I'd gladly pay for a desktop application of this where I kept all of my notes and todos with local persistence that I could backup, migrate and move (similar to something like Notational Velocity), I like this, but I guess so far OneNote remains my personal champ in this regard-even though I have to tie it to OneDrive across my pc and surface.
Edit:
Although feverishly refreshing the thread and looking at all the praise...maybe I'll give it a more thorough shot for a couple of weeks.
I use org mode for: my tasks (gtd style), food log (using org columns), notes (easy export to any other format), habits. Alongside beorg for iOS for quick capturing on the go, I cannot imagine I would be any happier elsewhere.
Been using it for a work journal for a while, and it's pretty reasonable. I used to use RedNotebook before that, but I finally got fed up with the lack of Markdown syntax.
It's a bit less than ideal, overall. I would like to see you be able to assign a custom output format, so for each index and section kinds it would be nice to automatically create paginated sections that you want for specific layouts. I've tried this and it only sort of works, but expects them to be the pages as your lists.html or index.html, and can't paginate a path.
Also, built in client-side search. I'm working on Mermaid.js, Chart.js and Reveal.js short-code integration next.
Gollum also seems to have powerful customisation features like macros and YAML front matter, but I have yet to make use of them. For now, Gollum suits me as a simple, free alternative to Confluence. Notion is obviously a far more powerful product.
Why is it every time something like Notion is mentioned, there is always someone who wants "local, self-hosted, Markdown"? Just build it yourself.
This clearly shows you have no understanding of the product at hand. Notion is so incredibly powerful that Markdown doesn't even scratch the surface here.
In other words: you're not willing to pay enough for such a feature to make anyone capable of building it make it for you.
There just aren't enough people like you to support self-hosted $4/month product and you're not willing to spend $2000/month for self-hosted version.
So your options are not using the product at all or using hosted, incredibly cheap, version.
And many people don't have the time or skill to "just build it yourself," so when something awesome like this comes along that looks really appealing, you get people asking for self-hosted options.
You can either log-in with Google account (which you most likely already have) or via 2fa mechanism where they send an expiring login link to your e-mail address.
There are no password and therefore nothing to hack.
Why not? Is there something wrong with wanting a local, self-hosted tool? Or wanting to pay for it instead of building it yourself?
For some people like me that's a basic condition to even consider a tool.
Do you publish the progress of this project you're working on for interested persons to keep track or should we wait until you're ready to unveil it?
https://gitlab.com/equalos/equal
I've been trying to get it into a nice state, but it is a process.
The problem is that making a good interface is a though and long task. It's not done with crapping something together which then barfs out some file. That's people just can't build it themself, because it would be months and years to reach a good quality.
The demand for local&selfhosted on the other side is clear: people don't trust the companies. Companies peek into your data, sell them to other, or just disappear one day. With something under your control this will not happen.
There also might be a valid demand from those who would want to use the features of a collaboration suite like this for internal projects but find themselves beholden to internal or even client-demanded security/data retention policies.
Personal data notwithstanding we have data we put in our company wiki that is simply not allowed to be hosted on cloud services without lots of red tape and compliance certifications. Offering a on-prem option, at least for us, pushes all that responsibility onto our ops team, and Notion gets paid about the same but without the hosting costs.
Their personal plan is $4/month.
Maybe one in a few hundred people (let's say 500 for easy math) would want self-hosted version.
Are you willing to pay $2000/month for a note-taking application? I doubt it.
Not to mention the support burden of trying to figure out why something doesn't work on your self-hosted installation.
That economic reality is why on-prem, self-hosted software is almost exclusively a very expensive, enterprise software.
Companies can justify paying a few thousand a year for installation and a salary of an in-house employee to manage and maintain it.
Individuals can't.
If the on-prem version does not exist, I’ll never even try to convince them to switch, since we aren’t going to store anything sensitive on someone elses infrastructure.
So we stick with Confluence. Which everyone hates, but is still the best solution around.
Self-hosting nerds like myself would be able to get by on a no-support 'community edition' for like $10-15/mo.