Today, we’re excited to announce that the HackMD Community is live. 💜

For years, HackMD has been where teams draft specs, take meeting notes, write documentation, and think out loud together. But most of that knowledge lived in its own corner. You could share a link, sure, but there was no way to wander. No way to stumble onto a brilliant set of study notes, a well-argued RFC, or a tutorial someone published last week.

Community changes that. It connects the public notes on HackMD into something you can actually explore.

What is Community?

Community is a shared space where published notes become discoverable. Instead of your public work waiting for someone to find the right link, it now sits alongside notes from developers, educators, researchers, and teams around the world.

Here’s what that unlocks:

• Explore public notes from across HackMD, organized by topic
• Add topic tags when you publish, so your work reaches the people looking for it
• Discover authors and communities working on the things you care about

You’ll also start seeing related notes recommended at the bottom of the notes you read, so one good note leads naturally to the next.

We’ve always believed knowledge works best when it moves. Community is how it moves further.

How publishing works

The mechanics are simple: when you publish a note, it appears in the Community. That’s the whole trigger. Publish, and you’re in. Unpublish, and you’re out.

Nothing changes for your private notes, your drafts, or your team’s internal docs. Community only surfaces what you’ve deliberately published.

What publishing means for your permissions

We want to be completely upfront about how publishing interacts with note permissions, because your trust matters more to us than a clean announcement.

• When you publish a note, its Read permission is set to Everyone, even if you had it set differently before. That’s what makes the note viewable in the Community.
• When you unpublish, your original Read setting is restored. The system remembers what you had and puts it back.
• Write permission is never touched. Whatever editing access you set stays exactly as you set it. Publishing a note does not mean everyone can edit it, unless you’ve chosen that yourself.

One more thing worth knowing if you run a team: notes in a Public team are published by default, and individual notes in a Public team can’t be unpublished one by one. If you need those notes out of the Community, the way to do it is switching your team to a Private team. If your team’s notes were never meant for a public audience, now is a good moment to double-check your team’s visibility setting.

Why we built this

HackMD started as an editor. Over time, you turned it into something bigger: a place where open source projects document decisions in the open, where study groups build shared knowledge, where teams think together. We wrote about that shift in our 2025 recap, and Community is the next step in that direction.

Great ideas shouldn’t stay siloed once a project wraps. Someone out there is working on the same problem you just solved, and your public note might be exactly what they need. Community exists to make that connection happen.

This is just the beginning

We’re starting with discovery and topic tagging, and we’ll keep building from there: smarter recommendations, better search, and more ways to follow the work and people you find interesting.

Publish something you’re proud of, add a few tags, and see who finds it.

Stay tuned for more and don’t hesitate to share your thoughts with us in our Discord. 💜