Have you spent any time with Notion?

Notion: The Storage Paradigm
Indicative of perhaps nothing other than that I need better hobbies, I share the following observation about Notion’s storage paradigm:

  • “Pages” are containers
  • A Page can contain other Pages (think nested hierarchy) and “Blocks” (think “Objects”)
  • A Page can contain a full-blown “Database” (such Pages won’t contain other Blocks)
  • Some examples of Blocks are text, lists, toggles, images, PDFs, “inline” Databases (think filtered views of a cloned Database Page)
  • Some Blocks can be nested.
  • If you delete a Page, you delete everything it contains

It’s the last point that’s giving me some design annoyances. I begin to appreciate the benefits of a larger container of Objects within which I can define Tags, Relationships, Links, Backlinks, etc. The deletion of a single Object may break some links, but it leaves the other Objects in the container.

I recognize that nested Pages in Notion is similar to the folders/files hierarchy in an OS. It works for @James, but the other Blocks that Notion Pages also contain breaks the analogy for me.

TLDR: Chalk up another point for Evernote.

You are now being returned to your regular programming…

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Notion seems to take the NoSQL approach for their users in most things. If you treat your databases as your sources of truth, and put your data into those, if you ever want to delete a page that has links to databases in it, you’ll still retain the master copy. But, as a whole, I’m not a fan of NoSQL databases. I honestly just like the structure of Notion for my very specific uses. It’s nice to live in a world where there is OneNote, Notion, Evernote, and so many other variations for all the use cases they entail.

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