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As a long-time dilettante in this space, I totally agree. I am all-in on Obsidian (and a long-term paying sync customer) which is imo peerless for note-taking, and of course the plugin ecosystem is very vibrant. But there’s no question that there’s something special about the core “block” abstraction used by Notion (and, I see, AnyType), in that it really does allow you to not only structure and display information in absolutely any way you want, but also to reason about that structure in a unified way. You can come back after a month away and still remember how everything fits together. You can literally build everything a team needs: wikis, datatables, highly customised task/project managers, CRM, etc. And it’s all multiplayer. Notion the _product_ ain’t it, though. Closed-source, SaaS, very slow, buggy electron apps (Obsidian’s electron apps are very good, by the by - and their sync service is faultless). Hopeless handling of copy-pasted markdown: why can’t I simply paste markdown content in from another app and have it appear - and be editable - as a normal page? Insufficient access controls, no locking of page designs, poor sharing UX (just let me copy a link to the page without throwing up an access permissions dialog box each time and warning me that certain people won’t have access when they definitely will). The final complaint would be that they’re sort of caught between different audiences. We already had a company wiki we built with the block abstraction and were very happy with, then they went and introduced a new “Wiki” … I dunno … “special type”. Is it composed just of blocks like everything else, or does it get some kind of special treatment. Is every page I create under the “Wiki” folder a normal page, or somehow special? I get that they have to walk a line between power and casual users, but any UX decision that obscures the core block abstraction fails to strike that balance, imo. Why didn’t they make Wikis just another official template built of normal blocks? All of which is to say: I remain really hopeful on this space and would love to see an open source project come along and take the crown. Certainly an increasing number of promising entrants. |
I was coincidentally looking at Anytype yesterday, but can't create my own extensions (and the database has no formula type for columns??).
Curious if there's something that's been around for 1 year+ and allows me to build my own extensions?