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Comment by mtsolitary | Hacker News Reader

Are these people not worried about storing their entire lives in some SaaS company's proprietary format on their cloud servers?

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Notion's biggest market is students that have grown up with Google Docs. The idea of local storage is long gone for the "digital natives" generation. There was even this story from a couple of years ago from an engineering professor who had to change how she taught basic concepts because her students weren't familiar with folder-based file systems [0].

[0] https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...

Generation before me does that.

My generation knows what a file is.

Generation after me does that.

That idea will come right back when one of their favorite services pulls the plug.

The majority won't. I have seen this myself, as I did not like the SaaS nature of Roam Research, and wanted a local-first solution. There is a large community of people using Logseq or Obsidian, but they are still a tiny monitory as these products don't have name recognition and there aren't as many polished videos about them on YT.

I am. I export my Notion to HTML regularly. I can do a plain text search on it.

I actually do regularly go back and search my notes and journals within Notion. Knowing that I will be able to do it if I ever leave Notion is comforting.

P.S. If anyone at Notion is reading this, please work on your search. It could be so much more useful.

We know, and we are!

you can export and backup your entire workspace in usable format ( markdown for pages + csv for databases + attachments).

They probably don't care or think they have nothing to hide or probably never stumbled across numerous self hosted alternatives

https://selfhosting.quest/search?q=wiki

Self-hosting also means you'll have to make sure it's up and secure at all times. I used to self-host a ton of things, but keeping a decent security posture has become so much effort it's just no longer feasible for me, and no longer fun, so I try to use SaaS with a good track record and a backup/export option for anything critical these days.

Self hosting has only got easier in the security regard thanks to solutions like tailscale

Tailscale is a centralized service that your whole network is exposed to. I'm using them but if you're self-hosting for security or privacy reasons, that's probably not what you'd want as they or someone who compromises them would essentially own your network and it doesn't get much more critical than that. You can monitor and harden your infrastructure against that, but that's no longer easy. If you trust Tailscale with all your traffic, including from/to your notes app, I guess you could just as well trust a SaaS notes solution with a good track record and support for exports/backups.

Tailscale is only partially centralized (the admin portion). The actual traffic flow is not.

But also, I use Headscale so I'm self-hosting my tailscale as well.

As a self-hoster, I would totally recommend to the average person to self-host services on your LAN, and just use tailscale to extend your LAN beyond your house (for example on your laptop and phone) so you can get to things when you're not at home. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

I like self-hosting when I can, too, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it to the "average person". Especially if they would come back to me for tech support.

A generic wiki is not an alternative to Notion. And believe me, I have looked.

Might not be for you but it is for me and countless others.

The average person is not capable of self-hosting software and SaaS is much nicer looking / more fully features 99% of the time. I say this as someone who loves self-hosting and self hosts most of my own stuff.

I wonder if they offer an option to export the data in some usable format.

Unless there's a tangible monetary benefit in doing so, I don't see why that would be a good business decision.

It is likely that there will be some use cases for power users, however one must justify the development and opportunity costs associated with that.

Seems like they do from a quick googlin'

https://www.notion.so/help/export-your-content

https://www.notion.so/help/back-up-your-data

> one must justify the development and opportunity costs

GDPR

yes, markdown

It's not the most intuitive export (since there are backlinks, complex hierarchy, databases and all that jazz in Notion pages) but they do return Markdown for every page, CSV for databases (with some information loss), maintain folder structures, and multimedia attachments.

A quick search shows me that Notion exports can be used to populate Obsidian [1] (which implies that there's not substantial information loss).

[1] - https://forum.obsidian.md/t/notion-2-obsidian-migration-inst...

(I work at Notion)

We support Markdown/CSV "plain text" export, a semantically-rich HTML export, and a PDF export which is just the HTML export rendered as a PDF.

https://www.notion.so/help/export-your-content

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