I don't trust anything that Notion promises. Changing to .com is probably the simplest of those three, too. I have no idea what their backend looks like but I know I could make that change in 10 minutes on mine.
I don't understand why they're using the Somalian TLD when they also own .com
How reliable are these other TLDs like emerging country TLDs like .ly (Libya), .co (Colombia) or .so (Somalia)? Could you just get shut down overnight?
Any domain is entirely at the mercy of the registrar, and for country domains that's entirely in the country itself. It's amusing to me that some of the most "desirable" country domains are also coincidentally some of the most unstable countries.
This is not entirely true. For example the .se domain is not controlled by the Swedish government but is administered by The Swedish Internet Foundation which is a private foundation (source I work there..). It is (now) regulated somewhat by law.
Perhaps, but a private foundation in Sweden is subject to the laws thereof - if Sweden wanted to regain complete control there's not much your foundation could do.
If I understand correctly, the .so TLD is effectively a national resource of Somalia, and as such they have total control over it and could in fact shut it down if they wanted.
> It is an uncommon status that is usually enacted during legal disputes, non-payment, or when your domain is subject to deletion.
Serious question, if this is an extended legal dispute or the domain is actually subject to deletion, that would be hugely damaging to the Notion brand right?
I ask because I can't think of another company that's had a similar issue lately, so I find the domain dispute an interesting issue that we rarely see get to this stage.
I never understood why notion continued to use notion.so when they own notion.com and you don’t have to worry about countries (ccTLD) doing things like this.
Yeah, absolutely. I really like Notion as a platform, but it’s these exactly concerns that led me to switch to Obsidian as my personal knowledgebase. I’d feel better if Notion had a truly offline client with sync rather than wrapping a web app.
i've just given Obsidian a try as a result of this outage. it's damn beautiful and a lovely way to write Markdown, but I really wish it had database features like Notion, I rely on those so much
You don’t need to use two separate domain names for that. Best practice is to use the external domain internally, and use your internal DNS server to point the records to internal IP addresses. That way you can still get public certs issued to internal services.
"Hi there! Flagging that this is not an issue with a lapsed renewal. There is a complaint against Notion that we are resolving directly with the registrar. We’re coming back up now."
I wrote a blog post about this once[1] because I was totally shocked how few people actually use a separate domain for their status page. It's like < 0.5% and I'll never understand why.
> >>But you can’t use two completely different DNS providers for your status page and your primary page unless you are using a distinct domain.
> You can.
Depends on who's who though. Yes, it can be separate if they were different non-apex (AKA like www.google.com and mail.google.com) domains and apex domains (like google.com) can use at least two (depending on your registry) different DNS servers.
However, by design there is an implication that your apex DNS servers are synchronised (or reasonably so). So for example, one of your provider have malfunctioned and instead of just pulling it offline it answered your requests with an IP address you don't control (let's say 198.51.100.17, which is not a routable address) with a exceedingly long TTL (say a week). If a client-side DNS resolver followed it through the heart, it will not allow anything to reach the intended server, even the functions server for non-apex domains.
Plus, registry issues (there is only one registry in the end) and if they messed up, the website is going down (unless they are prudent) etc.
I haven't been using Notion for too long but have migrated a lot of stuff there. Does this kind of downtime happen often?
Seems like offline mode is not high up on their agenda, so maybe I can ask here if there's other applications with similar feature, but offline?
Saving bookmark/homepages, a kanban-style todo-list, general note taking (with math eq + image embed) and possibilities to sync between devices? (Personal use only)
They say the issue is with syncing multiple offline edits. But for solo its overkill. I love all the options is has, and its been good for me for the most part, but I just want a solo mode for myself.
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll take a look through it!
I actually do use the DB feature. Mostly for well, Todo task (kanban style) and as a remedy to the "Exploding tab" phenomenon (saving pages with #tags to later check rather than have it visible as 100s of tabs).
It's just very nice to have everything at one place. Being able to link/backlink between task, homepages, notes and lists have been really useful to lower my anxiety of forgetting/losing some information/thoughts I write down, later.
> They say the issue is with syncing multiple offline edits.
It's not trivial, but I thought that Notion is now big enough to invest the time here. I've been using OneNote for a long time, and its offline support is great, incl. syncing multiple offline edits using a manual conflict resolution.
Why? Was no one from Notion around during the 2010 takedowns of .ly domains?