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Τobias Whetton
Τobias Whetton

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We built a social network for sharing knowledge

TL;DR: It's worth trying out

Why? What's the problem?

A few years ago, my friend (and now co-founder) Connor and I were frustrated with the fragmented and passive experience we had trying to share our notes, ideas and pieces of knowledge with each other. We encountered a few different problems:

  • Documents and folders don't reflect how we think – we like to gather and piece knowledge together, linking our thoughts and ideas; not create a group of segregated files and stuff them under one umbrella folder.
  • Individual sharing is a pain – sharing with your friends, family and colleagues might seem great with a quick share link or a pdf in a message but then everyone is left with a handful of notes spread across a wide array of different services. Team collaboration has been solved well by workspaces from Notion by individual piecemeal sharing still has not.
  • The right knowledge is never with you when you need it most – we have spent years sorting and organising files but often we forget about where we put them. When we are out and about we have an idea or a thought that would link great to an existing note but it's not with us. There is no central knowledge repository that we have with us at all times.

So back in 2018, Connor and I set out to create a truly collaborative knowledge management system, Supernotes.

How is Supernotes different?

Our Unique Card Format

The first thing we did was invent a new format built for knowledge management in 2020, the note-card.

Card Format - Supernotes

There are no documents, no folders. Everything is a markdown note-card, which are themselves nestable, taggable and linkable (yep you guessed they're bi-directional). You can even have note-cards which have more than one parent!

Share directly with friends

We have added the ability to add your friends on Supernotes...

Friends on a note-taking app? What? YES.

This makes it super simple to share an idea, or a group of cards with someone, just drag and drop it onto their username or add it into an already shared card - like the example below!

Drag and Drop cards onto Friends - Supernotes

You can like, comment and edit your cards together - suddenly sharing knowledge is a lot more intuitive and easy.

Find anything easily

We have spent a lot of time making it super quick to find a card so you can link and build on that information together.

Command Prompt - Supernotes

We have also built Supernotes to be fast, like really fast, with almost every interaction taking less than 100ms. We have built this speed into our UX as well, just start typing anywhere on the platform to create a new card.

And so many more features... but instead of boring you have a look at our changelog - we release new things every month!

Finally I encourage you to check out Supernotes if you are in the market for a new knowledge management tool (it works great for code snippets!). It's been a labour of love by Connor and I for the past few years. If you have any thoughts or questions, it would be great to hear your comments below!

Top comments (4)

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shaijut profile image
Shaiju T

Nice 😄, What is the tech stack used to build it ?

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tobiaswhetton profile image
Τobias Whetton

Thanks! Supernotes is built on:

  • React/Redux
  • PostgreSQL
  • SocketIO
  • Redis
  • Python/FastAPI
  • Nginx
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skryking profile image
Jason Ormes

I don't see it mentioned on the support page, but how are cards stored on the backend? Are they encrypted in some way? Just curious if sensitive information can be stored safely or not.

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tobiaswhetton profile image
Τobias Whetton

Currently we do not have E2EE (end-to-end encryption), which is required for truly sensitive information. However, the database is stored encrypted at rest and we have strong access control which prevent any unauthorised access of your data. We are working on E2EE as we think it is important for your peace of mind, but making it work well with collaboration features is difficult and we want to ensure that it is a seamless experience.