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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

Yeah; I have the same reaction to products like Notion or Figma where someone is footing the bill to keep servers on. And if those servers ever turn off, I lose access to my stuff.

Either I'm paying for a product, and as soon as I stop paying, I've lost access to my stuff (Figma, Notion). Or the product is free, and someone is somehow intending to make money from me being their user. They'll either start charging down the line, or they're selling my data or my attention to advertisers (tiktok, twitter, etc).

I don't think I like using SAAS products because its never really free. At least not in the same way the web is free or vim is free.

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It’s ok to pay money for things that are useful to you! Often most free alternatives have drawbacks or downsides of their own. Sure, there’s a chance they will eventually get shut down, but that almost never happens without warning. And it’s always a good idea to make backups of your important data for any kind of tool or service.

I think a lot of people in this community get caught up with “owning their own data” just in case, but in reality there are almost always ways to migrate your data when you need to.

> It’s ok to pay money for things that are useful to you!

I do pay money for useful software! For example, I have no problem paying for intellij. With intellij, my data isn't trapped behind my subscription. If I stop paying for intellij, the software I've written is still on my computer. It still works, and I can still edit it just fine using vs code or something.

Likewise, I don't have a problem paying for Procreate on my ipad. Now that I've paid for procreate, I own it forever. And I can backup all my procreate documents onto an external hard disk (though the process is awkward) and they're mine forever. Thats important.

I even don't mind paying for Fastmail. All my data is stored on their computers, but because its email, I can at least get all my data off fastmail's servers if I ever want to. And then I can migrate my custom domain somewhere else, and I won't have lost any of my data.

But programs like Notion are no good to me. If I do creative work in notion, as far as I know my data is trapped. Does Notion even have a data export tool? Can anything even read notion's data format? Not that I know of. Google docs has the same problem (though at least thats free for personal use). And Figma.

(I just checked - you can export notion data to HTML & PDFs. But you can't get the raw data. Presumably, notion databases and things are all lost. I'd have to copy+paste into another tool losing all my formatting and start again.)

I don't like my creative work being trapped like that. I don't want to be lose access to my own work because the only tool which edits that data gets shut down or aquihired. I don't want to pay a monthly subscription fee to continue to have access to my own work.

I bought MonoDraw years ago (an ascii art drawing program). The developer has stopped working on it, but the software still works great. If it were a web app, I'm sure the website would have stopped working or gone down a long time ago. Just like Google Wave did. Or LiveJournal. Or hundreds of other sites over the years.

> in reality there are almost always ways to migrate your data when you need to.

So long as they put up an API that lets you get your data out. And the data you can get out has the full data model (lots of sites don't provide this!). And you personally remember to back it all up before the site goes down. (Oops - I've failed at this before). Even then, you can't really interact with your data any more except through 3rd party tools.

Sounds like a bad deal.

> Likewise, I don't have a problem paying for Procreate on my ipad. Now that I've paid for procreate, I own it forever.

Bad example. You only own it as long as you're in possession of a working iPad which runs the thing. Might be a long time, but I've got lots of apps from the mac and iOS 32 bits era which don't run anymore on new hardware.

All software eventually gets discontinued or you can't run it on current systems without heroic measures. More common and more standardized formats are better but good luck extracting the contents of a 1980s vintage DOS word processing program or any of the zillions of presentation or image processing programs of the era without a huge amount of work--and maybe even then.

Hmm? You can get the raw data and data for tables too. I've done a full dump before for offline analysis. The API for getting it slightly more in native format than just CSV and Markdown works fine too.

There's a couple of Notion to Obsidian import tools too like https://github.com/connertennery/Notion-to-Obsidian-Converte...

I’m glad this ecosystem is slowly growing around Notion & their data. But any tool less popular than notion (or, less popular with developers) will not get this sort of attention. I work with a designer who keeps paying for (Indesign?) simply so she won’t lose access to some old design work she’s done.

Even with Notion, it’s obviously a degraded experience to import the data into obsidian using some motley set of extensions. Especially since obsidian isn’t designed to have feature parity with Notion. My experience as a user is straight up better with shrink wrapped software that I can but once and run indefinitely, even long after the vendor has moved on. I don’t want to play the guessing game, wondering which of the products I use will die before someone makes good 3rd party tooling. After being burned a couple times by this stuff, I really prefer not needing to worry about my work sinking below the waves. Local software gives me that power.

As you can see, the point was not "paying for things you like", if you could buy them and they're yours. The problem is paying an ongoing subscription where they can pull the plug at any time.

And owning your data and your tools isn't a theoretical or fringe concern. It is a central aspect of many people's lives, with wide practical consequences.

"And owning your data and your tools isn't a theoretical or fringe concern. It is a central aspect of many people's lives, with wide practical consequences."

Ironically, most development eschews this practice. The default approach appears to be: "Import it... if you can."

Using libraries that are open source or perpetually licensed doesn't come with that sort of platform risk. The analog there would be relying on third-party APIs.

I fundamentally disagree. Supply chain is as important for software as it is for manufacturing.

All code presents risk. With modern dependencies chains, those risks compound through time too.

Sure; but npm packages are much more likely to still be around in a few years than some random startup’s web app. Even the original developers can’t take their own code off npm in most cases any more. And if you really needed to replace a package you depend on, most useful packages on npm have a bunch of good-enough alternatives you can switch to with a little bit of effort.

You're absolutely right. Something suitable will probably be available at any future point in time.

Come to think of it, I have been bitten by something like this before. I used the (mostly) single-developer project clojure-android to build an app and had no good options when bit-rot set in.

Sure but even then, forking & fixing that one library will be a walk in the park compared to remaking Figma or Google Docs if those sites ever go down. They don't seem like remotely comparable risks.

"fixing that one library will be a walk in the park compared to remaking Figma or Google Docs if those sites ever go down"

Most core tech is trivial to rebuild for a single user. It becomes complex over time due to scale and with the addition of user-guardrails.

I've been running a homegrown Object-Oriented Database for months without issue. It's less than 100 lines of Python including the interface.

In stark contrast to those 2 examples of Notion and Figma, consider Obsidian. With its massive OSS plugin ecosystem, it approximates their combined capabilities, but has a foundation of offline-first, local markdown files.

In what world does Obsidian come even close to having any overlapping features that Figma has?

This one, the real world, where Excalidraw and Canvas in Obsidian provide a fair amount of overlap with Figma.

Honest question from someone who’s never used obsidian: Does obsidian have anything like Notion’s multi-view databases?

TBH I'm not sure; I used Notion for a few months a couple years ago but unsure about "multi-view dbs" in particular. But I will say, the breadth and power and extensibility of Obsidian w/ its massive OSS plugin ecosystem is hard to overstate. If you like a Notion feature, I'd bet heavy it's doable in Obsidian.

Really looking for notion alternatives, notion works for me, but no good alternatives.

If you’ve some, do share those

Obsidian

An open source alternative to Notion is Outline. I’ve only looked at it, not used it in anger so I can’t offer much other guidance.

https://www.getoutline.com/

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