Have you tried Athens Research? [0]

It is open source and everything is stored locally but not in markdown files. You can self-host the desktop app to share notes.

[0]: https://github.com/athensresearch/athens

I went to visit https://athensresearch.github.io/athens/ and got "Only browsers based on Chrome/Chromium are supported" on Firefox. Lol.

Wow, iOS Safari gets the same message. Interesting choice…

That doesn't seem designed for growing teams – for example, it doesn't seem to have comments.

They are still in beta currently, focusing on small teams right now so there is hope for comments.

How is notion? I heard it was slow?

Also, is real time collaboration a game changer or a gimmick?

I used to think the former, but was questioning it recently.

What would be lost with syncthing + obsidian for your team or maybe something that does autocommit like fossil for probable conflicts?

It's still painfully slow, and the WYSIWYG editing is very clunky.

The real time is not as real time as, say, Google Docs. There's a lot of lag.

It's faster now, I haven't been bothered by speed yet.

But yes, realtime collaboration is a critical feature for documents that can be used during meetings (and IMO ~no meetings should be held without documents).

The other critical feature is comments, which I assume Obsidian does not have support for (they would be very nontrivial to represent in markdown).

For posterity, I got pretty annoyed by the clutter of "Type / for commands" and stuff, and used this Stylish theme to clean things up a bit:

https://gist.github.com/rattrayalex/2e4f934045aabc4caeeab249...