this post was submitted on 04 May 2026
94 points (99.0% liked)

Ask Lemmy

39637 readers
1026 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I like the idea of something like Notion but I have no idea how I would preserve my data or ever migrate it. I imagine you have to have some pretty complex stuff going on to have rich text, images, databases, macros and whatever else all in a file or notebook. Getting it out in some sort of format may not be too hard, but how would you ever migrate that to new software?

Am I over thinking this?

I know Obsidian stores everything in plaintext, but how would something like Notion or Affine (a self-hosted one) compare.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] DougPiranha42@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

As someone who used Notion and thinks about long term accessibility and vendor lock in: the ability to migrate is an important factor but not the only and most important factor. Notion is really, very good, very easy to get started with basic functionality and implement more sophisticated systems as the need evolves. And that is one reason why it’s popular.
I moved away from using it it to another proprietary subscription platform years ago when I changed jobs and started working on new projects. I still occasionally log back in and look up things, but not often because those projects are complete and closed. If Notion becomes unavailable one day, I have everything exported, saved on my computer, and backed up. It would be inconvenient to use those exports, but I didn’t have to so far, and probably never will.
Obsidian or logseq may be very powerful, and would certainly work for my personal notetaking. But for work, I want to avoid spending more time than necessary on configuring things and training people in using it, I need something that is easy to use correctly and securely for anyone. We regularly export and save everything. Migration would be a huge pain, but it wouldn’t be an unsolvable problem, it would just take time. I wouldn’t want to preemptively spend time when the platform may actually outlast the project.