Comment by antics
1 day ago
Author here. To be clear, we do not in ANY WAY compete with Yjs! We are a potential customer of Yjs. This article explains why we chose not to be a customer of Yjs, and why we don't think most people building real-time collaborative text editors should be, either.
You have an amazing tagline. This is the first time I read a tagline and thought: this is exactly what I was looking for.
But the product seems much more narrow than an actual tool run the whole business in markdown. I was hoping to see Logseq on steroids, and it feels like a tool builder primarily. I love the tool building aspect, but the fundamentals of simply organizing docs (docs, presentations, assets etc, the basics of a business) are either not part of the core offering or not presented well at all.
I love the idea of building custom tools on top of MD and it's part of my wishlist, but I feel little deceived by your tagline so I wanted to share that :)
This is great feedback, thank you. I will say that IS our goal... but we only really launched last week and are still figuring out what resonates with people and what they really want! It sounds like you're saying that the organization aspects are not there, which is very helpful to know... I am not quite sure I understand if you also think the toolbuilding is lacking?
If you are open to it, I'd love the opportunity to hear more. Here or email (alex@moment.dev) or our Discord (bottom right of our website) or Twitter/X... or whatever you prefer.
No, the tool building looks very sophisticated and powerful and I love that it hinges very much on the new era of building your own custom tools with the help of agents. The live collaboration on top of md files is also exactly what I was looking for!
If you're saying that Logseq on steroids is what you're aiming for, then, my immediate feedback would be to emphasize more: - the writing experience: at the end of the day, writing and taking notes will be the most common activity - the file organisation: tags, templates, media files, does it do the basics? - the sharing and access mechanism: can I easy share a doc with a partner / client?
Those are the basics of daily business tasks for my consultancy, and so the first thing I'm looking for. I really wish to get off Google drive, but those points need to be solved for that to sound feasible.
As for the tool building it looks very powerful, but the first example you presented (on-call dashboard), was a bit too much from the get go to wrap my head around the building blocks of your system. I've been building custom tools/wrappers of varied complexity on top of markdown for my team, from a custom revealJS skill that follows our design guide, to a form builder to a project/client DB that wraps duckdb (for yaml frontmatter parsing) with a semantic layer. I've watched your intro video but I'm still not sure whether your service would help me more closely integrate those tools to my company's knowledge base or not.
But once again, if your vision matches your tagline, then I'm really looking forward to hear more from you
That doesn't make sense. If you are a customer that implies you pay for it, so people can be users of Yjs which is free and open-source, but not customers.
The logic that makes sense is you are using your own framing (Moment.dev will later be paid and people will be customers) to interpret Yjs.
Moreover, the 'social proof' posted by the following later on by 'auggierose' and 'skeptrune': - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47396154 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47396139
Appears, to me, to be manufactured. The degree of consolidation in this 'SF/Bay Area tech cult' which I've noticed, although I am unsure if others are aware, that tries to help other members at the expense of quality, growing network wealth through favoritism rather than adherence to quality, is counterpoint to users whose interest is high quality software without capture.
While you may not like me describing this, it is not in your own interest to do this because it catabolizes the base layer that would sustain you. Social media catabolizes actual social networks, as AI catabolizes those who write information online. Behavior like this ruins the public commons over time.
I'm not sure I fully understand, but to be clear, we actually do voluntarily pay for the Free and OSS software we use. For example, we support `react-prosemirror` directly with monetary compensation. And if we used Yjs, we would have paid for that too. So in that sense, I do think of us as customers!
It's hard to tell, but I think you also might be saying that criticizing the FOSS foundations of our product actually hurts the ecosystem. I actually am very open to that, and it's why we took so much time writing it since part 1 came out. But the Yjs-alternative technology we use is all also F/OSS, and we also do directly support it, with actual money from our actual bank account. All I'm recommending here is that others do the same. Sorry if that was not clear.
The rest of your reply, I'm not sure I grok. I think you might be suggesting that we are sock-puppeting `auggierose` or `skeptrune`, and that we are part of some (as you put it) "cult" of the Bay area! Let me be clear that neither of these things true. I don't know anyone at Mintlify personally, and in any event we are from Seattle not the Bay!
No, you're not sock-puppeting it yourself. But you all are probably friends and cross-promoting. It's a common business strategy these days, but to some underhanded seeming compared to straightforward ways.
Anyhow, we just have different norms of being. I still stand by my above statements and observations, which you reject but has plausible deniability, so we'll just leave it as is.