What are you talking about? Notion is clearly not just a bunch of lists like Trello is.

The implementation of the Notion can be bunch of lists, like Trello. However Notion's UI doesn't pass this feeling.

It can be, if you want it to be.

https://www.notion.so/templates/kanban-board

I use this all the time, alongside my other personal databases and such. I wish there was an open source or self-hostable gizmo that was as flexible as Notion is.

Semantically our data model is an infinitely nested hierarchical tree of lists, although the UI might not look or feel like "just a list".

Our editor is more like an "outliner" than a traditional word processor, and before January 2022, you could't even select text across multiple blocks. We rebuilt the editor to work like both an outliner and a traditional word processor at the same time. You can still "feel" the tree/list structure when you select and drag multiple blocks around, or use indent/dedent - you can't indent a block multiple times within another block because that doesn't make sense in the tree structure.

I wrote a bit about turning our outliner into a word processor here: https://twitter.com/jitl/status/1483918085384028163

And also about the data model itself here: https://www.notion.so/blog/data-model-behind-notion

Thanks for the detailed explanation. But you do understand that from an enduser view, this doesn't really matter? What the original commenter meant that they like the simplicity of Trello, because it's just a kanban board. Notion is much more flexible than that as a user.

Yep can confirm.

I just don't like recreating a kanban board in Notion, it just seems too complex and cluttered, I don't care about all the other stuff, I love trello for how simple it is, but I keep finding different ways to use it, the simplicity is the key as it allows me just to dump what I want into it and use it however I wish, Notion is just overwhelming for me.

Thanks for letting us know about the details, honestly not being able to select text between blocks was wan of the UX deal-breakers for me, seemed like a way to avoid -exporting- your docs or whatever not allowing to copy the document fully easily. Glad its solved

Ah, so it mirrors the NLS internals

We're inspired by the greats (https://www.notion.so/about). Our Github code review bot is named doug-engelbot

Did anyone actually go over the NLS internals docs over at bitsavers? I went through them, it is impressive how much mileage they got out of the '68 designs. Still parts missing that no one seems to want to add to their new outliners.

The underlying data structure is really just a list of typed elements. But the interface is also hiding this pretty well, to the point that it becomes a bit messy on the corners, making it hard for new users. Trello in that regard is significant cleaner in its representation, but also more limited.

I tried Notion once to replace a Trello board, but couldn't find a way to have cards with checklists inside.

I'm confused, people have said Notion is a relational database. Is that not the same as "trees of lists"?

I thought a relational database like MySQL or whatever is formally more powerful than trees and list structures.