Auto-generated description: A dark-themed user interface displays a collaborative Markdown editor with sections for Markdown features, suggestions, and comments, alongside a task list and chat menu.

A couple of months ago, Matt Webb shared a tool called mist which I’d describe as Etherpad with Markdown and track changes. I don’t think I even shared it here, because, although it was cool, it wasn’t Open Source, and therefore I didn’t think it would last very long.

Happily, Matt’s not only open-sourced it, but made it really easy to deploy via Cloudflare. Happy days!

What I love about Markdown is that it’s document-first. The formatting travels with the doc. I can’t tell you how many note-taking apps I’ve jumped between with my exact same folder of Markdown notes.

The same should be true for collaboration features like suggested edits. If somebody makes an edit to your doc, you should be able to download it and upload to a wholly different app before you accept the edit; you shouldn’t be tied to a single service just because you want comments.

(And of course the doc should still be human-readable/writeable, and it’s cheating to just stuff a massive data-structure in a document header.)

So mist mixes Markdown and CriticMarkup – and I would love it if others picked up the same format. If apps are cheap and abundant in the era of vibing, then let’s focus on interop!

With mist itself:

Several people have asked for the ability to self-host it. The README says how (it’s all on Cloudflare naturally). You can add new features to your own fork, though please do share upstream if you think others could benefit.

This is the first time I’ve come across CriticMarkup which is a layer on top of Markdown for ‘track changes’. The way that it’s done in mist is explained here.

Source: interconnected