I built a faster Notion in Rust

https://imedadel.com/outcrop/

by PaulHoule • 8 months ago

197 107 8 months ago

imedadel.com

johnisgood• 8 months ago

Irrelevant, but "a faster", not "an faster".

ls-a2• 8 months ago

It's actually an faster if they used rust

lagniappe3• 8 months ago

'an' precedes a vowel sound, 'a' precedes a consonant sound.

nicoburns• 8 months ago

Looks like the original title was "an actually faster" and HN stripped out the "actually"

lagniappe3• 8 months ago

Automated or not, editing titles is not cool. What an odd double standard.

hresvelgr• 8 months ago

Looks promising. Where I think Notion really succeeds is letting people easily make attractive live documents. Where they've meandered off imho is trying to shoehorn in an RDBMS. If you can enable people to make pretty pages, and keep your document format simple, you'll be off to a very good start.

dabbz• 8 months ago

The people yearn for a database. Everything ends up trying to be MS Access, the perfect software.

airstrike• 8 months ago

Really cool stuff. I will spend some time here digging into the details.

I've built a Cursor for business users in Rust. Spreadsheets, slideshows, and an agentic loop.

If you're up for it, it would be nice to chat and share stories and vision.

Email is andy at inboard dot ai

aswegs8• 8 months ago

Whats your pricing? Will early access be free?

Sekhmet• 8 months ago

Each seat will cost around €/$10. If you see yourself using this product, consider sponsoring Outcrop today for €/$100; you’ll get €/$200 as credits on launch.

From the linked blog.

arnaudsm• 8 months ago

This is great, I wish tech giants focused more on latency.

Gmail, Notion, Facebook, are painfully slow on my high-end laptop with gigabit ethernet. Something is wrong in our modern engineering culture.

DarkNova6• 8 months ago

I think the problem is a lack of "engineering culture".

CuriouslyC• 8 months ago

Obviously not with Gmail/Facebook, in that case it's just 100% incentive misalignment.

The others, probably, VCs are incentivized to fund the people who allocate the most resources towards growth and marketing, as long as the app isn't actively on fire investors will actively push you away from allocating resources to make your tech good.

PaulHoule• 8 months ago

People experience latency but if you “saw like a corporation” you could only see throughput and never latency.

stu2421• 8 months ago

Mono Avalonia Not i on 1 No te

wkjagt• 8 months ago

I recently started looking for a new(er) laptop, because it often felt slow. But I started looking at when it was slow, and it was mostly when using things like GMail. I guess my feeling was "if my laptop isn't even fast enough for email, it's time to upgrade". But doing things I actually care about (coding, compiling) it's actually totally fine, so I'm going to hold on to it a bit longer.

Sanygeek• 8 months ago

This is the exact feeling I had. My 2019 intel MacBook Pro has 12 cores, 32gb ram and a 1TB hard drive. Yet, most consumer web apps like Gmail, Outlook and Teams are excruciatingly slow.

What is surprising is that a few years ago, these apps weren’t so terrible on this exact hardware.

I’m convinced that there’s an enormous amount of bloat right at the application framework level.

I finally caved and bought a new M series Mac and the apps are much snappier. But this is simply because the hardware is wicked fast and not because the software got any better.

I really wish consumer apps cared less about user retention and focused more on user empowerment.

koakuma-chan• 8 months ago

Of course. Anything that has greedy and/or non-technical management will be slow.

rayiner2• 8 months ago

I have a 10 gig internet connection (Comcast fiber, 5.6 ms ping to google.com with almost no jitter). Websites are slower today than they were when I got DSL for the first time in the 1990s--except HN of course. It takes multiple seconds to load a new tab in Teams (e.g. the activities tab) and I can see content pop in over that time. It's an utter disgrace.

beswalod• 8 months ago

Another Notion-like app. But it's already many FOSS alternatives

crashabr• 8 months ago

What are they? The thing I value the most is the collaboration and the relational part, allowing to build pages that are essentially views on other data.

The only one I'm looking forward currently is the next version of Logseq which will enable collaboration on their existing block-based authoring model.

theknarf• 8 months ago

Have you seen https://anytype.io/?

jxmesth• 8 months ago

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

Here's an alternative.

Sytten• 8 months ago

The prosemirror port would make for a nice OSS library if OP is willing to put it on crates.io.

metaketa• 8 months ago

I was thinking the same. This would have actually been awesome

drcongo• 8 months ago

Loved the thought processes in this post, so definitely interested. Notion always feels half-baked.

woile• 8 months ago

prosemirror in rust? I'd like to see something like that!

sgarland• 8 months ago

It certainly looks like the author has given careful thought to making this performant, but I am skeptical about it at scale. While OT means there should be fewer updates than CRDT, you still wind up with a fair amount of them, and you have to periodically rebuild the base document from accumulated steps, which can be quite large.

Assuming your backing store is Postgres, I’d experiment a lot with the various column storage strategies, at various sizes of documents and varying amounts of writes. The TOAST overhead can become a huge bottleneck.

xanth2• 8 months ago

This looks like it has great potential, but what I really want is an open source "notion" with a well considered plugin & schema model. I desperately want to sync back all my data into a single cohesive graph; notes, reading list, messages, exercise activity in a more compute friendly format than MD files.

bakli• 8 months ago

Like Obsidian?

shmoogy• 8 months ago

Obsidian isn't open source

Kye• 8 months ago

I was surprised at how similar Trilium looks to Obsidian when it was suggested in a thread somewhere: https://triliumnotes.org/

It's open source and as far as I can tell uses a database.

gman83• 8 months ago

AppFlowy ?

blubber• 8 months ago

Isn't really (ie fully) open source, is it?

kgarten• 8 months ago

Logseq? (Though it uses md)

neodymiumphish2• 8 months ago

It's definitely a work in progress, but AnyType has a lot of functionality similar to Notion. I haven't used it in a while, so I don't know whether there are plugins in any meaningful capacity.

From past experience, it's even pretty simple to host your own sync server to get away from their account/storage limits.

notachatbot123• 8 months ago

AnyType is not open-source.

albertdessaint• 8 months ago

You might be interested in Graphiti: https://github.com/getzep/graphiti. With a self-hosted Graphiti MCP, you can connect ChatGPT or Claude to build a knowledge graph from all your data. You can then query and update the graph directly through conversation & by ingesting data and visualize the graph using tools like the Neo4j Explorer.Don’t know if that could fit your use case but that could be a fun way!

wim• 8 months ago

We're building a new multiplayer IDE but for docs/tasks [1]. Local-first, real-time collaborative and end-to-end-encrypted sync. Not open source but self-hostable with a single binary and hackable with plugins (custom properties, views, code, etc).

[1] https://thymer.com

abstractbeliefs• 8 months ago

No open source, then I'm not playing.

I use Zim wiki for everything just now and I don't like it. I'm in the market for a replacement, and would even pay like with how Immich does it.

Unless the source code is available or you put it into legal escrow for when you go bust/abandon the software†, I will not invest my time and data into a system where I am entirely dependent on another organisation or service.

† And you will go bust or abandon the software before I die!

ObengObeng• 8 months ago

I will definitely be checking this out when it comes out! Hopefully soon!

ednico• 8 months ago

Seems amazing - I cannot wait to test Thymer out!

fourseventy2• 8 months ago

You should look at https://github.com/TriliumNext/Trilium. It's what I use every day for the things that you mentioned.

Fervicus• 8 months ago

Thanks for sharing. Are you using it on mobile? How is the experience?

square_usual2• 8 months ago

There's a ton of these right now. I did some research the other day and found at least five "open source" (to various degrees, all of these are not strictly speaking open source but open core) notion alternatives, and they're all in some ways better, in some ways worse than notion. I settled on AFFiNE [0] because it felt the snappiest, but they've got a lot of telemetry and tracking so I forked to remove that and use my telemetry-removed frontend as a PWA.

[0] https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE

xanth2• 8 months ago

I've looked into AFFiNE, it doesn't have the native data ingress I'd like.

pscanf• 8 months ago

Adding my own to the list: https://github.com/superegodev/superego (Warning: still an alpha.)

Distinctive points:

- It exposes the "database metaphor": your data is organized in collections of documents, each collection having a well-defined schema.

- It's all local in an app (no server component to self-host).

- It has an AI assistant on top that you can use to explore / create / update.

- It allows you to create small personal apps (e.g., a custom dashboard).

- It allows you to sync data from external sources (Strava, Google Calendar, Google Contacts.)

Cons:

- The database metaphor is quite "technical". A "normal" user is not comfortable with the idea of creating their own collections, defining a schema, etc. In fact, right now I only have developers and techies as a target audience.

- It's not optimized for any one use case. So, for example, as a notes-keeper Notion is obviously much better.

- It's still in early stages (I'm working on it alone), so:

  - There's no mobile app yet.

  - It doesn't yet support syncing between devices.

  - There are just 3 connectors to sync from external sources.

elbear• 8 months ago

Tiddlywiki

scoring-wade-6c• 8 months ago

You can try https://getoutline.com

fallen_comrade• 8 months ago

Can vouch, outline is great

Jaxan• 8 months ago

I specifically like md, because I will always be able to open it and modify, even if the original app no longer exists. I use obsidian without any extensions.

I must admit that I don’t archive things like exercise activity. So maybe the simple mindset won’t work then.

thiago_fm• 8 months ago

I see a big amount of naiveness on his post, I tried to view it with a positive mindset, but I can't help myself and think how naive his perspective on that is.

First, lots of server-side code is IO-bound, writing it in Rust vs. Java/C# would barely show any difference in a Monitoring tool, in a real-life scenario.

His authorization system is very limited in scope, of course it can be fast! Get real users and we will see if that will still be fast.

When you are running it in production, even if using Zanzibar's approach of loading everything into memory, you'd still need to handle many aspects he didn't think of, like updates to such permissions, and dealing with sharding etc. Things are always more complex in real life.

And last not but the least, Notion is really fast as it is. I never knew it was slow.

Without bringing any new concept to "Notion", I find it hard to believe this will ever work.

I hope he finds happiness building it though, building is fun!

wjsdj2009• 8 months ago

Interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing.

braza2• 8 months ago

Last year after a thread around Obsidian and the downhill of Evernote I took almost 6 months to migrate more than 100K clippings and notes and it's so refreshing to have your own data in sync in your terms and not be in any proprietary format, that I do not image myself going to anywhere that I cannot push/retrieve my notes in my own terms in a portable format.

Notion is a great product for corporations, and I get why companies are jumping on this bandwagon so fast; however, as a consumer, I wouldn't consider it or any option based on seat (like Outcrop) or any that wouldn't give me a binary that I can use in whatever machine that I want.

0dayman• 8 months ago

Obsidian is much better

bomewish• 8 months ago

This looks like a tidy little out of the box fts system. I’d use it as a tantivy interface basically. And I’d pay for it if it had good and simple document ingestion and metadata search semantics. Not the intended use case really but this doesn’t exist.

ancharm• 8 months ago

Will this also be available on the web via WASM compilation, in addition as a desktop app?

mellosouls• 8 months ago

Unless its open source I can't really see the point with bragging about it being in Rust. Its just another product, and its either faster or its not - the underlying language or platform is pretty irrelevant.

yomismoaqui• 8 months ago

Is this the new "I built a Twitter clone in a weekend"?

CalvinClare• 8 months ago

While it's possible to develop a more convenient version of Notion, I think it's only suitable for practice, since we can't compete with companies that monopolize the AI note-taking industry.

tonyoconnell• 8 months ago

You can make your website run fast as well with https://astro.build - it strips the Javascript and uses HTML until js is needed. You can get 300ms page loads for outcrop.app with Astro on Cloudflare Pages. Good luck with the project. I requested early access - You should use the response to the form submit requesting access better - I mean somebody who added their email expressed a lot of intent - why end the conversation with a toast notification? I hope life is going well in Dublin.

denysvitali• 8 months ago

Something went wrong! Cannot read properties of null (reading 'enable')

(On outcrop.app)

nixpulvis• 8 months ago

It’s not decentralised, it’s persisted to Postgres, but loaded in memory on startup.

How are changes to permissions managed I wonder.

hexo2• 8 months ago

Nice. I dunno what is Notion but I suppose - I tried Obsidian and some other sw i dont recall anymore, never liked it. Then I found org-mode in emacs and gave it a try. I did not look back except for one feature - mind maps or 2D note taking. For this I've tried mind maps but it just wasnt really what i needed or wanted. I probably dont really know what I want or mean by 2d note taking, I just have some vague idea.

WillAdams2• 8 months ago

The thing which I've always wanted to see is a knowledgebase system which uses a company's e-mail as an interface:

- new e-mail from client comes in which can't be matched to an existing project? New page in the knowledgebase

- second e-mail from client comes in w/ an attachment? It's stripped off and added to that page in the kb

- employee sends out e-mail with link to the initial version of the project? The link is added to that page

&c.

Maybe AI could make something like that work now?

smodo• 8 months ago

Still baffles me that Outlook won’t let me tie together emails, calendar items and documents. It makes so much sense to combine these things. All my meetings are about documents and their related correspondence but you never have a coherent information space for them.

WillAdams2• 8 months ago

I spend a lot of time saving Outlook messages to the file system and storing them for reference later.

bryanhogan2• 8 months ago

I can highly recommend Obsidian for long-term knowledge bases. Have been writing about using it well: https://bryanhogan.com/tags/obsidian

It's missing collaboration at the core, although it's possible to achieve this currnetly with third party solutions, or the next major update should also include it as it's the "multiplayer" update.

bad_username• 8 months ago

Obsidian is nothing less than a complete IDE for text.

dtkav• 8 months ago

I work on one of the third party plugins enabling real-time collaboration in Obsidian called Relay [0].

We have a novel architecture where you can optionally register a self-hosted relay server with our control plane for complete privacy for all of your docs and attachments.

We know that people typically prefer to have a unified vault, so you can share individual folders with different groups of people within your vault.

Relay is free for markdown docs up to 3 users, and then we have a hobby plan which includes attachment storage (especially popular with D&D and TTRPG players), as well as per-seat plans for businesses and universities. There are a couple of cloud-only alternatives like peerdraft and screen garden as well.

[0] https://relay.md

henryhchchc• 8 months ago

I am using Obsidian with the markdown-oxide [0] language server in my favorite text editor. It works pretty well for link navigation and completion.

[0] https://oxide.md/

backscratches• 8 months ago

Fantastic tool.

small_scombrus2• 8 months ago

How do you manage the more Obsidian-y sync side? Do you have it open with no tabs, or something else going on?

thewhitetulip• 8 months ago

I've written a full length novel in Obsidian and it's fantastic for writing anything.

Obscurity43402• 8 months ago

What do you think about Logseq? I tend to prefer native outliners and Obsidian just doesnt scratch that itch for me as well as drag and dropping and swipe indenting

bryanhogan2• 8 months ago

I also use Logseq for quick daily notes, since I like that it has the infinite vertical view & I want these notes open in a different program. But it has some quirks and tells that make it feel like lower quality software compared to Obsidian, e.g. its startup time is horribly slow.

perfmode• 8 months ago

Curious about the authors authz implementation.

Preloading authorization data into memory does not, by itself, provide the specific security guarantee (consistency) that defines Zanzibar.

The Zanzibar model is famous not just because it is fast, but because it solves the "New Enemy" problem (or causal consistency). Simple in-memory caching (preloading) often fails this test unless it is paired with complex invalidation logic that mimics Zanzibar's Zookies.

jschorr2• 8 months ago

It is actually slightly worse than even that: while New Enemy [1] is the primary concern, caching like this can also introduce a staleness issue from the other direction: let's say a user adds a new row or document, and immediately sends the link to their coworker... who tries to load that piece of data, but the (stale) access control dataset is cached and they are not in it... they get a "no access" error. While certainly fail safe (vs fail dangerous for New Enemy), it can be a fairly important UX concern as well.

Generally, the solution is to keep a timestamp of when the data changed (Zookies as you mentioned) or you can proactively reload or recompute the cache when the underlying data changes (sometimes in very smart ways), but yeah: it adds significant complications over a "simplified" approach to Zanzibar.

Disclaimer: I'm the cofounder and CTO of AuthZed and we develop the SpiceDB [2] and Materialize [3], which have quite a bit of logic around these exact problems

[1] https://authzed.com/blog/new-enemies#the-new-enemy-problem [2]: https://spicedb.io [3]: https://authzed.com/docs/authzed/concepts/authzed-materializ...

fud101• 8 months ago

Hi, i'd like to implement my own version for learning purposes. Do you have any recommendations?

I built a faster Notion in Rust

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