Public Collections (viewing groups of cards as a non-user)

Feature Requests
1

Hey guys,

First of all i would like to say that i love Supernotes and that i use it daily. I hope i don’t seem dissatisfied or annoyed in this post, i just wish to express my thoughts and this feature request. I really value the openness and interactivity you exhibit.

I would like to request the ability to explore shared child cards without logging in.

Currently it seems like you can only view the single card without having to log. Clicking on the “View child cards” button simply dumps you on the login page. Personally i really feel this creates a barrier to freely share my notes.

As a student i especially feel like this feature is missing. The bulk amount of my notes is for subject that i share with 100+ other students and it feels like a shame for them to be unable to view them without an account. Even when working together on a project it feels like its too big of an ask for them to sign up.

Using markdown export is a possibility, but it does have some caveats. If i want viewers to see the actual formatting i would have to host it somewhere, and some of the non-standard markdown features of Supernotes would require changing up the syntax. Which is too much work to be honest.

Exporting to PDF is definitely a very viable option, but it takes away the interactive free flowing nature of supernotes, and breaks spoilers formatting which is very useful for educational content. (not giving the answer straight away)

What i would like to see i simply the ability to explore shared child cards without logging in.

An alternative solution and i really mean alternative. Would be to publish your markdown engine as open source, so users can use the look outside of supernotes.

Also for refrence i see that on Notion some of my classmates do share longer form content.

Thanks for your time,
Kasper :love_you_gesture:

9 Likes
2

Hi @kakka0930, welcome to the Supernotes Community :raised_hands:t3:

Firstly, I just wanted to say thank you for your kind words, it’s great to hear that you use Supernotes daily!

This feature request is a great idea, and we agree with you 100%. This in fact something we are already working on and have recently announced in our Spring Update. We are calling this feature “Public Collections” – as you will be able to create your own collections of cards and then publish them to a url which you can share publicly.

We are currently prioritising offline mode and mobile app improvements; but once they’re out, Public Collections is likely to be the next thing we will release. Looking forward to sharing this with you soon.

1 Like
3

+1 to this :smiley:

1 Like
4

Long-time Supernotes user who just recently re-subscribed to Supernotes after an extended hiatus. I’d like to add a +1 to this as well. I’ll throw in another potential use-case for this that I might use:

I am a founder and engineer of an app for which I maintain a FAQ parent card with child cards for specific questions and answers. It would be really interesting to use a publicly shareable collection (i.e., sharing the parent FAQ card) as a knowledge repository for my customers. Maybe you could even use it for the Supernotes Help Center too!

There’s a lot that could be done here too, though I’m not sure you’d want to extend the functionality to include likes and comments as that could be far outside the scope of what you intend. But, publicly shareable collections without these additional features would still be extremely useful.

1 Like
5

You’ll be happy to hear we’re getting closer and closer to focusing on Public Collections.

The previous barrier was producing very performant share pages. With the recent Supernotes 3.1 update, we reworked the entire sharing architecture to be lightning fast, especially for embeds. We also introduced Custom Collections, making Public Collections much more feasible.

Now the challenge is to tie this all together. We have lots of ambitious ideas, including potentially adding bio profiles to showcase all your collections, custom CSS styling, and configurable custom domains. However, this is all a lot of work, and our immediate focus is still to improve the core Supernotes offering (seemingly less interesting but v. important) before branching out too much. We are excited about this ourselves though – I, for one, want to share all my recipes and restaurant collections – and look forward to sharing more updates on this in the future.

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6

Those ideas do sound exciting. I’m sure you all are well aware of this but I constantly need to remind myself that it’s often possible to deliver value iteratively rather than hold off on releasing until I can ship the “big idea”. What I’ve found helpful for myself is to think of customers eventually being able to piece together all the iterative releases like breadcrumbs only in retrospect with the final release being the “key” to unlock what the “big plan” was all along.

All that is to say that personally I’d be content with just the ability to share a single parent card with child cards inheriting the permissions of the parent. The custom collections sound great but the above I think would be quite useful until that’s all ready.

I’ll have a look at your linked improve the core Supernotes offering thread and chime in there if any of my usability-related ideas would add to the conversation.

I really appreciate opinionated software and Supernotes is a great example of what is possible when that is done well. You all showed discipline in sticking to Supernotes’ core principles when bi-directional linking infinite outliners were (still are?) all the rage and I was happy to see the same approach to generative AI. So, I’m sure you’ll figure out how best to integrate any feature suggestions, if at all.

7

Hello, I am a VTuber in Japan. My name is Kaede Sato.

While searching for a tool that supports Zettelkasten, I came across Supernotes. Thank you for this wonderful platform.

Having practiced Zettelkasten for two years, I believe the following features are crucial for any Zettelkasten tool:

  • Web publishing
  • 2-hop linking
  • Non-hierarchical notes
  • Zero configuration
  • Web application
  • Markdown support

So far, I have used several applications, such as Cosense (a Japan-made app not well-known overseas), Notion, and others.

Among them, the apps that I find most suitable for Zettelkasten are Cosense, Notion, Obsidian, Logseq, and Supernotes.

Supernotes stands out as one of the most user-friendly applications I have ever used, alongside Cosense. Its minimal need for configuration makes it an exceptionally effective tool in my experience.

Specifically

  • Web publishing

    • Not currently possible with Supernotes.
    • Without being able to publish notes and have them indexed by Google or Bing, it becomes challenging to engage with others.

  • 2-hop linking

    • Not possible with Notion.
    • This feature makes the link structure more comprehensible.
    • However, the current Link View isn’t highly impactful.

  • Non-hierarchical notes

    • Achievable in Notion and Obsidian but not enabled by default.

  • Zero configuration

    • Not available in Notion, Logseq, or Obsidian.
    • A low-barrier recording environment increases the volume of notes and contributes to more efficient productivity.

  • Web application

    • Not available with Obsidian.
    • Difficult to use in environments where app installation is not possible.

  • Markdown support

    • Not supported in Cosense.
    • Enables the creation of long-form content and makes it easier to document thought processes.

Regarding Web Publishing

To get straight to the point, I would like to request the implementation of the long-awaited Public Collections feature as soon as possible.

Over the past two years of using Zettelkasten, my biggest discovery is that Zettelkasten should be made public.

This doesn’t mean publishing notes individually as cards but compiling them in a blog-like format for public access.
Additionally, they must be indexed by crawlers like Google for greater reach.

The reason is that knowledge and ideas are invigorated when they interact with others.

In this regard, I feel that Supernotes is currently lacking.

While I could simply stop using Supernotes and move on, I chose to write this post on the forum because Supernotes is such an outstanding tool.

Cosense, for example, has this feature enabled by default.
Notion makes public sharing simple, though it is less crawler-friendly.
Obsidian offers paid solutions like Publisher and self-hosted options like Quartz.
Logseq can be paired with self-hosted solutions like Hugo through Logseq-Schrodinger.

I strongly hope that Supernotes will implement a similar feature.

Thank you very much for reading this far.

This message was translated using ChatGPT.