It’s completely valid to think about. Note taking programs inherently come with a “technical debt.” The more you make use of its exclusive features the harder it’ll get to transfer.

If you’re worried about migrating I’d recommend something open source or self hosted. You can always choose to stay on a specific version you know will be easy to migrate from in needed.

I used Notion for a while in like 2020, it was fairly easy to transfer to Joplin, Obsidian, and later Logseq once I decided to move to more source available options. But I imagine with how many features they’ve added it might not be as easy anymore.

I’m currently exclusively using Logseq markdown, the one pro but also con is the non-linear note storage. Every page is in a single folder and they’re linked using tags and references rather than organized by folder. Super intuitive in Logseq and it works with other markdown editors like Obsidian too, but open it up in a regular file explorer and it looks like a mess lol.

You can export the data as either CSV (for tables) or PDF (for pages). I’m not worried about lock-in, Notion makes it easy enough to switch if you want to.

People who choose Notion are either ignorant of or don’t care enough about the lock-in to set up and use something like Obsidian instead.

Honestly a big part of it is marketing: Notion advertises on the local metro in many cities, Obsidian gets recommended by people on techy online discussion forums.

Another part is initial friction: with obsidian you need to figure a few more things out before you can get going (e.g. do I want to sync/backup this? Where should that go?). With Notion you just make an account, validate your email and then get started (which is an onboarding process everyone is familiar with)

But essentially

how would you ever migrate that to new software?

You’re not supposed to ask yourself this question until it’s too late

As much as I prefer lock-in free methods, Obsidian or any other note taking software I’ve seen does not come close to covering full set of what Notion has to offer in terms of features relevant to note-taking. Inline Kanban, tables, and just about every single things that cannot easily be represented in text and images are usually not covered. Also: collaboration, synchronisation, sharing. Lack of vendor lock-in is secondary.

Just use a folder with markdown.

There’s loads of great editors and other things.

Notion just doesn’t have any FOSS alternatives right now that are a true replacement. A couple come close, like Appflowy and Affine, but they’re open-core with paywall hell, and are pretty half-baked as it is. Obsidian is awesome but it’s not really a 1:1 replacement.

I just had to take-out my whole whiteboard history by exporting to PNG per board, because I upgraded my surface pro device to Fedora 44. I thought I had it all out in the open (source), PSYCH, hahaha.

Now trying scrivano, so far so fun!

I try to go for simple data Formats, not least, because I can later reuse these second brains from my locally hosted ai much easier.

Also because I do not want my second brain to be on the clutches of any cloud company.

There’s always a way. I’ve gone from Evernote to Joplin to Notion. When the time comes, I’m confident I’ll be able to extract my notes.