[fastball]

Just to throw my hat in the ring here:

My co-founder and I have been building a hosted version of this[1] for the last two years, because we recognized that while self-hosted wikis work great for techie people, there are a lot of other people who that label doesn't fit.

So we've been working to create a collaborative knowledge-base platform built around some key concepts:

1. Built around cards rather than documents, which allows for a lot of interesting and flexible features. Such as...

2. Granular sharing – on Supernotes, you can share an entire collection of cards, or you can share one card at a time. We also have recently introduced[2] a "friends" features that allows you to quickly drag-and-drop cards onto your friends to share with them.

3. Multi-parent nesting – there is no folder-style filesystem on Supernotes, we allow you to nest cards inside of each other. On top of this, we allow for this nesting to be multi-parent, so different users can fit the same cards into their own unique structure (effectively a collaborative / personalized version of symbolic links).

4. Public vs. private tags – cards can be tagged with public tags that everyone sees, but can also be tagged privately with only tags that you can see. This same idea is reflected across the platform, where we want the underlying content to be the same for everyone but want to allow users to personalize the metadata/structure to suit their own workflow.

5. Focus on speed – we have spent a lot of time making Supernotes speedy quick, and try to make it faster every time we release a new feature.

Anyway that is the rough idea. The goal of Supernotes is to be a sort of data-layer where you can keep all these compartmentalized pieces of content (as cards) and then mix-and-match at will to create very simple or very complex stores of knowledge. We also want you to be able to embed these pieces of content elsewhere (say in a Notion document or on your blog) with as little effort as possible (not quite there yet, but will be soon).

[1] https://supernotes.app/

[2] https://supernotes.app/changelog

[stevenicr]

I like the points you mention here - I took a look at your site and glad to see pricing is easy to find. I myself want to self host, as I don't trust the cloud - but if I was to try your version of this thing, I would lean into the $300 one time payment, as the free tier would be worth the time (20 notes) - and I hate monthly payments and non-owned code.

I did scan of the faq and ended up up on the docs and searched for export. I was pleasantly impressed with the entry which showed an export option along with text and videos showing how to do this.

For me, I probably won't be spending 300 on this when I can wiki or wordpress for free... but if I was not so jaded about saas and cloud, I would be persuaded to check out your thing if you had on the front page like "export, backup" and bonus if it was 'import/export markdown or similar files'

I'd feel less worried about vendor lockin, holding data hostage, what happens when you go bankrupt, etc

the heading fonts on your privacy page are a little wonky in my browser (firefox) - being that you are uk and sharing data with EU and outside the EU - I'd only save info if it was encrypted.. not sure if that is a thing, if so I would make 'privacy built in' a big thing on the front page.

my cents in trying to help, I'm sure 98% of those who may use your service are not as sensitive to the same things I am - so this is not a critique saying it's bad, just offering some random thoughts as I took a look.

[fastball]

Thanks for taking the time to write down your thoughts!

Data ownership is pretty important to us, even though we are only offering a hosted solution, which is why we explicitly say as much in our T&Cs[1]. But yep, we want to make export / backup of your data as easy as humanly possible. The hard part generally is that there are a number of features that exist on Supernotes which just don't exist elsewhere, so even when you use the export feature it is hard to guarantee we can export it in a format that is useful to you.

That is part of the reason we are doing our best to openly document our API[2] so that you can interact with your own content in whatever way you wish (including importing content from wherever or exporting to wherever). Obviously this requires some coding, but we're hoping the community[3] will share any tools they build on top of the API with each other.

Unfortunately E2EE is not quite there yet, as it makes it much more difficult to facilitate sharing when you have E2EE, as well it being a bit of a problem when it comes to a knowledge base if a user loses their private keys and you have to tell them "sorry we can't get your content back – it's all gone". But this is definitely something we are working towards – just takes some time to nail the UX. Since we are definitely never going to sell your data or anything (as per T&Cs), it's better for us if it's E2EE as then it's just one less liability for us from a data protection perspective.

[1] https://supernotes.app/terms/

[2] https://api.supernotes.app/docs/

[3] https://community.supernotes.app/