(Part 4 – A Notion-hosted site I built)
The catch is that, quite simply, it’s a closed system and a closed format. And while you can point your domain to it, it’s also not something you host. Your data and your business is at risk if you’re locked out of your Notion account, or if Notion’s systems are breached. If Notion begins to charge for public hosting or removes/restricts its free plan, you’ll incur costs just like your self-hosted WordPress installation, but without any of the control. This isn’t specific to Notion, but it is definitely applicable to it.
This is the problem with no-code systems and tools in general. The reduction in friction is almost always at the cost of control over data. In this case, you can in theory keep a local copy of all the data you put into Notion – I have all of the icons, the photographs, the text in Markdown, tables in CSV. But the value of Notion isn’t in the data. It’s in the meta-data. It’s in its ability to organise my coffee-related data and text on the same page. To create galleries out of simple tabular data. To make it possible for me to organise my coffee database for myself and offer that same database to the world via the web. It would just not be the same for me to create HTML pages – open format – of each of the roasts and brew methods, to link to different brew methods from roast pages and vice verse. HTML is a linked graph. Notion is databases. There is value in those roast <> brew method relationships.
I’d love to see WordPress implement a version of this. With the Gutenberg publishing system, it has already taken a block-oriented approach like Notion has.
If one of those blocks can be a database – not just a table – of WordPress pages, it could transform what a WordPress site could be.
(ends)