u/automatedinbound

December 2024. Notion buys Campsite. They bring on the two founders, Brian Lovin and Ryan Nystrom, with a big warm welcome blog post about the future of collaboration.

If you never used Campsite, here’s what you missed. It was the calm, sane alternative to Slack. Posts instead of frantic chat. Real channels. A Home feed that actually told you what needed your attention. Built-in docs. People loved it. I mean loved it.

Then in February 2025 it shut down. Fine. That happens when you get acquired. You figure the good stuff shows up inside the mothership a few months later.

So I went looking for it.

Well folks: it’s not there.

Sixteen months in, there is no Campsite inside Notion. No posts surface. No channels. None of the stuff that made people fall for it. Notion’s team communication today is the same as it was before the deal. Comments. @-mentions. A discussion box. Slack and Teams integrations doing the heavy lifting.

Now here’s where it gets interesting.

The founders didn’t disappear. They’re shipping like crazy. But all of it is AI. Nystrom runs AI engineering now. They built Notion 3.0, the AI agents, the Custom Agents launch. Big, visible, important work. Just nothing, and I mean nothing, that looks like the product they got famous for.

And the market noticed the hole. There are already new tools popping up openly going after ex-Campsite users. You don’t get to do that if the thing already lives inside Notion.

So here’s my theory, and tell me if I’m wrong.

This was an acquihire wearing a product-acquisition costume. Notion was going all-in on AI at the exact moment they bought two killer builders. So what do you do? You point them at AI. Building a real Campsite inside Notion would’ve meant going to war with Slack and Teams, the same tools Notion’s own integrations depend on. Easier to swallow the team and the philosophy and quietly let the app die.

Their own welcome post even called Campsite “a Lego block that was missing from our construction set.” Read that again. That’s not “we’re going to ship your product.” That’s “we’re taking your block and your people.”

So I want to hear from you:

Was this always an acquihire and we all just wanted to believe otherwise?

Is the Campsite vision dead, or is it hiding inside the AI work somehow?

Does a Campsite-style feature ever actually ship in Notion, or is it gone for good?

And if you used Campsite back in the day, has anything come close to replacing it?

Tell me what I’m missing. Because the more I look at this, the more it smells like a really polite funeral.