various ways, but at the end of the day you're still going to hit situations where it's really not clear what the users' intent would be to handle two mutually-unaware edits on the same words
        junon 3y ago
        CRDTs handle exactly that. There are times where things aren't exactly as the user intends but at least there's a way to determine a resolution.
  - sshine 3y ago
    > It’d be like saying that World of Warcraft should have an offline mode. No, an offline mode in WoW lets everyone cheat. Blizzard started with this, and it’s bad for cheating as well as recurring revenue. You can’t cheat at self-organising. > its entire purpose is to exchange information online I don’t think so. Its purpose is to express yourself freely and interlinked. A feature is that you can always share any hypermedia with others, and it does provide a lot of value in an organisation. But Notion would be valuable offline. Unfortunately, a company like Notion is similarly incentivised to make their software dependent on connectivity, since they are a SaaSS (service as a software substitute); offline-first self-organising apps like Obsidian, Emacs org-mode, or VSCode Foam wouldn’t generate as much money; this is why Obsidian are heroes: they pick an architecture and business model that is in the interest of their users.
- matlin 3y ago
  This is the motivating behavior behind triplit.dev (disclaimer: I'm a developer on it). Every productivity app should be able to keep chugging along whether the server is online or not. Makes server outages like this WAY cheaper.
- bartkappenburg 3y ago
  I misread this as having a supportdesk reachable by phone :s
- sshine 3y ago
  [flagged]
- JSavageOne 3y ago
  For anyone looking for an offline Notion, I've been building https://mindgarden.app https://mindgarden.app Allows you to load a local folder directly in your browser, and works completely offline. No login or installation required. It is still a work in progress though so has some bugs / rough edges.
  - kushan2020 3y ago
    I am also working on something similar and open source Bangle.io . It allows you to open a local folder and persist your markdown notes there. It also supports syncing directly with your GitHub repositories. [1] https://bangle.io https://bangle.io
    - skinner927 3y ago
      Any plans on creating a static site generator?
dmattia 3y ago
Issue is written as "We are experiencing some performance degradation and are investigating the cause." and Notion is loading for me in browser.
- morgango 3y ago
  I have it loading and able to create new pages, but not able to put a template on a page (just scrolls forever) or upload and image.
fastest963 3y ago
I've been unable to create pages all day and have intermittently got error pages.

25 points by fastest963 3y ago

xmprt 3y ago

Incidents like this are why it's so critical to have offline support as a first class citizen.

dangus 3y ago
I think that’s an unrealistic expectation for a product that exists to connect hundreds of employees across global networks and present dynamic information. Somewhere in that equation there’s going to be downtime, whether that service is cloud managed or self-hosted. It has minimal value offline because its entire purpose is to exchange information online. It’d be like saying that World of Warcraft should have an offline mode.
- BillinghamJ 3y ago
  Despite that, Notion actually does work okay in unstable/briefly offline connectivity situations. It syncs changes when it reconnects.
- remkop22 3y ago
  You could make the exact same argument for something like git. Yet everybody would be totally fine if their remote/origin is down for a couple of hours. Offline support is about bridging smaller periods of being unconnected while still enabling the user to be somewhat productive.
  - BillinghamJ 3y ago
    Git has much more explicit conflict resolution though, which covers a lot of the risks involved
    - junon 3y ago
      And CRDTs already solve this, which is what I assume notion uses.
      - dunham 3y ago
        No, it was not using CRDTs when I last checked (more than a year ago). If you're designing for online-only, you can cheat a little and be "good enough". Setting properties is a last write (to the server) wins (set path foo on block XXX to Y). So text changes overwrite the entire block. The contents of a page are a list of block ids. The operation is "insert id XXX after YYY", and if YYY is not found (deleted/moved), it's placed at the end of the list. But the biggest impediments to offline for Notion (again when I last checked) were that it doesn't have a full copy of the data and some of the operations are executed server-side (autocomplete dropdowns, search, and some bulk operations). I was hoping they would deal with the former, because it'd make it easier to backup and process my data. But I ended up moving on. I think they've dealt with some of the search operations, but are still not syncing all of the blocks.
        junon 3y ago
        Interesting, that actually surprises me. Thanks for clarifying!
      - BillinghamJ 3y ago
        I don't think there's truly any technical solution to "two users edited the same piece of text" tbh. You can try to be smart about it in various ways, but at the end of the day you're still going to hit situations where it's really not clear what the users' intent would be to handle two mutually-unaware edits on the same words
        junon 3y ago
        CRDTs handle exactly that. There are times where things aren't exactly as the user intends but at least there's a way to determine a resolution.
- sshine 3y ago
  > It’d be like saying that World of Warcraft should have an offline mode. No, an offline mode in WoW lets everyone cheat. Blizzard started with this, and it’s bad for cheating as well as recurring revenue. You can’t cheat at self-organising. > its entire purpose is to exchange information online I don’t think so. Its purpose is to express yourself freely and interlinked. A feature is that you can always share any hypermedia with others, and it does provide a lot of value in an organisation. But Notion would be valuable offline. Unfortunately, a company like Notion is similarly incentivised to make their software dependent on connectivity, since they are a SaaSS (service as a software substitute); offline-first self-organising apps like Obsidian, Emacs org-mode, or VSCode Foam wouldn’t generate as much money; this is why Obsidian are heroes: they pick an architecture and business model that is in the interest of their users.
matlin 3y ago
This is the motivating behavior behind triplit.dev (disclaimer: I'm a developer on it). Every productivity app should be able to keep chugging along whether the server is online or not. Makes server outages like this WAY cheaper.
bartkappenburg 3y ago
I misread this as having a supportdesk reachable by phone :s
sshine 3y ago
[flagged]
JSavageOne 3y ago
For anyone looking for an offline Notion, I've been building https://mindgarden.app https://mindgarden.app Allows you to load a local folder directly in your browser, and works completely offline. No login or installation required. It is still a work in progress though so has some bugs / rough edges.
- kushan2020 3y ago
  I am also working on something similar and open source Bangle.io . It allows you to open a local folder and persist your markdown notes there. It also supports syncing directly with your GitHub repositories. [1] https://bangle.io https://bangle.io
  - skinner927 3y ago
    Any plans on creating a static site generator?

dmattia 3y ago

Issue is written as "We are experiencing some performance degradation and are investigating the cause." and Notion is loading for me in browser.

morgango 3y ago
I have it loading and able to create new pages, but not able to put a template on a page (just scrolls forever) or upload and image.

fastest963 3y ago

I've been unable to create pages all day and have intermittently got error pages.