Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

I think state-funded open source solutions to digital platforms is a fantastic opportunity to get away from the big tech walled gardens. Of course, there is always the risk that this becomes unmaintained in the future, but the community at least can take over. But until then, it's a nice platform and a nice contribution to the community.

johndhi• 1 year ago

I haven't thought about this a ton - but am I wrong that it sounds crazy and inefficient for the government to essentially compete with private industry?

It feels like a colliding of worlds and a cannibalization that doesn't make sense to me. Like - if the government launched a messaging app competitive with WhatsApp and it drew users away from WhatsApp and it had better encryption ... Would that actually be better for the economy of this country? Something seems off about it to me.

maelito7• 1 year ago

if the government launched a messaging app competitive with WhatsApp

Done, but for public workers. https://tchap.beta.gouv.fr

These tools are not yet for citizens, but for workers.

armarr• 1 year ago

Being dependent on foreign companies is a security issue. The economic value is more subtle and indirect but it is there

JansjoFromIkea• 1 year ago

Things like this aren't about economic growth, they're about reducing the reliance on foreign services

mcintyre19942• 1 year ago

I don’t think in this case they’re really trying to compete - they just need something better than any of the open source solutions available and are then open sourcing that. I doubt they’re going to get into the business of hosting public instances or marketing to businesses.

It wouldn’t make sense to rely on a foreign closed source company if they want to do anything serious with this IMO.

emacsen• 1 year ago

There's so much here to discuss that we could only ever touch on the surface level, but let's give it a go.

Let's first start with what I understand to be the premise- that private industry and governments are two worlds (ie your worlds colliding idea). Let's explore this from the other side: Private industry should never compete with the government.

We don't need bottled water- tap is fine, and it competes with government water.

Commercial radio and TV stations should not exist in countries that have a public station.

Doctors and nurses should never work in private clinics where government offers medical services, or supplementary insurance should not exist.

Back to government, though. Government should do what's best for the citizenry. It might make a public bridge to compete with a commercial ferry service. Or it might mean offering cheap Internet to compete with exploitive ISPs.

Proprietary software like this is an effective tax on the citizens, but a commercial one. Governments can fund a public alternative for a small amount of money. Why not?

bayindirh6• 1 year ago

No, it doesn't.

First, you create the tools you need with the money your people give you. Then, you give back the tools you created to the public and/or everyone who needs them.

You keep your data in your own data center, use the tools which squarely fills the needs of your workers and people, and you share its maintenance with the outside users.

It's a win-win-win (country, its workers, people in the world). WWW is developed the same way, Europe's open data repository Zenodo (https://zenodo.org) is built the same way, alongside countless science tools.

We shouldn't be afraid of governments doing cool things. Heck, most if not all supercomputer centers in the US and around the world are government funded, and free for scientists.

Moreover, the project is licensed MIT to enable to be "taken and ran with it" by private sector. From the README.md:

While Docs is a public driven initiative our licence (sic) choice is an invitation for private sector actors to use, sell and contribute to the project.

rtpg4• 1 year ago

In a universe where the French government drops a perfect replacement for Notion and causes Notion to go out of business, this is still a net positive for society in the same way that things like Linux existing is a net positive for society.

One should not focus on the economic sphere as the be all and end all. We can just have improvements be distributed to everyone sometimes! We can just do good things through coordinated efforts and entirely sidestep the economy to get the good things.

All the people who were working on Notion now can go get some on the job training to learn to farm.

Why don't we just do this for everything? You can go read a bunch of political and economic philosophy about that.

nchagnet4• 1 year ago

I get your point, and I agree to some extent, but I also don't think it has to be black and white. I don't really trust the French government to fund such projects long-term, but at the same time private companies create and end services all the time (looking at you Google). So within those parameters, this doesn't seem like a bad thing.

And regarding the economy, my understanding is that there's been a push in the French government (and in Europe to some extent) towards more independent services (the recent behaviour of US big tech are not helping for sure). If the government is going to generate some tool for its internal use, I sure would prefer if they open sourced it at the same time.

Finally for the WhatsApp alternative, if France or Germany or whoever else started an open source WhatsApp competitor with better encryption, I definitely think it would be good for European citizens: one less dependency on Meta. Why wouldn't we want that?

ryanSrich3• 1 year ago

It's insane yes. What an incredible waste of tax dollars.

DeathArrow• 1 year ago

It feels like a colliding of worlds and a cannibalization that doesn't make sense to me. Like - if the government launched a messaging app competitive with WhatsApp and it drew users away from WhatsApp and it had better encryption ... Would that actually be better for the economy of this country? Something seems off about it to me.

The economy works best when anyone does what is supposed to: the Government sticks to maintaining order, defending the country, public healthcare, public education. The companies are producing goods and services.

Governments trying to undercut businesses isn't doing any good to the economy. There will be less money, less jobs.

danmaz74• 1 year ago

Your example of WhatsApp is a perfect one for me to say: yes, I would much rather use for my private messaging an open source, publicly founded solution, than a solution which Mark Zuckerberg controls for his own private gain.

sMarsIntruder2• 1 year ago

You’re right. That’s economically inefficient, but apparently seems to be the only way to create models that compete with the bigs. IMHO this repo will die within few years, and that’s both a pity and a waste of public money.

fluidcruft• 1 year ago

Private industry can always build on open source as well. The just work on the parts that don't involve reinventing the wheel.

afavour2• 1 year ago

IMO there are a few interesting things to unpack here. Going to put your WhatsApp comparison aside because I don’t think it’s actually applicable.

When it comes to software these governments are already shelling out X amount of money (which they don’t with WhatsApp, hence putting it aside). If they can make a comparable product they themselves own with X * 0.5 money it’s a clear win. Even if it’s X * 1.5 money to begin with while they create the software then decreasing over time as the software stabilises it’s still a win.

There’s an additional economic factor as well. For any country that isn’t the US licensing off the shelf software means transferring money directly to the US economy. Creating your own homegrown version keeps that money in your country, paying for employees that will themselves contribute to the economy. Without making the thread overtly political, this is something a lot of countries are thinking about more and more recently.

diggan3• 1 year ago

if the government launched a messaging app competitive with WhatsApp and it drew users away from WhatsApp and it had better encryption ... Would that actually be better for the economy of this country? Something seems off about it to me.

I'm curious to know why that seems off. If you're a "free market" proponent, you usually are because you want people to have access to "the best", as that's what competition is supposed to bring out.

And if a government manages to come up with a better Whatsapp (whatever that means), and users starts to change, then clearly the alternative is better, as proven by users moving over, so then even someone who wants free markets would believe that this is a good outcome, if I understand things correctly.

But instead it sounds crazy to you, it seems. It would be interesting to hear more about why you feel this is crazy. To me it sounds like a good idea for users, which I guess is what I care more about.

addicted• 1 year ago

am I wrong that it sounds crazy and inefficient for the government to essentially compete with private industry?

The Internet is a strong and definitive counterpoint to this claim, IMO.

If the government didn’t create the open internet, we would all be living in AOL style walled gardens right now.

fastasucan• 1 year ago

Why is it better that 5 private companies make the same product and compete against each other in marketing? Why should the government buy a product from them, and spend lots of money to tailor it to their needs, without even owning the finished product?

blitzar• 1 year ago

The big tech billionaires got there by taking the same money from the government and keeping the ownership. If the government money keeps the ownership in the hands of "we the people" then that sounds good to me.

mike-the-mikado• 1 year ago

I think this is quite right. The government should get out of the business of building roads and giving them away for free.

If they were privately owned, they would be priced appropriately and we would not have all the problems with traffic congestion.

Lutger3• 1 year ago

It doesn't need to compete, not really. There are many bodies of government. National governments, local, state wide, and from many different countries. These all need software, often doing more or less the same. If they would pool their resources to pay development of useful software, theoretically it could overcome a tragedy of the commons and create really useful software cheaply. This increases productivity and thus economic growth.

It may compete with private software for a while, but not that much: companies will find a way to add value to existing open source software or create new propositions. Building out the boring and useful foundational stuff collectively will just move the bar on what is exciting and new software, or what are better takes on existing software. Companies will be creatively seeking out ever more complex problems to tackle once the government builds out the basic tooling.

And ideally, that is what private companies should be good at: quick to pivot, creative and innovative problem-solving.

Of course, that requires governments to play nice and enable companies to leverage their tooling too, and - perhaps a bigger problem - take responsibility for competent governance of the most important projects and manage their adoption well.

nrjames• 1 year ago

Vendor lock-in is risky and expensive for large corporations and governments, both of which tend to move slowly. I find it completely legitimate that a government would create a tool that's useful to its workforce and helps to avoid vendor lock-in. Insomuch as it's created by the government, it's released as open source.

Most companies and people aren't going to want to maintain the VMs and/or infrastructure to run their own platforms, so they have the option to continue using SaaS offerings like Notion.

KronisLV2• 1 year ago

Personally, even if this software wouldn't be 1:1 capable of replacing the established players, it still feels like a good idea. With how much people (rightfully) complain about how open source is underfunded and with how often we're forced into borderline exploitative dealings with the established players in the market (the likes of MS Office, Adobe products, Atlassian products, even some Oracle stuff), funding the development of open alternatives (even if done with some comparatively small amount of taxes) seems like a good idea, as long as everyone in the government isn't incompetent.

For example, if we had governments with strong tech departments that could fund helping the development of LibreOffice, then suddenly even if someone wants to use MS Office, that's still a bargaining chip to get a better deal because there's a viable alternative. Or to develop something like OpenProject, Kanboard etc., alternatives to the likes of Jira, that might be enough for many out there, while also possibly benefitting from community contributions. People love to complain about how Jira supposedly sucks, so that'd be a good opportunity to step up and make something "better". Or using open source technologies like PostgreSQL or MariaDB/MySQL for developing their own internal systems instead of always forking over a bunch of cash for Oracle or MS SQL by default.

If you want a government that's cost efficient, then invest in making it be so, treat the software landscape as an investment opportunity - spend some money now to save a bunch of money later. The same way how an app can be a home cooked meal, some software could be a public utility.

afavour2• 1 year ago

Germany has an interesting history with Open/LibreOffice. Multiple attempts that ended up going back to Windows, but with fresh attempts that are ongoing:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/04/germanys_northernmost...

slowtrek3• 1 year ago

Notion is not an example of delightful software and it is very much one of the most reproducible apps ever. I don't know how they managed to make it fashionable amongst startups, but it's certainly not because it's an innovative product.

daveguy• 1 year ago

... seems like a good idea, as long as everyone in the government isn't incompetent. For example, if we had governments with strong tech departments that could fund helping the development of...

The US had two very strong and competent tech departments -- 18F and USDS.

They got doge'd -- dismantled and coopted, respectively.

throwaway2037• 1 year ago

This will be a controversial take here on HN: I'm not too excited about governments getting directly involved in the development of software, let alone open source. With possibly a few exceptions (internal software for national agencies, etc.), it is way outside their area of expertise. I think it would be better to pay a vendor like Redhat or SuSE or Cannonical to do it. And, the gov't can write the support contract such that for X EUR per year they get Y competent developers to work on LibreOffice, or whatever they like.

artur_makly• 1 year ago

But wouldn't a DAPP solution would solve even more problems.. faster? What am I missing?

wslh• 1 year ago

Of course, there is always the risk that this becomes unmaintained in the future

We can't even be certain that Notion won't be acquired, deprecated, or poorly maintained in the future. Risks exist on both sides.

diggan3• 1 year ago

We can't even be certain that Notion won't be acquired, deprecated, or poorly maintained in the future.

At this point, I feel like we can be pretty sure the combination of "Huge VC investments + for-profit startup" will with 99% certainly eventually lead down the road of enshittification, either by acquisition or by going public. At least based on most previous "internet" startups with that combination.

bluedino2• 1 year ago

Anyone remember Evernote?

esafak• 1 year ago

It happened to Coda.

ivanmontillam• 1 year ago

I couldn't upvote you more than once.

I agree wholeheartedly with your point.

Government-funded open source like this, creating alternatives is a good idea. Taxes put to good use!

virdev19• 1 year ago

Yes yes yes and yes Public Money Public Code!

sitkack4• 1 year ago

That is what grants are for! The government(s) get the exact software they want by a whole field full of folks that know how to make those changes.

virdev19• 1 year ago

Docs actually thanks to the open source grant system we have in Europe. The hard part in a project like Docs is the text editor. We built Docs on top of [Blocknotejs](https://www.blocknotejs.org/) an [NGI funded](https://ngi.eu/funded_solution/blocknote/) library. NGI (Next Generation Internet) and NLNet has been doing an amazing job funding thousands of projects and we are seing the amazing results today. NGI is a program of the European Union

zwnow• 1 year ago

Speaking from experience, in Germany people refuse to learn any new software and are quickly overwhelmed if 1 thing is different from what they are used to. Open source government solutions are good and all, people will only use them if forced to by law though. Public offices are one of the reasons our digitalization is really far behind.

wvh5• 1 year ago

When universities, libraries, government and open-source community could unite and, perhaps most crucially, find a benevolent dictator for life that could shepherd the herd of cats with all noses in one direction instead of getting bogged down in academic or governmental committee mud, we might have Nice Things that are not in the hands of any one party but owned by all (i.e. the tax payer, and volunteers).

Those projects could truly be owned by the public and not solely corporations or government. Clearly data is the big thing, and I don't want to have to trust a government or corporation with access to all of it.

In reality, having been part of some of these projects, they often get bogged down by getting all parties and funding organised, in other words, death by committee.

Imustaskforhelp8• 1 year ago

Why am I starting to believe that france is now more culturally shited towards being a new super power in this multi polar world instead of USA.

Seriously , I never used to really think about france that much , but Emmanuel Macron correcting trump on live air really made me trust france more as a non US citizen.

thrance3• 1 year ago

That was funny, but as a Frenchman I don't hold too much hope. Our far right, supporting both Trump and Putin, has been gaining steam with each passing election for the past 20 years.

Hopefully the circus currently taking place across the pond is enough to deter some from voting for them, come 2027?

maelito7• 1 year ago

That's what I hope too. Trump's failure could be our far-right failure to win the 2027 elections.

deskr• 1 year ago

20 years. That's step 1, Demoralization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQPsKvG6WMI

rdm_blackhole2• 1 year ago

The far-right is a symptom of what is happening in France. Fix the problems and the far right will disappear.

Unfortunately, that would mean that the politicians from the last 20 years need to do a mea culpa on quite a few things and that will never happen so the far right will eventually get in power.

Don't blame the players, blame the game.

froggertoaster• 1 year ago

I would hardly decide to trust a politician based on a 5 second quip on live TV.

Imustaskforhelp8• 1 year ago

Yea I agree , fair point. Though I think , I would probably study more about france's current system to trust it more but that requires efforts and in general a sense of direction (like which country / politician to even start reading to start to generate trust from reason )

I was more about talking trust from intuition which can then create that sense of direction.

I thank you for creating this comment. I gotta read more about macron to see if he's really how I felt from my intution.

jisnsm5• 1 year ago

Why am I starting to believe that france is now more culturally shited towards being a new super power in this multi polar world instead of USA.

Because you are reading a lot of destabilisation propaganda online. I recommend you cut your news and social networks consumption a little bit.

The fact that you are beginning to trust FRANCE over something that MACRON did, no less, speaks volumes.

myko• 1 year ago

It is completely reasonable to see France in that light given recent history of the US - a man who should be in prison for insurrection is the head of the executive.

Imustaskforhelp8• 1 year ago

May I clarify my comment.

Trust was maybe a different word , maybe hope is the correct word ? (but doesn't everybody trust hope)

But I trust the people who can make me hope for a better future by actively not submitting to those people who are actively trying to reduce my hope in better future.

There is absolutely no denying that what Trump has done , has absolutely made many people really hopeless. Such levels of incompetency at a presidential level just feels weird. Its as if nobody is seeing how absurd things are , when you connect everything.

Maybe its me , but this presidency feels like a chaos to me as an outsider / foreigner.

America , as it is right now , is a failed state.

I don't understand , don't we trust countries based on their stability and their stance. Such level of open defiance is what makes me trust france that they are more likely to stand to facts than ahem america.

To be honest , maybe I am being too gloom / sad over america. It feels like the world is shifting towards a russo-american , european , chinese influenceced multi polar world.

What america really hated russia was for are just past wars , but britain and france also had these but they collectively became allies after world war.

May I ask , where in my total arguments , am I sounding unreasonable? I thought it doesn't matter where you read the news , I was able to reason to a pessimist outlook of the trump presidency.

Everything is a propaganda , propaganda literally means something along the lines of sharing your ideas.

Listening to propaganda isn't bad , but blindly advocating for it without reason is bad and dismissing other opinions without reason to fulfill your bias is bad.

If you can really counter my reason , then hey , I can be glad that I don't have to be sad about USA.

Also , I watched a video somewhere that we have a limited amount of (he said "fucks" but in the sense of I give a fuck) things you can care and you have to use it wisely.

I really was giving too much care about USA but I have stopped caring now since its not my country anyway and what power do I really have? Maybe it might be my own fault / I read some things without really applying my own reason.

I am sorry if it offends people but this is my honest opinion America has fallen in my eyes. And there is nothing I can do to change that , so why even care about america?

__MatrixMan__• 1 year ago

When it comes to the use of cutting edge technology to further the goals of the people at large, France has been a leader for some time. As for why you're just noticing now, perhaps the time has come for the rest of us to do the same.

atmosx• 1 year ago

Macron’s approval ratings must be below 3% by now. If he had any backbone, he’d resign immediately.

phtrivier2• 1 year ago

You made me look : it's about 27% [1], which is of course not great, but actually not that bad _for him_, _in the past few years_.

The political landscape is completely split in 3 thirds in France at the moment, and people stay firmly in their lanes.

It would need an incredibly popular décision to bring anyone from the left or far right to approve of him.

[1] https://www.latribune.fr/la-tribune-dimanche/politique/barom...

rdm_blackhole2• 1 year ago

If you trust E.Macron, I have a nice bridge to sell you. Trump is a liar, but so is Macron.

France's government is working on a law to force the messaging providers to implement a backdoor that would break E-to-E.

Macron has promised to end homelessness before being elected. It never happened. He was supposed to stop the rise of the far right, the far right has never been higher.

He was suppose to simplify France's bureaucracy to help entrepreneurs and trim the fat so that we stop burdening the new generation with crippling debt. The debt has literally exploded under his presidencies, crime is on the rise and Islamism terrorism as well.

His political capital in France has vanished. His party does not control the parliament nor the senate. His own prime minister is not from his party and as such will not implement Macron's agenda.

Macron is more interested in pushing the interests of the EU or Ukraine than those of France itself.

In France, the president is the one who sets the agenda in terms of foreign policy and that is what Macron is focusing on. On the rest of the issues that France is currently facing, he basically has no say on it.

He is basically a lame duck president who has less than 2 years left and can never run again.

PoignardAzur3• 1 year ago

There's a lot to things to blame Macron for, but your post is an incredibly bad faith caricature. Like, this:

He was suppose to simplify France's bureaucracy to help entrepreneurs and trim the fat so that we stop burdening the new generation with crippling debt. The debt has literally exploded under his presidencies

Was Macron supposed to magic Covid out of existence? The "whatever it takes" approach he took was the best possible policy for preserving the economy, and exploding debt was the cost.

bryanhogan4• 1 year ago

Does this provide database functionality like seen in Notion?

I'm always disappointed by note-taking tools calling themselves a Notion alternative when they do not provide an alternative to Notion and are instead just another note-taking tool with a simple UI.

If you want to be a Notion alternative provide the things that make Notion great, e.g. the database functionality. It's okay to be a simple colaborative notes tool, but that is not a Notion alternative.

maelito7• 1 year ago

As far as I know, the database part is handled by Grist, listed on the suite of tools this note app is part of.

https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr

Of course, it's not a replacement to Notion yet.

bryanhogan4• 1 year ago

I'm actually not talking about how they handle the database but instead the Database feature of Notion, which is more of a advanced table for the user that can be turned into a Kanban, timeline, calendar, etc. It's one of the main advantages Notion has over other note-taking tools.

mrweasel3• 1 year ago

It's a little like products that brands themselves as a "Jira replacement". Yes, you got the basic functionality down, but so does a hundred other projects. You're not really dealing with the hard problems or the advanced features. Maybe in the future yes, but a replacement... a potential future replacement maybe.

IshKebab4• 1 year ago

Tbf Jira's "hard problems" are really things that shouldn't be done in the first place, like the insane configurability. Just ends up in a mess.

The problem with Jira is that it's enterprise software that's put in place by people that don't actually have to use it.

Terretta3• 1 year ago

Craft has collections for tables of data, also has a variety of other data modeled things like TODOs: https://www.craft.do/

bryanhogan4• 1 year ago

Sadly that tool seems to be subscription only? And it does not have an Android version even though they are on iOS.

sylvinus6• 1 year ago

Not really a database, but I've made a prototype integration of Docs with IronCalc: https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs/pull/466

This could also take the form of a custom block that you could embed in a text document.

virdev19• 1 year ago

Hey! Docs’s PM here.

IMO Notion really made an awesome job with real-time, collab features (comments, suggestions) and useful AI actions. So much, people only see databases ^^.

For now we’ll be focusing on these. That’s already plenty ^^ Further down road we’ll if we manage to take on databases.

rtpg4• 1 year ago

Having both the Notion-like UI and the real time collaboration is exciting! So much stuff has been either/or, and it made it hard for me to find a good alternative.

I really appreciate how Notion is basically "what if Google Docs but you can actually organize your information". The collaborative components feel really powerful.

I do kind of wish that something that was more ... Wiki-flavored would show up though. I like confluence, it's just mega slow!

bryanhogan4• 1 year ago

What about markdown based tools that focused on the linking part, e.g. Haptic or Logseq, is that wiki-flavored enough?

tommoor3• 1 year ago

You should take a look at Outline (mentioned in the title). https://www.getoutline.com/

theflash66614• 1 year ago

All features aren't available in the community edition …

maelito7• 1 year ago

This tool is part of a WIP complete suite of tools for public agents called "La suite numérique".

https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr

weakfish3• 1 year ago

This is awesome!

remram• 1 year ago

Ah this makes sense, I was going to comment that "docs" was not really a suitable name.

What is the correct full name then? lasuite docs (judging from the logo, that seem to be the brand part)? docs numerique (from the URL)?

maelito7• 1 year ago

numerique.gouv is like digital.gov. Kind of a whole ministry.

La Suite Docs is better yes.

Terretta3• 1 year ago

That said, calling the video conferencing capability "Visio" is à la banane.

theflash66614• 1 year ago

"Visio" is French slang for a videoconference meeting. Open to suggestions for a project name that better reflects its purpose and vision.

drowntoge• 1 year ago

Tchap looks neat as a Slack alternative, but it seems like it's still only for government workers.

IshKebab4• 1 year ago

We use Mattermost at work, and apart from the mobile app being a bit shit, and search being kind of useless, it's easily as good as Slack. In some ways it's better, e.g. you can use proper Markdown in messages instead of Slack's Mrkdwn abomination that doesn't even allow links.

I wish they would improve search though; it's kind of a critical feature in a company.

maelito7• 1 year ago

Tchap is just Element/Matrix with some gov specific features.

bcye3• 1 year ago

adding to this, it seems to me like most of the projects are yet to be open sourced. the github currently has docs and their video conferencing tool (which also looks great): https://github.com/suitenumerique

manuhabitela2• 1 year ago

All the projects are already open sourced actually, but admittedly all don't have documentation as good as docs or meet. Still a wip :)

chanux• 1 year ago

Gives Etherpad vibes!

ecwilson• 1 year ago

I was going to post this exact same comment. I was obsessed with Etherpad when it came out and to this day, reminisce about it whenever I fire up a Google Doc. Can’t wait to try this.

bureautards• 1 year ago

yes, make better notes of meetings, make meetings a pleasure, make bureaucracy a dream job

wiltonn• 1 year ago

Or just stop paying for notion.

joking• 1 year ago

I like almost everything from this project, even the documentation and development is being done in the open, with design docs like this: https://www.figma.com/design/qdCWR4tTUr7vQSecEjCyqO/DOCS?nod...

replwoacause• 1 year ago

It really feels like we are in a time where EU countries are taking front and center on the world stage with cool, progressive and unified stuff, and the US is in the ally snorting crack. Saying this as a disappointed American. But yeah…really cool to see governments collaborating this way.

Tadpole9181• 1 year ago

It's not like the US wasn't warned about this repeatedly for decades, and yet we chose this.

mrweasel3• 1 year ago

Looking at how much infrastructure needs to be spun up, I don't really see this as a good solution for personal note taking. If you use the Docker environment, you spin up 10 or more containers... including KeyClock. I get that this is intended to by hosted by a company or an organisation, but plenty of people are using Notion just as individuals.

Most people would be better of with Obsidian, Bear, Notion or even Apple Notes.

johnecheck2• 1 year ago

If we can spin up the 10 containers with a single docker compose command on a $5/month VPS, this really doesn't seem like too much for an individual.

And the best part: this is MIT licensed. If it's actually difficult to set up, build a nice web UI that makes it easy and you've got a product.

mrweasel3• 1 year ago

I'm not worried about the cost, you can probably run all of it in the closet on a Raspberry Pi, it's the complexity. What do you do when part of this inevitably fail, how do you get your data back out, where is the data? In Minio, in Postgresql?

wim2• 1 year ago

We're working on an "IDE for notes/tasks" [1] in the space of Notion and so on where you can easily self-host the sync backend with a single binary.

The idea is that you can choose between cloud or self-host (and "eject" at any time to switch between the two if you ever change your mind). We hope that might be a good balance between some companies or individuals wanting to self-host but still making it accessible when you don't know how any of that works, which indeed can get complicated fast.

[1] https://thymer.com/

weakfish3• 1 year ago

I’d love to try this out - I signed up for beta access. Looking forward to giving it a shot!

ukuina• 1 year ago

This looks neat! Will the self-hosted binary function in air-gapped environments?

thor-rodrigues2• 1 year ago

That looks VERY AWESOME. Really looking forward to try it :)

drio0• 1 year ago

do you plan to have a mobile app?

would you implement database function like in Notion?

Is it a full feature todo app or just noting down tasks?

would be a killer app if it has 3 Yes

jeelthompson• 1 year ago

This looks really cool, signed up for early access. Any plans to have an import from notion feature? I’ve used notion for personal note taking and manually moving over would be a big time sync at this point. But I’d love to have a self hosted solution.

grvdrm• 1 year ago

Also going to sign up.

Love your site. Looks great. Lots of visual appeal. Not the same cookies cutter Tailwind theme that seems to be present everywhere.

Bigpet• 1 year ago

looks neat. Like Acreom, but with better collaboration capabilities.

Nelkins• 1 year ago

I see you can @ people. Does that mean you can get notifications when you've been @-ed? Also, is there the ability to comment on documents? For me these are two killer features to leave a Notion or Confluence.

xena• 1 year ago

Honestly it's a reasonable set of dependencies:

* Postgres for permanent storage

* an OIDC identity provider so you don't have to make your own password system

* Redis for caching

* S3-compatible object storage (so you don't have to reinvent file uploads)

* The app itself

What would you rather them do? Waste time reinventing the wheel for no reason? If you have the IDP and object storage setup already figured out you can get away with just the app, postgres, and redis.

RamblingCTO• 1 year ago

That's a typical tech answer. Do you really want to spin up 10 images for note taking for yourself? From a product standpoint that's not sensible and wastes way to much resources.

sylvinus6• 1 year ago

Our primary target is indeed larger organizations but we're working on one-click deployment solutions and an all-in-one container.

addcommitpush2• 1 year ago

This is an internal tool (which was open sourced) made by the French government digital service to be used by French government employee on French government infra. I do not think it is trying to be a better solution for individuals. It’s trying to be a better solution for gov employees.

dkobia• 1 year ago

I love this. Open source projects often suffer from a combination of a funding crisis and maintainer burnout. I think state funded open source projects are a wonderful idea!

By investing in open source projects, governments can create more efficient, transparent, and innovative digital services. If anything I’m sure it’ll save tax payers money on expensive licenses paid to a company in another country.

kijin• 1 year ago

It's also about risk management from the government's perspective. You don't want to be beholden to a potentially hostile foreign corporation for tasks as essential as managing your own documents. Compared to how much money they already spend on American SaaS, Investing a few million euros in open-source alternatives could be seen as cheap insurance.

hirako2000• 1 year ago

Outline is open source.

nylonstrung• 1 year ago

Yeah, but BSL license

theflash66614• 1 year ago

From my understanding, all features are not open source, for example organization management aren't open-source, which limits its adoption in large institution …

crabmusket4• 1 year ago

It's Business Source License

https://github.com/outline/outline/blob/main/LICENSE

thor-rodrigues2• 1 year ago

I really like the idea of shifting the business model for office software. Instead of the current model—where companies develop a tool, lock users into their ecosystem, and profit by bundling software with hosting and storage—we could move to a model where different providers compete to offer the best deployment solutions. This would foster competition based on factors like pricing, encryption, customer support, server location, and integration flexibility, rather than simply forcing users into long-term subscriptions.

That’s why I’m glad to see governments supporting Open Source alternatives to proprietary office software. Paying recurring subscription fees for low-maintenance tools like MS Office feels out of touch—especially when Microsoft once offered a one-time purchase model before shifting to SaaS to maximize profits. This change has made it difficult for individuals and businesses to retain long-term ownership of their tools without being tied to costly and recurring fees. The same trend has played out across the software industry, from design tools like Adobe Creative Cloud (which replaced one-time purchases with a mandatory subscription model) to communication platforms like Slack and Zoom, which lock companies into ongoing costs while limiting interoperability with other solutions.

bjackman• 1 year ago

we could move to a model where different providers compete to offer the best deployment solutions.

The Matrix project lead talked at FOSDEM about an issue with this model [0]: a pure market approach to this just doesn't offer any way to fund upstream development.

Luckily the public sector ought to be a an arena where we can solve this problem by being englightened consumers instead of just buying from the provider that provides the most service per dollar. But that enlightenment does require some education.

[0] https://lwn.net/Articles/1009932/

maxyurk• 1 year ago

JFrog is doing very well financially with an excellent self-hosted offering

GraemeMeyer• 1 year ago

Microsoft still offers one-time purchase for Office by the way - Office 2024 was recently released.

jahewson3• 1 year ago

Large organisations had access to subscription software long before modern SaaS, and chose to use it. In the 1990s Microsoft offered an Enterprise Agreement that operated in this manner. Support is also something that large organisations value and are happy to subscribe to.

jjice• 1 year ago

It feels like notetaking/wiki software have gotten a resurgence in the last few years. Not that it was ever not a thing, but like a new generation of people realized wanted to build new tools for it.

Personally, I think the variety of tools is very interesting, and while I like Obsidian and plain markdown file, I do love to see different options in the space with hosted options and different capabilities.

Notion feels like it's got this serious range from individuals up to teams at large enterprises. It's incredibly flexible and configurable and I have to assume that's a big part of it, but it was so interesting to watch it eat away at other things like Confluence over the years. My perspective is probably skewed (and I know Confluence and other are probably still massive and dominant), but I'm surprised such a simple concept is getting so much more software. Or actually, that's probably why it's a space with so much software.

Terretta3• 1 year ago

If you're familiar with the space, ever heard anything that ticks all these boxes:

(a) git versioned

(b) CRDTs

(d) front matter + markdown able to be SSGd

(e) comfortable UI for not-devs

(f) native (Swift) MacOS app, else Tauri/Electron self-hosted client+svc

(g) if online, OIDC / SAML SSO

Appears this can be cobbled leveraging Obsidian plugins, but unstable due to git vs. CRDT issues. And there are a few "CMS" for SSG stacks that almost but not quite meet this.

dtkav• 1 year ago

Dev of the Obsidian Relay plugin [0] here.

We support most of this (you'll need to also use Obsidian Git), but haven't released OIDC (please reach out of you need it!).

[0] https://system3.md/relay

borgster• 1 year ago

Qownnotes. Syncs with cloud for multi device.

trendschau• 1 year ago

I’m also a bit surprised by this, but it really seems like there’s a growing need, maybe as a way to handle information overload or keep up with the ever-faster pace of learning and change.

When I started Typemill.net years ago, my focus was actually on ebook publishing. But over time, I noticed that a lot of small businesses were looking for lightweight tools for documentation, note-taking, and similar content. So, I naturally shifted to documentation and small knowledge bases.

For a long time, this space was pretty much dominated by big enterprise tools like Confluence on one side and Evernote on the other. But now, with tools like Obsidian, BookStack, Docmost, Outline, and others, there’s finally a broad range of modern solutions that fit different needs and sizes. I think that’s a great step forward...

yread• 1 year ago

How does it compare to nextcloud?

jxf• 1 year ago

I like this! One note: I think the README would also benefit from having a (crowdsourced?) list of providers that offer (or will soon offer) Docs as a hosted offering. Many users of collaborative editing tools aren't sophisticated enough to actually host an instance.

yujzgzc3• 1 year ago

I stopped reading at "AGPL". I appreciate the intent but this stuff is impossible to use in practice. Even governments need partners who would likely be hesitant to run it because of that.

bcye3• 1 year ago

It is MIT licensed not AGPL, explicitly to make it easy to use for anyone. AGPL only applies if you want to use MinIO as your object storage

yujzgzc3• 1 year ago

Thanks for clarifying. They just removed the mention of AGPL due to the confusing nature of it. https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs/commit/c85224af425261...

vvpan• 1 year ago

How does AGPL work in the context of a non-compiled language like Python? Honest question.

iamsanteri• 1 year ago

Love this! Would be interesting to know why they chose Django. Will support by giving my upvote!

mightysashiman2• 1 year ago

How does it compare to Anytype? (less clunky and unintuitive I hope?)

mightysashiman2• 1 year ago

On the test account: "Error 429: too many requests".

crazygringo6• 1 year ago

I'm intrigued by the decision to call it "Docs".

In any other circumstance it would be a clear trademark infringement on Google Docs. It's literally the same product with the same name, it has an extremely similar logo and almost exactly the same typeface in its logo.

But since this is a government project between France and Germany, maybe governments are allowed to ignore trademarks? Or Google wants to stay on their good side because of all the fines, so the last thing it's going to do is sue them for trademark infringement?

I've never seen a legal situation like this before.

dewey• 1 year ago

I guess that's the "problem" with generic product names. There's also Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, Microsoft Calendar etc. - Docs is not different than that.

crazygringo6• 1 year ago

"Docs" isn't that generic. It's not even a word in the dictionary. It's the plural of an abbreviation. Nobody called a word processor "Docs" before Google did.

If you say "open Calendar", I don't know if you mean Apple or Google or Microsoft. If you say "open Docs", I know it's Google and only Google.

This is no different than if the project called itself "Word", which would be equally confusing with Microsoft.

Neither Docs nor Word are genericized. They're both totally valid trademarks. Which is why naming this project "Docs" would be immediately shut down if any private organization tried it. And I've never heard of governments infringing private trademarks before, so I'm curious what's going on here.

thiht• 1 year ago

Yeah if you want a strong trademark on your product, don’t call it "Docs"

theflash66614• 1 year ago

isn't "Google Docs" the trademark https://about.google/brand-resource-center/trademark-list/ ?

crazygringo6• 1 year ago

That doesn't matter. It's about similarity and consumer confusion.

E.g. you can't launch an ice cream brand called "Haagen" or called "Dazs", even though the trademark is for "Haagen-Dazs".

evaneykelen2• 1 year ago

Outline is also open source (or at least “source available”): https://github.com/outline/outline

theflash66614• 1 year ago

All features aren't available in the community edition …

evaneykelen2• 1 year ago

Do you have a reference to the differences? I can't find it on their website nor on GitHub.

ctrlp4• 1 year ago

I just cannot understand the appeal of these browser based note taking apps. Notion, Obsidian, Outline? Is it the collaboration feature? Why not just use Google Docs or equivalent?

For notes, I don't see the appeal of having a browser interface. I just put my notes in a text file. No protocol, just search for text strings or text tags. If I need hierarchical organization, I use directories. What am I missing out on?

jonahx• 1 year ago

What am I missing out on?

1. Non-technical colleagues.

2. Easy and real-time collaboration.

3. Slickness, mixing of multi-media, etc. This is related to 1.

Not arguing against your preference, just answering the "why".

staplers2• 1 year ago

  I don't see the appeal of having a browser interface.

You can thank work-locked machines removing any app-level flexibility. I'm not signing into any google work account on my personal phone.

Browser level access allows for multi-device multi-context (personal/work) access.

Also google docs/drive is deeply unusable when trying to organize mental spaces.

e12e2• 1 year ago

I just cannot understand the appeal of these browser based note taking apps. Notion, Obsidian, Outline? Is it the collaboration feature? Why not just use Google Docs or equivalent?

Google docs is also browser based? And obviously not foss or self-hostable.

Are you saying "why does Google have docs app in addition to a note taking app?" (Google docs vs Google Keep, Microsoft Word vs Microsoft OneNote etc?)

ctrlp4• 1 year ago

I'm saying that there are already collaboration tools like Google Docs or whatever. I don't see how managing notes in such a tool beats having some text files. Working with a browser kind of sucks for write operations. It's fine or even good for reading. But writing into a browser goes through obscure layers so that, what? it can go into a database? Files on disk solve this issue. Grep over files or even a more robust index of searchable data solves the findability problem. There can be other sidecar tools to support discoverability, but I'm just focused on the HCI/UX of a browser for text entry and editing, and find it really poor compared to a text editor with files that you control and can run other tools over.

Arcuru• 1 year ago

I am currently in the process of switching from using Obsidian to manage local markdown notes/files to using Notion for at least my personal project tracking. I have 2 reasons.

1. Notions "Databases" are easier to use, edit, and manage than any similar setup I could figure out locally. And they have inbuilt integrations so you can sync things like Github/Gitlab/Jira, etc directly into your docs. I highly recommend setting up a personal project inside Notion to try it out.

2. Less important but still useful, the collaboration is good to use with my partner. We can have shared household notes/saved info/tasks/etc all in one place very easily using it.

ezst3• 1 year ago

Have you tried TriliumNext? It doesn't have collaboration for editing but sharing is built in,

It lets you structure your notes in a way that's reminiscent of object oriented programming (you've got templates to define types, inheritance of attributes to instantiate and specialize them, etc). I have hierarchies of hundreds/thousands of notes that for all intent and purposes are as good as Notion's Databases

mmooss5• 1 year ago

I don't see the appeal of having a browser interface. I just put my notes in a text file.

Great until you need an image or more than the simplest table, as examples.

ctrlp4• 1 year ago

Hmm, I find it easy enough to open a link or even embed an image in a text editor.

maxloh• 1 year ago

It seems that the editor is supported by ProseMirror.

Kudos for their work!

YousefED2• 1 year ago

Yep! Docs is using our editor BlockNote (https://www.blocknotejs.org) which builds upon Prosemirror (and we're also proud to be sponsors of Marijn from Prosemirror who's done an amazing job, indeed)

frenchtoast8• 1 year ago

For a while I've been searching for a note taking app that

* Allows more than one user editing the same page at once

* Is accessible on a mobile device (either app or mobile browser)

* Can be at the very least viewed in read only mode if disconnected from the internet

The last point is the most important to me and frustratingly has been the most elusive for me to find. For now I use Notion with the hopes they implement it eventually. I can't consider switching to a self hosted alternative without the last point.

electriclove• 1 year ago

Apple Notes?

ryanf• 1 year ago

Have you seen https://www.craft.do?

crazygringo6• 1 year ago

Both Google Keep and Google Docs meet your requirements, depending on whether you want small notes or big notes.

What's wrong with those?

MrBra• 1 year ago

we don't need an FOSS self-hosted alternative to X. We need a FOSS alternative to the cloud/hosted model such that there's distinction between the two, everything is everywhere for everyone, free. Fediverse, but better. But we're not even at Fediverse ;)

sylvinus6• 1 year ago

Hey. A few developers from the team are on HN and will be happy to answer any questions here!

We also made a small scratchpad you can use to test collaboration features, if it doesn't get too flooded :) https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/docs/a3f0becc-f2b7-45be-a5e5-...

miki123211• 1 year ago

What's your stance on accessibility? Is that something you even consider?

Notion is particularly terrible here, so this could be a great alternative for people / organizations who need that.

theflash66614• 1 year ago

https://react-spectrum.adobe.com/react-aria is used in most La Suite projects. Also we have one frontend developer focused on accessibility and few auditors. We always prioritize accessibility

manuhabitela2• 1 year ago

It's not only considered, it's a an actual goal to be 100% usable by everyone. It's already the case for some of La Suite projects. Not quite there yet right now for some others, but it will be.

And I agree, lots of popular, proprietary solutions should do better in terms of accessibility. I believe open-source helps in that regard, as in many others.

Here in La Suite we have some wcag-geeks in the team and regularly include some of our users with disabilities for feedback.

hysan• 1 year ago

What led to the choice of using Blocknote over other editor packages? Would love to read about the decision making and comparisons between all the editors you considered. Also interested in any other write ups about choosing packages (ex: I see you using hocuspocus which I think is from another editor - TipTap) and why you landed on your particular tech stack.

YousefED2• 1 year ago

Maintainer of BlockNote here (and contributor to HocusPocus). I can't speak for Docs as to why they chose BlockNote, but can answer some of your questions. BlockNote is actually built on top of Tiptap - but designed to take away the heavy lifting. As powerful as they are, to build a Notion-like editor on top of Tiptap (or Prosemirror) still requires quite some engineering firepower. We've built BlockNote to come "batteries-included" with common UI components and a simpler API to make it easy for you to add a modern, block-based editor to your app.

virdev19• 1 year ago

Hey! Not a developer but here are a couple pointers. As Yousef says below, the text editing bit is hard. We wanted to be build fast and BlockNotejs makes it easy, you get the block stucture, the slash command, you can style your editor and extend with custom blocks. The BlockNotejs team researched the live editing space thoroughly so we could just follow the tracks: BlockNotejs, HocusPocus, Yjs. We "just" had to build the wrapper around with authentication, docs permissions and search and boom you have Docs!

npodbielski• 1 year ago

Looks really nice. I looked at the readme on github and selfhost section mentions it is only for testing. Why? What is the difference?

Savageman• 1 year ago

Really cool to be able to test this directly, thanks for setting it up.

I found something I would qualify as a bug: if you click on the right of any text, the cursor is placed at the beginning of the line, where I would expect to have it at the end.

ex3ndr• 1 year ago

But outline is opensource?

theflash66614• 1 year ago

Actually some Outline feature aren't, which could be quite limiting when deployed in a large organization or institution

amai2• 1 year ago

Which format are they using to write/store the notes? Is it another Markdown dialect?

theflash66614• 1 year ago

It's based on https://www.blocknotejs.org/

amai2• 1 year ago

And this again is based on prosemirror. So for better math support you would have the option of using https://benrbray.com/prosemirror-math/ .

virdev19• 1 year ago

The notes are stored in Y.doc format because we use Yjs for our collaboration server. https://docs.yjs.dev/api/y.doc

cloudking• 1 year ago

Docmost is another open source option https://www.docmost.com

noname120• 1 year ago

Looks like an amazing alternative to Dropbox Paper

remark5396• 1 year ago

There are already quiet a few softwares that claim to be Notion alternatives or seem to be:

- AppFlowy: https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy

- AFFiNE: https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE

- SiYuan: https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan

- Trillium Next: https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes

- AnyType (only clients are source available): https://github.com/anyproto/anytype-ts

ezst3• 1 year ago

Count me as a biiig proponent and user of TriliumNext, it's in my mind and experience the most capable note taking and organising app there is, but I don't think I nor any of its developers would call it a "Notion alternative".

CountGeek2• 1 year ago

And Docmost - https://github.com/docmost/docmost

crabmusket4• 1 year ago

https://getoutline.com mentioned in the submission title

hardwaresofton• 1 year ago

The future continues to be AGPL

piokoch2• 1 year ago

"Simple collaborative editing without the formatting complexity of markdown"

It is incredible that nowadays Markdown is considered "complex".

sylvinus6• 1 year ago

Well I think that most of our users have never typed a "[" character... So for them, Markdown is definitely complex :)

virdev19• 1 year ago

What's complex for most users that do not spend their days into an IDE is not seing what's your prose is going to look like and they've been use to that for a couple decade. For us it kind of made sense to support markdown + giving giving a minimalistic toolbar for users who don't know how to md. Also, you can do a lot of things in BlockNotejs you can't unless you code html and css in md (colors, blocks etc.)

virdev19• 1 year ago

Hey everyone! I'm the PM working with the Docs team. Thanks a lot for the kind words, we're as excited as you to be working on such a cool project. We didn't expect to get posted so soon on HN. We still have a lot to do in terms documentation and reusability. But we'll be working a lot on that next week. We'll keep you posted here. Again thank you everyone!

alephnerd• 1 year ago

Great work by the Suite Numerique team!

Are you guys looking at adding localization support for languages beyond French as well (eg. English, German)?

It would be a great alternative to multiple disjointed OSS offerings like Mattermost or Appflowy.

Also, I found the DIPT to be fairly intruiging. How much inspiration did the org get from Gov.uk, and are there some resources, papers, or books you could point to about the DIPT initiative?

sylvinus6• 1 year ago

Indeed, Docs is already available both in English and German :)

AFAIK we took a lot of inspiration from Gov.uk and 18F/USDS (RIP), at least for digital services. You can look at https://beta.gouv.fr/

virdev19• 1 year ago

Hey! Thanks! Yes we do plan to support more languages, we want the project to be usable by the many. Translations are here : https://crowdin.com/project/lasuite-docs (just added turkish tonight ;)

mkl2• 1 year ago

Do you have plans to add structure to the document collection? E.g. group documents into projects, put documents into order and hierarchy (docs holding chapters, sections). I would really like a system that lets you have projects with a document per chapter or section and has a chapter/section outline on the left panel of the document editor.

Comments and custom styles would also be great.

virdev19• 1 year ago

Hey! Yes we do, we plan to release sub-docs before the end of the month. That will allow you to create trees of docs (with as many child / grand-child as you want) all inheriting the user rights of the parent.

andyferris• 1 year ago

Not a Docs question, but I recently came across Grist and I see that Grist is actually listed as a project under la Suite Numerique. On the other hand, Grist Labs (getgrist.com/about) claim to be the developers, are based in the US (NYC), and I couldn't see any mention any EU collaboration on their website. What is the connection here? How does it differ from the governance and funding model of Docs?

I love that you guys are building a suite of next-gen tools rather than just recreating LibreOffice. Seems really smart to me!

sylvinus6• 1 year ago

AFAIK, there are lots of contributions from developers in the French government to the Grist open source repository. We also deploy it, we have instances running in various government agencies.

For Docs, we bootstrapped the repository ourselves on top of Django, Next.js, BlockNote.js, Y.js and many others. We welcome contributions!

virdev19• 1 year ago

The French government agency ANCT Données et Territoires has also made significant contributions to the codebase.

From the Grist-core readme : https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core

u_sama• 1 year ago

Hi, thanks for the project and contributing a nice European alternative to Outline. I had a few questions relating to Docs as it seems a nice alternative I want to integrate in our company.

- Is it a project funded directly by the Governments or by the NGI funds?

- Is there an extensibility via plugins or other in the future thought for integrations ?

- Is the ProConnect the only way or can one use a self-hosted OIDC or another IdP to login?

virdev19• 1 year ago

Hey! Thanks for your interest. It's directly funded by the governments. BlockNotejs (the library doing the editor bit) received some funding from NGI. And now France and Germany are sponsoring the project (and also Yjs) No plugins plans for now. You can use your self-hosted OIDC, when you run the project locally you'll see a Keycloak as first screen. Let us know if you get it running docs@numerique.gouv.fr would love to hear your feedback as a reuser.

cyberpunkdyst• 1 year ago

Did you consider building on top of some existing open source solutions like Docmost, Appflowy, or AFFiNE?

virdev19• 1 year ago

Hey, we dedided to take an approach where we build on top of libraries like BlockNotejs, Yjs, HocusPocus but build our own wrapper around it in Django and Next.js. This allows to iterate really fast and to catter our own need (we are large organizations we don't have the same as startups or SMEs). Contributing and sponsoring allows us to make improvement that help the whole collaborative software category.

reacharavindh• 1 year ago

One of the things that I rely on with a collection of docs is a usable "full text search". The demo atleast only searches on the titles which only goes so far. It would be very useful for this project to have a proper search solution.

PoignardAzur3• 1 year ago

Have you considered integrating Zulip into your chat solution? It's leagues ahead of any other product in the space.

kalipso• 1 year ago

Anyone knows if there is something like that with heavy focus on privacy? basically decentralized offline first, end2end encrypted collaborative note taking/knowledgedb is something iam looking for.

rvense6• 1 year ago

No, but the French and German governments just gave you an excellent code base to start from!

CountGeek2• 1 year ago

A while back this was posted on HN - https://github.com/docmost/docmost/

virdev19• 1 year ago

We plan on getting e2ee as we have the military are interested in using it. From what we investigated there will be some tradeoff feature wise (attribution of edits will be harder for example). Happy to receive some help on that front.

ldubost• 1 year ago

For e2ee you might want to have a look at CryptPad (https://cryptpad.org). You can test it on the free instance https://cryptpad.fr

You'll have plenty of doc types with full end to end encryption, including for your drive.

aetherspawn2• 1 year ago

I’ve been looking for something like this that also has a Whiteboard feature (think Miro) to deploy self-hosted at a small business.

It has taken me these places:

Obsidian - has whiteboard, but not collaborative. Sync plugin cannot be self hosted. Open source sync doesn’t have user management.

Affine - ditto. Also not completely open source.

Logseq - ditto. Some text editing features require advanced knowledge of databases to use (ie writing query) making it difficult to deploy to non-technical staff.

Excalidraw - whiteboards only.

Pi9h• 1 year ago

I am building Docmost (Open-source alternative to Confluence and Notion).

We have integrated support for Excalidraw, Draw.io and Mermaid diagrams; Plus real-time collaboration.

Github: https://github.com/docmost/docmost

aetherspawn2• 1 year ago

This looks really good.

cynicalsecurity• 1 year ago

Great idea, but Django as back-end is a very bad choice.

janceek• 1 year ago

No? What makes you think that

naveed125• 1 year ago

Not sure how its different from self hosted outline?

BOOSTERHIDROGEN• 1 year ago

Upon reviewing the Docker Compose, I noticed a large number of containers. Although this could be seen as negative feedback, I view it as a challenge and make time to address it as a self-hoster.

wuming22• 1 year ago

The reality is nowadays few documents need desktop publishing features. Because seldom if ever become paper documents.

Also the average back office author knows a tiny fraction of Microsoft Word or Excel features.

Give them means to type in text, add pictures and collaborate. Templates for beautification. That’s all what is needed.

This has been known for ages. Alas Microsoft has a grip on governments and large orgs we know little about. CERN is an example.

mmooss5• 1 year ago

nowadays few documents need desktop publishing features. Because seldom if ever become paper documents.

I rarely read paper, but I find professionally designed documents much easier to read on my screens. It's such a relief to open a PDF of a professionally designed book, for example, after reading screenfuls of html.

wuming22• 1 year ago

Agreed. Here I invoke the wisdom of groff old timers and of younger CSS developers: where the latter stops being useful when a professional looking pdf must be generated?

I can prepare a decent looking document, or spreadsheet, with LibreOffice styles (CSS) without particular effort. With Docs should not be much different.

Have seen official government Word documents with formatting in need of assistance. Teams at very large firms share Word documents, via email, forth and back debating about revisions of text and numbers. Publishing was only the necessary last step.

In most cases authors use the bare minimum of functions to get the job done. Professional looking is something else instead. I don’t know where Docs stands here.

imoreno• 1 year ago

From the top of the readme:

without the formatting complexity of markdown

Really, markdown is complicated of all things?

addcommitpush2• 1 year ago

For non technical people used to WYSIWYG, yes?

xyst• 1 year ago

Wonder how good this is at resolving merge conflicts:

Offline? No problem, keep writing, your edits will get synced when back online

Have been burned too many times in college.

person 1: is updating doc

person 2: is updating doc

person 3; updating doc

(( doc reaches a dozen pages ))

person 3 loses internet connection but everyone else continues working

Person 3 adds and edits a handful of pages while offline while #1, #2 keep chugging along.

#3 internet is restored and now the system attempts to merge in their changes and sync changes from #1, #2. At the same time, #1, #2 receiving updates from #3

Now chaos ensues as the system is throwing a shit ton of errors and old changes getting reverted. Immediate showstopper.

Not so fun times. And a lesson learned.

kowalej• 1 year ago

Was just thinking how my team can get off current Notion lock in, this looks promising. Might be able to contribute as well, being a Django shop.

simonebrunozzi• 1 year ago

Run it locally - Running Docs locally using the methods described below is for testing purposes only. It is based on building Docs using Minio as the S3 storage solution but you can choose any S3 compatible object storage of your choice.
Prerequisite
Make sure you have a recent version of Docker and Docker Compose installed on your laptop:

See, this is the issue. If you want adoption, you can't assume that users are familiar with this.

You should start with a dmg for Mac users.

photonios• 1 year ago

I love that this is funded by the French&German government. Go Europe! Wonderful to see. My only wish is that other EU governments (my own included) would invest even more into projects like this.

virdev19• 1 year ago

Hey! The Netherlands joined recently. Let’s hope more countries follow

Johnson8053• 1 year ago

personally prefer affine.pro. selfhosted is enough for me

piokoch2• 1 year ago

That's a nice shot, that probably is not going to change much. This is a neat alternative for Notion if you are small company, but with strong IT team that will maintain installation (all the boring stuff from updates to backups).

If you are 20 person startup then Notion will cost you around 200 Euro per month. Having Docs installation will be cheaper? Will 200 Euros cover the expenses? I am afraid the math is not on the Docs side.

First question that any bigger organization will ask is: how SSO will work, what is the integration with our company LDAP, etc. If they hear that well, install Docs for yourself and figure out integration by yourself no manager would agree to use Docs, as from his or her perspective it is cheaper, less risky to go with something like Notion. It is also true even with gov administration or public universities, they also operate within IT infrastructure and they gladly take something free, but it must integrate with that IT infrastructure. If not, this is not an option.

virdev19• 1 year ago

Hey there! Thanks for the comment. I have to disagree with you. For government and large legs it makes less and less sense to just pay for licences. If you pay per user it becomes a huge chunk of your budget AND you have no control on your IT nor the budget to hire people. In the context we live and especially in Europe it also make no sense to opt for an American vendor who has to give access to US gov if asked to. And for small orgs I don’t see why there’d be no large mutualized instance that everyone can use for a reasonable price that pays for the ops team running it + server expenses.

samtuke• 1 year ago

Love the concept, but if the core developers don't rely on direct relationships with non-government customers, then I assume this software is unlikely to meet my needs as a startup founder (or the need of most other readers here on HN).

Governments make perverse customers with needs and incentives that don't align with other regular users and customers, in my experience. So the lack of a paid hosted version of Docs is concerning to me in terms of their priorities, quality, and the future product focus of this otherwise promising (and much needed) app.

Tldr: being customer-focused and having a product led organizational culture is unlikely if you're building for government.

shyang• 1 year ago

There is also HedgeDoc (https://hedgedoc.org/). I found it useful for (1) collaboration, and (2) being able to write in the Markdown syntax w/ side-by-side rendering. (Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31645045)

bzg• 1 year ago

For more Free Software developed within the French public sector, check https://code.gouv.fr/sources/#/awesome

progx• 1 year ago

Dark mode?

rayrrr• 1 year ago

For my data engineers, some similes: basic note taking apps like Joplin are like a data warehouse. Notion is like a data lake. What we need is something like a data lakehouse. Hopefully this might be it.

datadrivenangel2• 1 year ago

Obsidian! It's a lot cheaper than databricks.

m4l1c3• 1 year ago

C'est cool ça comme projet!

- Pas mal non? c'est Français! :)

blacklight• 1 year ago

This got me genuinely interested - until I cloned the project and saw the docker-compose file.

Minio + Celery + 4-5 services just for the main app + Keycloak?

I'm sorry, but this isn't something that "anyone can run".

This is something that requires a beefy server and someone who can manage microservice architectures with 10+ services.

I'm not sure why all of those services are requirements for the app.

I don't know why you need an S3 provider and a federated identity manager to run something that looks like Notion.

I don't know why you need to split the app into 5 microservices.

And I honestly don't think that all of this overhead is needed.

I'll give Docs another look if it decides to trim some of this bloatware.

foundzen• 1 year ago

why everyone ends up using yjs as their choice of CRDT framework. aren't there better alternative or it is just following the popular choice?

dcchambers• 1 year ago

Offline? No problem, keep writing, your edits will get synced when back online

I'm sold.

TheDong• 1 year ago

Anyone know the system requirements?

I got bit by notion when I assumed my recent i7 would be enough for it to keep up with my typing speed, but after a few pages of notes, notion uses 100% of a core and input lags considerably....

Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

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