Skiff is joining Notion

Daryl Sun@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 76 points –
Skiff - Private, encrypted, secure email - 10 GB free
skiff.com

Landing page:

Skiff's mission is to bring freedom to the internet by helping people collaborate and communicate with confidence and privacy. We see a deep alignment with Notion's vision to build a connected workspace and enable everyone to build tools that reflect their values and protect their privacy.

We're extremely excited to accelerate this mission by joining forces with Notion's world-class team and we are pursuing big plans for making all of our online lives freer and more empowered.

We look forward to continuing to serve you with even more exciting updates on the horizon.

Learn about migrating your data

Data migration page:

Dear Skiff Community,

We are excited to share that Skiff is joining Notion.

Skiff's mission is to bring freedom to the internet by helping people collaborate and communicate with freedom and privacy. We see a deep alignment with Notion’s vision to build a connected workspace and enable everyone to build tools that reflect their values.

We’re extremely excited to accelerate our mission by joining forces with Notion’s world-class team. We sincerely hope that the Skiff community will join us for this next stage of our journey. We’re pursuing big plans for making all of our online lives freer and more empowered, and these plans will carry forward directly the ambitions we’ve strived for alongside the Skiff community.

As we begin to shift focus to our shared efforts with Notion, we will be closing down Skiff's product suite after a 6-month sunset period We are deeply appreciative of the trust users have extended to us, and we are committed to honoring that trust by ensuring that all data on Skiff is easily exportable. For the next 6 months, Skiff services will continue to operate without disruption, and users can freely duplicate, migrate, or export data. You can now also set up a forwarding address to redirect mail to any other provider.

Our commitment to privacy and security is unchanged. All user data remains end-to-end encrypted, and Skiff products will never monetize your data. Accounts and data on Skiff will not be converted into Notion accounts.

We encourage you to export your data and migrate custom domains within the next 6 months. We’ve prepared this guide to make that process as easy as possible. For any other questions, our support team is readily available via the in-app “Send feedback” option or at support@skiff.org.

The Skiff community has lifted, inspired, and energized us at every step. We are humbled by your support and we apologize for any disappointment or inconvenience this change may cause you. We remain as committed as ever to bringing about the vision for a better internet that brought us together. Thank you for being part of the Skiff family, and we look forward to continuing to serve you with our future efforts.

Sincerely, Skiff Team

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God fucking damn it. I finally find something to replace Google docs, get all my fucking work into it, and they shut it down. I will never have anything to do with any of these flakes again.

Anyone recommend a replacement?

What kind of functionality do you need? (I am not familiar with the scope of offerings skiff has/had)

Basically something like Google docs with better privacy. Cloud-based document editing with at least markdown that automatically stays synced across devices. Sorting into folders is nice too, and an Android app is a must.

I was using a word processor and idrive storage for a while, but I ended up losing work to crashes with a frequency that really was not working for me. Plus LibreOffice sucks. I don't know why word processors need to be such bloated ugly garbage.

Skiff really kind of hit the sweet spot. I'm looking at Notion but like, ugh.

Edit: Okay. Notion seems okay so far. I'm a little shaded out by the whole let's pull our project and merge it with this other one, buuut.. It's kind of better by the look of it. Hmph.

Okay. Notion is complete and utter trash. It's failing to save literally everything I do on my phone.

I'll throw in a recommendation for Notesnook. It's available on all platforms, syncs across devices, is e2e encrypted, handles tables, and you can organize notes via notebooks, If you need to get a bit more granular, you can subdivide notebooks via topics. It also handles markdown. I pay around $5.00/month for a pro account, and am getting more than my money's worth.

I’ve been using AnyType as an alternative to Google Docs and Notion, but this one looks great too. Thank you for the rec! We need to make more people aware of these alternatives.

Notion has lost work on me a couple of times, so I think I'm going to keep exploring. Does Notesnook automatically save and sync everything?

Most definitely! You even get those features in the free tier.

Notion is a cool product and I'm cautiously optimistic this means they could be trying to bring more encryption into the product suite.

Standard notes sounds like it fits your requirements quite well though, I'd give it a peek.

Maybe Proton drive or pass in the long term. They seem to slowly be working their way towards notes/document editing.

If you care about privacy then look for something open-source and self-host it. That also has the benefit that a company can't shut it down at their whim.

My main concern with privacy in this case is just not wanting to train AI on my notes for stuff I haven't even released yet. Like, once it's out in the open, whatever, but at least wait until I publish. Damn.

I always found Notion’s aesthetic kind of unsatisfactory.

Sadly, I don’t know much about Android so my recommendations (Craft, Coda, Tana) aren’t that useful. But it looks like you got a lot of other suggestions! :)

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Have you considered self-hosting? Nextcloud is a great alternative to stuff like Google docs, etc...

Everything has a replacement. Except their custom domain option

What do you mean with custom domain option ? Email providers like mailbox.org, Tuta, Proton, Zoho and hosting providers (e.g. Gandi) can let you use a custom domain email for email. Or do you mean your own webmail custom domain login page ?

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I got the announcement via my Skiff mail. I went to get on their Discord to see what was up, but it's gone. They nuked it.

Shady AF.

If Notion starts forcing you to pay $30/month just to read notes, you'll be fucked. There's no way you can rescue your data.

That's not really true. I recently migrated from Notion to Obsidian. It wasn't 100% painless but good enough.

The API probably makes this easier now as well

They're literally .md files. I transferred mine over from Skiff.

The whole thing definitely makes me raise an eyebrow, but Notion honestly seems like better software than Skiff so I'm less upset than I was initially. Always a good idea to keep backups rather than relying on a single company, though.

Will be curious to see what Notion's plan for this is since Skiff is shutting their service off in 6 months...

....why shut it down instead of just integrating it?

Can anyone shed some light as to why this isn't good news? I've only heard of Skiff recently and used Notion all of about once. Is this a red-flag for Skiff? Their service has interested me.

This is only good news for the people at Skiff that are getting paid. Skiff is dead.

Alright then, shame. Their product seemed really polished from the outside, even if it was very Apple-esque. Still no competition for Proton I guess.

Honestly, I've been using Skiff for a few months and I switched to Notion last night. It's basically just a better version of Skiff. I kinda get why they threw in with them now.

I posted on the discord last night and now it's been nuked. There were lots of unhappy people there as you would expect. What a trash company to pretend to care about it's users and just go for the $.

If you expect any company, especially a startup, to act differently then you grossly misunderstand how companies work

Welp, that sucks. I guess maybe if Notion veers into privacy that'd be a win, but difficult to see that future. Their new "Notion Calendar" requires Google Calendar.

Yeah I'm cautiously optimistic that maybe they'll be bringing some of that end to end encryption tech with them and making Notion's very powerful system more privacy respecting.

Maybe they also acquired them to help fill in some of the gaps like the calendar you mentioned.

At this point... I'm rooting for Proton. I currently have Proton, Privacy, Bitwarden, and Standard Notes. Proton already has an "almost there" replacement for Bitwarden that's got (IMO) a better UI and better integrates with SimpleLogin. They've talked about expanding SimpleLogin to phone numbers and credit cards which would gobble up Privacy for me. They have a fundamental notes system in Pass (their password manager). If they fleshed that out to where it could compete with Standard Notes (... which while getting better has always been a little clunky) I could see myself consolidating around their ecosystem.

At the same time I might stick with Bitwarden and Standard Notes just because I think Proton being a "monopoly" of sorts isn't necessarily for the best.

I was using their quick aliases all the time to get free Adobe trials. Is there any alternative? Gmail's "+" aliases are detected as aliases, Skiff was unpopular enough that they hadn't blacklisted them.

I went with SimpleLogin with a custom domain.