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Show HN: We want to displace Notion with collaborative Markdown files
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. :)
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.
Not 100% sure I understand, but, if you opt into sharing a doc, we do spin up a collaboration server on your behalf, and editors do not have to set anything up to use it. The bulk of the work we've had to do is to make this seamless and good.
For the other points: yes, we aspire to do all of those things. :)
So Retool but for using agents. Neat.