Team Wiki

Introduction

It’s 2025, and I think that we still don’t have even the basic knowledge tools that will be considered indispensible soon.

I’ve been working on histre since 2019. To be frank, it’s still quite far from what I imagined it would be. Other knowledge tools have gained traction, and even been financial successes, but have not solved the fundamental problem.

“Team Wiki” is one pillar of the knowledge tools. Current players are Notion, Confluence, Coda, and a few others. The value prop is clear: capture the tribal knowledge in your company.

Here is my first-draft thinking about them.

Current State of the Market

Notion validated this market, but they’ve painted themselves into a corner with the architecture. It’s painfully slow even all these years later. Here is one recent discussion thread, and there are many more: Hacker News: Notion 3.0

Notion’s validation of the market is even more notable because they weren’t even the first mover. People are desperate to have this pain solved that they’re willing to take on the pain of moving their team knowledge to a new system. Yet this pain remains unsolved to this day.

There are a number of startups claiming that they can slurp up internal docs and comms, and provide coherent answers for any question an employee might have. You’d think this circumvents the need for a better Notion. So far I think this falls into the garbage-in-garbage-out trap.

Problems with Notion and Others

• Pointer Chasing
  • https://lobste.rs/s/y11kqf/data_model_behind_notion_s_flexibility
  • https://histre.com/highlights/kirubakaran/53a27eba/
  • https://jake.tl/projects/notion-api

Solution

Using the pull technique, here is what I think the “good future” for “team wiki” looks like:

• architecture that facilitates low latency
• robust syncing
• polished design
• web app, as well as native apps
• automatic version control
• no lock-ins
  • webhooks
  • data export

Concerns

1. Competition
   1. What if Obsidian releases a multiplayer webapp?
      1. Relay - Multiplayer plugin for Obsidian doesn’t seem to have much uptake. That’s a third party plugin, so it isn’t using built-in data structures to facilitate syncing.
      2. Current Obsidian users are not using it as multi-player. They are primarily people who want to have their data files be local. So Obsidian doesn’t have a moat of users here.
   2. What if Google Docs gets a Notion-like UI?
      1. They haven’t done it so far.
      2. Even if they did, people would worry that they’ll just shut it down, like so many projects.
2. Effort
   1. Can I create a meaningful minimum viable product in a reasonable time, given my current time and money constraints?