Relay - a Notion like workspace built in Elixir, tailored for relational work

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Hey! I’m new here, and this is my first Elixir project, but I’ve been a Swift engineer for about 10 years. I built Relay to help teachers, pastors, non profits, or small teams focus on work that brings tasks and people together and not be overwhelmed with context switching.

Anyway, curious if anyone is interested in such a thing, and then possibly talk about the code more. It is vibe coded, but I’ve tried to keep things sane and learning the best practices of the ecosystem of Elixir and Phoenix. I’m using LiveView throughout for the UI, it also has an MCP server. I plan to make native Swift clients eventually, and am open to open sourcing it, but its closed source for now until I understand that process better. I want a simple local self host option as well, like have Relay hold your data and do the boring deterministic logic for your local Agent to work with and optimize its token usage.

The big idea is, I want the composable data layer of Notion, but I don’t want the lock in or the cloud only forever sub approach for my most important data. And many orgs can’t afford Notion but I think would benefit if they could.

So I built something that will ingest your data, organize it for you, and give you the option to build your own GUI for it or use the one I made, and you can host if on your own device if you don’t want my cloud. I have it on Fly for now. I’d like there to be just one network that grows for simplicity of the sharing pieces, but people can self host their own nodes which keeps their data on their own machine but they can still browse the public database for like easily published notes or things like that. I was also looking at integrating Nostr for some of the social components. I haven’t figured all of this out yet.

So, take a look, and let me know what you think https://relaynotes.com

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Nice product. The web search feature is a really cool feature.

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Impressive! You’ve clearly put a lot of thought into the product, and it seems like a great use of LiveView.

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Watched some of the videos on your site - looks interesting. Seems well thought through.

What’s the algorithm portion right now? All deterministic algos? Or do you have AI doing some of the work there?

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I’m not quite sure how to use it. It looks like I can add different files by category.

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Just deterministic for now, weights and things, imitating whats known publicly of the big tech algos. no AI in there yet. I need to learn more in this space and curious or open to any thoughts or direction.

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Yeah, I haven’t made any onboarding yet, sorry.

Best way to get started is sync with your gmail calendar and contacts. Then add your tasks and notes manually (I’m working on Todoist sync now.), and you can compose or link stuff together, so you can plan your day and week and stuff with what to do, as well as also see who is getting your attention. For educatoin and ministry, this is really important because people are coming and going, its hard to track every student, maybe you want to see and remember the last time you spoke to soeone and what was said, this kind of thing.

then once that data is in there, it has a auto discovery and suggestion surfacing engine to help you not forget stuff.

then i have some extra network features, like web search, video search (youtube without the distraction! yay) bookmarking links, these get added to your composable system. there’s also light publishing, write a note, publish it, and its not just a link its searchable on the public system. I call this public system “atlas” .

Forms are cool too, write markdown, make questions, get responses. Those responses get composed with your other people and tasks automatically, so you can build a client list automatically from survey respondents, as an example.

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Thank you for your explanation.

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I think you have a great idea that is more general than Education or Ministry. I want to learn more.

Your site has a lot of timeouts that I experienced on all of the basic deployments I made on Fly. I think you need more resources (1M of RAM on the Db and App? happy to share my fly configs). I have never made it past 20 second on your videos, and they just quit. I have submitted several email addresses to establish an account, but have not received a response. I do live in a rural are with a slow connection.

I have been working on something similar (in a way). We were creating a social network by invitation only that maximized entropy, avoiding an echo chamber. Also looking at a Habermas machine. We had started to look for ways to expand the conversation outside the local network, which was leading to an ontology of interests. It was getting a bit overwhelming. We called it Circle.

I would love to collaborate. Also new to Elixir.

Vince

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Hey thanks for reaching out and the encouragement!

Definitely agreed there’s more use case than education or ministry, there’s reasons I focused there, but I also have a vision for it to be ubiquitous. As a personal goal, I want to replace my own Todoist and Bear subscriptions, and some kind of agentic experience for every day work. And then ultimately it seems like a much more sane way to build software if apps can share the same core data layer and other primitives, or if social networks actually let you use your own community’s data for good instead of just pushing ads.

Admittedly, a big piece to make any of this possible is a simplified UX and UI, maybe like agentic Chat or a terminal TUI so you don’t need millions of buttons and UI everywhere; just let the agents handle tasks and show composable widgets, its the only way to make something across all these surfaces and not have it a horrible mess, not to mention the engineering debt. I haven’t figured out this puzzle yet, but it’s something I’m actively working on. So right now the app is just a bad notion / todoist clone with a collection of these features, but certainly not the intent of the final version. What it does show is some interesting interactions with composable data.

Yes, sorry about that, I’ve recently introduced some performance problems I’m still trying to diagnose and fix. I thought it was some features or maybe server load as you suggest, but its not that, its my bad code when users (like myself) start connecting and syncing 100s of google events and todoist tasks, related to the db pools. That must cause even the home page to reset and break the videos. Those are hosted on mux actually so they should perform well but it must drop the connection.

I think it is fixed now, home dashboard is loading quicker, and i was able to watch home page video without any problems, let me know if you’re still having issues.

Hey thats cool, Habermas machine is new to me but reading about it seems a nice extension to Dunbar’s number and what you’re talking about. How far along did you get with Circle? Still working on it?

Awesome, happy to connect, I’m traveling now let me reach out when I can.