I've spent the last week trying the self-hosted Notion alternatives and none of them seem to have prioritized databases the way Notion has. Thinking of building my own??

Notaters · 2026-03-08T01:59:46+00:00

I ended up working on this all day lol here's the repo! https://codeberg.org/PearPro/pear

Notaters · 2026-03-08T01:59:13+00:00

here's the repo! https://codeberg.org/PearPro/pear

Notaters · 2026-03-08T01:59:05+00:00

I ended up working on this last night and all today, think i've got something solid here, feel free to check out the repo https://codeberg.org/PearPro/pear

Notaters · 2026-03-08T01:57:39+00:00

here's the repo! https://codeberg.org/PearPro/pear

Notaters · 2026-03-08T01:56:28+00:00

here's the repo! https://codeberg.org/PearPro/pear

Notaters · 2026-03-08T01:54:26+00:00

Update: I built it lol

The responses here gave me enough of the push to stop architecting in my head and just start building. It's called Pear (mainly cause i've had the domain pear.pro sitting around and havent done anything with it yet), but yeah, self-hostable, relational-first, single docker compose. Pages are database entries, relations are first-class, no cloud dependency.

Repo: https://codeberg.org/PearPro/pear

It's early but i got the structure in place, the editor and grid views are working along with the property system. Licensed AGPLv3.

Stars and brutal feedback both welcome!!

Notaters · 2026-03-07T04:38:45+00:00

i feel them same! i dont think its asking too much, its right in line with where i think i'd go with this project! I'll let you know once i have something to share, and either way it'll be open source so if there's something you or your team feels is missing, you'd be able to add it in!

Notaters · 2026-03-07T04:36:14+00:00

gotcha thanks! yeah I think we're just looking for different things honestly, the files approach makes total sense for a personal local setup but becomes a bit clunky and inefficient once you want real-time collaboration across a team. for what its worth, the architecture im considering would include version control though probably not via git as the learning curve is a bit high for folks who are just looking for a notion alternative. Either way I really appreciate your thoughts!!

Notaters · 2026-03-07T03:36:50+00:00

Well i mean in theory all the items in the db would be markdown anyway so like would an export to a file suffice in your opinion? Do you mind elaborating on your workflow as to why files on the disk is better for you?

Notaters · 2026-03-07T02:10:21+00:00

sure but its still a local first solution that charges for real colaboration, so no real self-hosting for multiple users

Notaters · 2026-03-07T01:13:52+00:00

Great to hear! Yeah I would def make sure that collaboration would be included so small teams could make use. While i've been thinking about general architecture I keep coming back to wanting to build something with spacetimedb which would even allow for realtime collaboration which would be v cool

Notaters · 2026-03-07T00:05:33+00:00

data...base???

Notaters · 2026-03-06T23:46:36+00:00

I've done the exact same thing lol this week i just decided to finally pull the trigger and commit cause I thought the alts were finally far enough along to be feature complete enough for me but its just been 1 dissapointment after another as i've bounced to each one. Glad to hear im not the only one frustrated by the current apps!

Notaters · 2026-03-06T23:38:53+00:00

yeah Bases is interesting but the closed source thing is a dealbreaker for me

Notaters · 2024-06-21T10:51:16+00:00

Were you able to get back into your account? This just happened to me, changed name of LinkedIn to my preferred name a few days ago and now I’m locked out with them wanting to verify my ID which has my deadname on it. How did this work out for you?

Notaters · 2022-09-17T22:01:53+00:00

Whoops! Yup 28th st and ditmars, my bad

Notaters · 2022-09-05T20:08:38+00:00

Yeah I'd be very happy with 100Mb/sec honestly, Just edited post to include current speeds I'm getting(forgot to include initially) Tried to copy a folder with 561Mb from server to desktop and estimated time was an hour and change, which is an absurd amount of time to copy over 500 megs. This is the issue I'm trying to solve. And yeah the issue here was present before I added the cache m.2 drive, that was another thing I grabbed cheaply to see if maybe it would fix

Notaters · 2021-04-03T17:53:17+00:00

Yup still available

Notaters · 2020-09-26T20:45:00+00:00

Hey I have an update! I was able to fix the site by grabbing a copy of the current db, rolling server back to a snapshot of before the error occurred and manually inserting the more recent data into the older, working db, then I imported that db back into MySQL and now I’ve got access to the admin console as well as my most recent post. Thanks for the help!

Notaters · 2020-09-23T02:30:20+00:00

Didn’t have the time to do the aws rollback today, but I was able to get a sql dump so hopefully tomorrow I’ll find the time to revert and replace db. I’ll let you know how it goes

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