I built an faster Notion in Rust
50 comments
·November 19, 2025xanth
wim
We're building a new multiplayer IDE but for docs/tasks [1]. Local-first, real-time collaborative and end-to-end-encrypted sync. Not open source but self-hostable with a single binary and hackable with plugins (custom properties, views, code, etc).
neodymiumphish
It's definitely a work in progress, but AnyType has a lot of functionality similar to Notion. I haven't used it in a while, so I don't know whether there are plugins in any meaningful capacity.
From past experience, it's even pretty simple to host your own sync server to get away from their account/storage limits.
notachatbot123
AnyType is not open-source.
neodymiumphish
Fair enough, it's protocol is open source and the apps are source available. Modifications can be made by individuals for their own uses, though. I think it's as close as you can expect to get with a mostly full-fledged Notion competitor.
In any case, I don't particularly enjoy AnyType, despite coming back to it a few times to test it out (and still maintaining my own sync server, despite not actively using it, in case I go back to try it out again after some demonstrably updates). Just pointing out that it's a less restrictive alternative.
bakli
Like Obsidian?
shmoogy
Obsidian isn't open source
null
echelon
I'm still happy to use it. It's not like they can rug pull on the data or even the existing app binaries.
I'd really like to see the team get rewarded for their work, too. I'd be sad if it went 100% open and they didn't so much as draw a market salary from it.
I think if it went open, they'd get nothing. That's the one thing I strongly dislike about open source is that only hyperscalers really economically benefit from it.
They've done a remarkable service for all of us.
Kye
I was surprised at how similar Trilium looks to Obsidian when it was suggested in a thread somewhere: https://triliumnotes.org/
It's open source and as far as I can tell uses a database.
kgarten
Logseq? (Though it uses md)
albertdessaint
You might be interested in Graphiti: https://github.com/getzep/graphiti. With a self-hosted Graphiti MCP, you can connect ChatGPT or Claude to build a knowledge graph from all your data. You can then query and update the graph directly through conversation & by ingesting data and visualize the graph using tools like the Neo4j Explorer.Don’t know if that could fit your use case but that could be a fun way!
braza
Last year after a thread around Obsidian and the downhill of Evernote I took almost 6 months to migrate more than 100K clippings and notes and it's so refreshing to have your own data in sync in your terms and not be in any proprietary format, that I do not image myself going to anywhere that I cannot push/retrieve my notes in my own terms in a portable format.
Notion is a great product for corporations, and I get why companies are jumping on this bandwagon so fast; however, as a consumer, I wouldn't consider it or any option based on seat (like Outcrop) or any that wouldn't give me a binary that I can use in whatever machine that I want.
arnaudsm
This is great, I wish tech giants focused more on latency.
Gmail, Notion, Facebook, are painfully slow on my high-end laptop with gigabit ethernet. Something is wrong in our modern engineering culture.
wkjagt
I recently started looking for a new(er) laptop, because it often felt slow. But I started looking at when it was slow, and it was mostly when using things like GMail. I guess my feeling was "if my laptop isn't even fast enough for email, it's time to upgrade". But doing things I actually care about (coding, compiling) it's actually totally fine, so I'm going to hold on to it a bit longer.
DarkNova6
I think the problem is a lack of "engineering culture".
PaulHoule
People experience latency but if you “saw like a corporation” you could only see throughput and never latency.
CuriouslyC
Obviously not with Gmail/Facebook, in that case it's just 100% incentive misalignment.
The others, probably, VCs are incentivized to fund the people who allocate the most resources towards growth and marketing, as long as the app isn't actively on fire investors will actively push you away from allocating resources to make your tech good.
umanwizard
You would be surprised at how bad the “engineering culture” is at meta. There are surely people who care about page load latency but they are a tiny minority.
stu2421
Mono Avalonia Not i on 1 No te
yomismoaqui
Is this the new "I built a Twitter clone in a weekend"?
Sytten
The prosemirror port would make for a nice OSS library if OP is willing to put it on crates.io.
hresvelgr
Looks promising. Where I think Notion really succeeds is letting people easily make attractive live documents. Where they've meandered off imho is trying to shoehorn in an RDBMS. If you can enable people to make pretty pages, and keep your document format simple, you'll be off to a very good start.
bomewish
This looks like a tidy little out of the box fts system. I’d use it as a tantivy interface basically. And I’d pay for it if it had good and simple document ingestion and metadata search semantics. Not the intended use case really but this doesn’t exist.
johnisgood
Irrelevant, but "a faster", not "an faster".
null
sgarland
It certainly looks like the author has given careful thought to making this performant, but I am skeptical about it at scale. While OT means there should be fewer updates than CRDT, you still wind up with a fair amount of them, and you have to periodically rebuild the base document from accumulated steps, which can be quite large.
Assuming your backing store is Postgres, I’d experiment a lot with the various column storage strategies, at various sizes of documents and varying amounts of writes. The TOAST overhead can become a huge bottleneck.
ancharm
Will this also be available on the web via WASM compilation, in addition as a desktop app?
0dayman
Obsidian is much better
This looks like it has great potential, but what I really want is an open source "notion" with a well considered plugin & schema model. I desperately want to sync back all my data into a single cohesive graph; notes, reading list, messages, exercise activity in a more compute friendly format than MD files.