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Show HN: We want to displace Notion with collaborative Markdown files (moment.dev)

29 points by antics ↗ HN
Hi HN! We at Moment[1] are working on Notion alternative which is (1) rich and collaborative, but (2) also just plain-old Markdown files, stored in git (ok, technically in jj), on local disk. We think the era of rigid SaaS UI is, basically, over: coding agents (`claude`, `amp`, `copilot`, `opencode`, etc.) are good enough now that they instantly build custom UI that fits your needs exactly. The very best agents in the world are coding agents, and we want to allow people to simply use them, e.g., to build little internal tools—but without compromising on collaboration.

Moment aims to cover this and other gaps: seamless collaborative editing for teams, more robust programming capabilities built in (including a from-scratch React integration), and tools for accessing private APIs.

A lot of our challenge is just in making the collaborative editing work really well. We have found this is a lot harder than simply slapping Yjs on the frontend and calling it a day. We wrote about this previously and the post[2] did pretty well on HN: Lies I was Told About Collaborative editing (352 upvotes as of this writing). Beyond that, in part 2, we'll talk about the reasons we found it hard to get collab to run at 60fps consistently—for one, the Yjs ProseMirror bindings completely tear down and re-create the entire document on every single collaborative keystroke.

We hope you will try it out! At this stage even negative feedback is helpful. :)

[1]: https://www.moment.dev/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42343953

7 comments

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nashashmi
The problem with the mission statement mentioning Notion is that notion is too big of a product and you are probably only aiming to displace a small part of it.

Secondly, if a server cant be spun up alongside this that serves markdown editing, that others can access immediately without going through a setup process, for guerilla collaboration, then it is not replacing notion. It is simply a different medium.

Notion is a lot of things; pages, triggers, actions, databases, and agents. You are focusing only on pages.

helsontaveras18
I liked the idea and the headline got me to click. But then I got confused with the Postman capabilities… So this is beyond markdown—it’s helping you build live dashboards with Markdown.

Why would I reach for that instead of Claude code building a dashboard with HTML/CS/JS?

DerArzt
I'm not understanding the value here. If I'm writing markdown and avoiding notion, what does this provide my team that git does not?

I can easily write the markdown docs and they will render fin in most git forges.

jsjenfjri
brother you should be competing with jupyter notebooks, you know the python and the math nerds who do data viz and all that sass

the average notion user is a brain dead idiot who doesnt even know what markdown means

antics
I think responses like this are a good reminder that technology is most leveraged when it's useful to both people who are technical and nontechnical. For the first time in the the 70+ year history of software, the cost profile of "integration software" is approaching cents per app. A child can magic up an NES emulator from the ether; semi- and non-technical users can instantly create something personalized to their use, which is useful to their specific team and their specific company.

I'm not going to be the one to shut them out of this change. We will work to help both of these audiences.

ryandetzel
What is the pricing strategy. I really like this concept and have been looking for something like this but would love to know where this is going commercially