I think the project mentioned here is very cool and something I am looking for, will definitely try it out. But highly agree that calling it a Notion replacement/alternative is mislabling it. But I've seen this often on HN nowadays, any note-taking application = Notion.

It is not a full notion replacement yet. But having team workspaces is around the corner as well as other knowledge management features.

> Honestly if Notion would offer a self hosted version for companies, that would be a killer feature

Cloud hosting is the killer feature. No one wants to be in the hosting business. There are enough other things for a company to worry about.

Managing servers, deployments, zero downtime upgrades, security patches, monitoring CVEs, auth, 2FA, lost passwords, DDoS attacks, database maintenance, sharding, migration, load balancing, caching, DNS, reliability, latency, uptime, load testing, a million different dashboards, 24x7 on call... Paying $10/mo to offload all of this is a steal.

Yes the editor is self build and it supports concurrent edits. You can try this out in the browser version and invite a coauthor.

Developers are entitled to earn more money when they continue working. On the other hand, it is unfair how consumers have frequently needed to re-purchase products that they bought with the impression it would last a long time.

At least, the developer should specify how long the product will be supported for security and bug fixes.

A great solution, if you can pull it off: You continue maintaining the base product indefinitely, but "v2" features are disabled until the user pays more. And if you buy v2 in full you get the full feature set.

Why do you need to read the small print to "guess" the obvious - unless "lifetime upgrades" are advertised, they are not part of the package. Also, you don't have to pay for v2, you can continue to use v1?

Are you saying you expect to pay one time and never again and want continued support for the lifetime of the app?

An amazing open source obsidian competitor is org-roam for emacs.

I'm thinking to open source parts of it, like the text editor.

Logseq is the answer

I ended up with Emacs and org-mode. One of my friends used Vim and Pandoc to the same effect. I didn't quite have to write my own tool but each new LaTeX template foisted on me was hours of work that could have been spent doing research. My impression after seeing my peers work with Mendeley, Notion, Overleaf, etc. was they looked prettier at first glance but didn't solve my problem.

Over time I developed the opinion that LaTeX is an unnecessary tax on scientific progress. It's insanity to keep using it when HTML exists.

My/our setup for papers is: Latex installation on laptop, (home, work, conferences) + private Github repo + Zotero (with notes and highlighting directly in the PDFs) + notes.md for thoughts/ideas etc.

Team members all have local Latex installs as they have CS/math backgrounds.

Works well, easy to onboard new colleagues. Probably harder if there were people with other backgrounds (MBA), however an industrial designer on the team also uses GitHub for basic pull/commit.

For my fiction writing, I also use local Latex install+GitHub.

Just thinking out loud as someone who's been in a similar situation...

There are a ton of tools that claim to be one stop shops, but of course, almost none have all the features you would want.

Hence it makes sense to separate the different parts (to use tools that are excellent/powerful at any one task), and use some intermediary in the middle. Of course this isn't as efficient and frictionless as possible, but it allows compatibility.

I suppose in today's "everything is a file" computing paradigm, files (or folders) with data are probably the closest? It is far from perfect, but it's possible to integrate with a bit of legwork with scripts and the like.

That way you can import from your browser/extension of choice, save it in a form (.md? .odt/docx?) of choice, and export it as you please (ppts or pdfs? webpages?).

Check out thinky.dev - it is primarily focused on 2 right now, but I think it is really good at it.

It was also built because of academia, my masters thesis

While I haven’t had a need to use it, this sounds like what Ulysses[0] was built for. I saw a writer talking about it years ago, and how they liked it because it allowed them to organize and keep their research right alongside their document in the same app.

[0] https://ulysses.app

This sort of flow works well for me with obsidian+paperpile+latex

I am using Scrivener right now, since it’s superlocal and interfaces well enough with other apps.