Anytwo and the future of Anytype

News
21

So I finally had the time to watch the Town Hall, read this topic and first thing I want to say is AnyTwo really looks awesome. This is what Anytype could have, would have or even should have been. :wink: It really is impressive and I cannot congratulate the team more, well done!

Secondly I want to apologize for my strong opinion in the other Town Hall topic regarding perks not being transferred to AnyTwo. This was solely based on what other users and a bit what @kaye said there. Nothing of the sort has been mentioned in the Town Hall and according to this topic, nothing has been decided yet.

I am still of the opinion that AnyTwo is the next Anytype update and as such perks should be transferable but that is a topic for later.

However, I do have a few concerns I’d like to share.

Firstly, as impressive and awesome as the demo was, I have heard the same promises from you before, with the last rework of Anytype. That it would be better, faster, more stable, faster development and that from now on, things will go a lot faster!

What makes it different this time?

Don’t get me wrong, I have a more positive mindset then with the last rework of Anytype but I still have my reservations regardless. After 6 years we kinda hit a reset button and go back to an early alpha/beta product while current Anytype is not a finished product.

Second concern and something I really don’t understand is why maintain two Anytype apps in parallel?

Splitting resources between two apps with a small team feels like a lot of extra workload for the team. You also need two workflows for support, forum, suggestions and more which feels like a lot.

Having two apps might also be very confusing for both current and new users I think and on top of that, there is clearly an old app and a new app. AnyTwo will be the way forwards while current Anytype will become Legacy (sooner or later).

As an outsider I would say make Anytype Legacy open source (as planned) and then focus on AnyTwo. Make AnyTwo the continuation of Anytype (like anytype 0.7 or something), no new name and focus on just one app.

And my last concerns, which is kind of a continuation of the first is that I don’t feel like I can make Anytype or AnyTwo my daily driver or recommend it to anyone sadly. I have never felt I could truly make Anytype my daily driver based on the development and missing features.

and I really want it to be! But in the past 6 years we had 2 complete reworks (1 for the new app, 1 for the underlaying structure needed for multiplayer if I’m correct) and now we are faced with another complete rework and another new app…

How can I in good faith recommend this app to anyone when it is beginning to feel like an app/team stuck in the mythical development hell of increasingly bigger scope, more features, more perfect?

Again, I am really impressed with AnyTwo and the new capabilities but my concerns are real (and I am not the only one reading this topic).

I want Anytype to become successful because I see it’s place and possibility to become the next big app next to Notion, Capacities, Obsidian and Onenote. Anytype offers a unique combination of features that no other app has and with this dedicated team I really wish it to become really succesful!

22

I was just about to add exactly that.
It’s hard to believe how splitting one product into three - Anytype, Anytwo, and AnyBusiness - which means to continue to maintain one product and to develop two others at the same time - could be accomplished at all with what appears to be a smaller team.

23

Two points that raised eyebrows in the Town Hall:

39:06:

Global peer-to-peer sync, devices can sync globally without needing a central server or matching LAN

1:16:00:

Paid memberships allow syncing over the internet

It seemed like the Town Hall was initially saying that the main limitation of local-only mode (LAN-only sync) is no longer a limitation, but then says that it’s a paid-only feature? That’s fine and I get why Any(two) needs to make money, I just want to confirm I’m understanding. Will free/local-only mode still only be able to sync over LAN?

Either way, the new system looks beautiful and I’m excited to test it out

24

In Germany there’s a saying: ‘A new broom sweeps clean’.
They didn’t speak about that in the Town Hall, but it seems to be very clear that there was some fluctuation in the development team.

I feel a bit guilty towards the long-standing programmers that are no longer members of the team when I write this, but, as a matter of fact, overt time one becomes blind to the obvious. If one works for a long period of time on a project, the view narrows.
A fresh outsider can sometimes pinpoint direct to flaws in the general structure and come up with fresh new ideas how to solve such long-term issues.

And I believe this is what has happen here.
AnyTwo (or “AnySquared” how I would name it) is not only a bunch of bug fixes plus a bunch of new features.
Instead, I see a whole new and clearer mindset behind all of that.

The recent “reworks” came from the same developers that have built the whole thing from start on, until they came to a kind of dead-end. But their reworks was no complete reworks. A new data base, yes, but the rest remained the same.
But what we see now is something that was made from fresh minds that got the chance to bring their clear view and their new ideas into the old thing.

Instead of partially renovating an already very old house, they built a new one, based on the knowledge what was good, plus a clear view on what is needed to solve things in general, plus what is needed in addition.

I was never before so optimistic, that things this time become REALLY better, on the whole foundation!
This is the first time where I’ve trust that we really get rid of all these nagging long-term issues and all these recurring bugs that in the past became fixed, then suddenly reappeared, then became fixed again and again, in a loop.

Yes, in past, promises was broken often. But now, we look on a completely different situation.
This time, and for the first time, I believe in everything what they promise.

25

First impressions.

The GREAT:

  • a working editor. A-FUCKING-MAZING. i will switch without blinking only for that.
  • improved organization. not sure which is better.

The MAYBE:

  • developer API. the one there was never really took off. the docs were never great. insane potential, though.

The … “hm”:

  • anytype becoming open source: Nice. I really appreciate the thought and the attitude, yet … what about any2? not even “source available” any more? (maybe i missed that …)
  • “can we self host? - yes”. paid or unpaid?
  • also i’m with @kamryn here - p2p sync without payments (so online-2-online, basically) - yes or no?
  • and also @Jeroen: “I have heard the same promises from you before, with the last rework of Anytype. That it would be better, faster, more stable, faster development and that from now on, things will go a lot faster!” … yes, sorry, it came to mind. it was a banger release announcement, though.

The wishlist:

  • better communication, still. “we’re rewriting the whole editor” would have hurt nobody, and i would not have written some angry remarks when something was fixed just to introduce a different regression. any mention of any roadmap carries no longer any substance, the existing one was never more than unusable.

The final verdict:

  • LIKE!!
    • All in all I am VERY happy with the news and the new possibilities.

The reason I am still hesitating with going all-in is that data longevity. as a reference - so far i know two money-maker-combinations:

  • obsidian: fully free data model (markdown files), proprietary app with proprietary sync. cool.
  • a buch of other apps: fully open-source, paid hosting (sync). also cool.

right now, Any2 seems proprietary/proprietary (closed app, “inaccessible” data format). to ME, that spells RISK, because there nothing that gives me long-term access without major PITA if Any decides to ignore their promises at some point (“but we would NEEVEEEEEER” … ya ya sure) or simply goes down. and free building blocks don’t count - see the PITA condition.

still, i’m really optimistic :slight_smile: and looking forward to the new system.

26

I’m both excited and apprehensive as others have said. The new feature set looks awesome. I am glad you made the decision to ditch all the legacy stuff. As a software developer myself I understand how challenging it is to maintain legacy code/features.

I kinda wish this had been done earlier, but honestly better now than in a few years. Going back into alpha stage with missing features kinda sucks. Not sure how much that will effect me until we get there.

Excited to see what the lifetime plan costs/includes. I would really encourage you all to increase the amount of storage included with plans going forward. imo the amount of storage you get for each of the plan’s pricing is pretty low.

Also not a huge fan of the Anytwo naming. Maybe rename the existing Anytype → Anylegacy (or something) and have the v2 version as Anytype.

27

Will Any2 have an open source license?

28

Thanks for posting the town hall video. I just watched it in its entirety.

I’ve been a struggling user with Anytype for a while, and just finally felt like I was up to speed with the help of the revised help docs, and bam, whole new version.

For me, the entire value of Anytype lies in its E2EE / zero-knowledge structure, built upon familiar Notion-lite functionality. Frankly, if Notion / Craft / Capacities added this to their software, I’d likely jump ship immediately.

That might be a crummy thing to say, but the ups and downs of the development of Anytype have their limits on an end user, and a paying one at that.

All that said, I was impressed by the demo. I understand the need to tear down the foundations and start again. I especially understand the need to become a real, viable company that can pay its developers for their time and risk. So really… I get it and I have no problem with any of that.

But I (we?) need assurance that this truly won’t be another big adventure without proper continuation. Like tuning into a new TV series, and having it canceled before the story is properly told…

So here are my specific comments and concerns:

Original Mission Goals Getting Compromised

With any sort of revamping, original mission goals get compromised. Can we be assured that this isn’t the case here? That data security and privacy are still paramount and aren’t being compromised in any way with the peer connections, the business model, with syncing, with data storage?

In a way, the lack of transparency about the development of Anytwo has left me less trustful. I feel like Inspector Clouseau entering his apartment, waiting for Kato to pounce on him.

Feature Parity + Moving Data Over

Can you issue a clear statement as to what features from Anytype will be missing from Anytwo?

Ideally, you’d indicate what features are being completely eliminated, which are coming, and roughly when.

And on that note, I’d love to learn more about what data from Anytype won’t get transferred over to Anytwo via whatever mechanism is employed.

The AI Question

You can count me as someone who is absolutely uninterested in AI.

I don’t use it. I don’t like it. I don’t trust it.

Sure, there’s some AI creep into tools I use on a daily basis for my work (Adobe stuff mainly), but it’s not something I want.

My suggestion, building on the idea mentioned in the town hall of an “AI switch” would be to make this feature a paid add-on. Don’t make it crazy expensive or anything, but this will tell you who is actually willing to pay for these features, as opposed to, “well, it’s built in, so I’ll tinker with it.”

Update the Help Docs ASAP

Please make this a priority. Not all of us are engineers, and need some help getting up to speed with the software.

That’s what I have for now. I’ve signed up to be a tester, and hope I do get to try it out.

All the best to the team,

Arash

29

Thanks for sharing the update on the new version of Anytype. I’ve been using Anytype for a while and am also among the paying users. Honestly, though, I have mixed feelings about this announcement.

The announced features sound fantastic, and I’d love to use them. I can see why you’re excited about this direction. But that’s also part of the problem: when someone shows me something exciting and then says, “It’s going to be great, but you’ll have to wait until next year,” it encourages me to look for something that already offers those capabilities today. Even in the best-case scenario, with no unexpected delays, it sounds like the new features are still at least six months away.

I’ve spent a lot of time searching for the right note-taking app. Since discovering Anytype, I’ve made several attempts to switch over completely, and I’m now actively using it. I could live with the few missing features and always looked forward to each improvement. It felt like the app was gradually becoming the tool I needed.

Hearing that you’re rebuilding it from scratch makes me feel like I’m back at square one. Depending on when the first version arrives and which features it includes, it could be another year or more before I know whether the new Anytype will meet my needs. That’s a difficult amount of uncertainty to commit to again.

What makes this especially frustrating is how much time and effort I’ve already invested in finding the right tool and making Anytype work for me. This is about organising my information, adapting my workflows, and building something I can rely on for years. The biggest cost for me isn’t the subscription, it’s the time spent evaluating, migrating, and starting over. I chose Anytype hoping I could finally stop searching and focus on using it. This announcement makes me feel like I have to start that search all over again.

The uncertainty around pricing adds to these concerns. I understand that prices can change and that a sustainable business needs to adapt. But announcing such a major transition while saying that you haven’t yet decided what will happen with pricing leaves another important question unanswered. I’m being asked to keep investing time and content without knowing when the new version will meet my needs or what it will eventually cost. As a paying user, that makes it harder to feel confident about the future.

Personally, I would have preferred the rebuild to be announced when a complete replacement, with all the existing features, was ready to use. I appreciate the transparency, but announcing it this far in advance leaves me in an uncomfortable position: the current app now feels like a temporary solution, while the next one is still a long way off.

That makes me hesitant to keep adding content and investing more time in the current app, because I’m unsure how much development it will receive and how much of what I build today will carry over. At the same time, putting my notes and daily workflow on hold for six months or a year isn’t a realistic option.

To be clear: I don’t want to leave Anytype. I want to stay. But I need a clear commitment to existing users and a complete, dependable app that I can use for my daily work. I don’t expect development to stop or every possible feature to exist. I do need a stable foundation I can confidently keep building on, without feeling like I’m always waiting for the next version to become ready. Plus, as you will have three versions of anytype to maintain, it will be more work four you to keep all of them in good shape.

Can you commit to supporting the current app throughout the transition and providing a straightforward migration that preserves our content, structure, and workflows? When can paying users expect clarity on future pricing and what will happen to their current plans? Those commitments would give me the confidence to keep investing in Anytype.

30

Hey Kaye and the AnyTeam,

First, let me thank all of you for all the hard work. I haven’t been this excited about a piece of software in a long, long time.

Like many others, I have some questions and feedback, but I also want to admit that you guys changed my mind on AI.

I was initially very much against adding AI to Anytype. Mostly because I feared the kind of lazy implementation we’ve seen in so many products running out of ideas, where AI gets bolted on because it’s the current trend to hype up investors rather than because it genuinely improves the product.

I had two main concerns.

The first was privacy. If AI had meant compromising Anytype’s approach to privacy and data sovereignty, I would have stopped using the product altogether.

The second was cost. I was worried AI would become an excuse for a blanket price increase to fund a feature that not everyone asked for or needs.

From what you’ve shown so far, I’m really encouraged by the approach you’ve taken on the first point: AI is optional, we can choose where to use it, and we can choose the model. I also appreciate that there will still be a free tier for Anytwo. Of course, since the membership model hasn’t been finalized yet, I’m still curious to see how the cost side ultimately works out, but I’m really happy that the cost is for Anytype’s growth, not to cover a costly AI infrastructure.

Seeing some of the use cases for Anytwo and Anyscribe during the Town Hall was also super interesting and promising. I’m SO looking forward to Anyscribe. It opened the door to so many possibilities and use cases, well beyond what competitors like Notion currently offer, in my opinion, anyway. Maybe I’m a little too hyped. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Collections 2.0 and migration:
From what I’ve seen of Anytwo, I’m genuinely excited and don’t have much negative feedback at this point.

One thing I would really appreciate, though, is a more detailed explanation or demo of Collections 2.0.

Because of how the word “Collection” is currently used in Anytype, I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around exactly how the new system works and, more importantly, how I should think about structuring and organizing my objects and existing workflows within it.

That leads into what is probably my biggest concern which is migration.

You briefly touched on migrating from Anytype to Anytwo, and I understand that there will be a migration bridge that can be built with an agent because the new system isn’t backwards compatible.

I would really like to see a proper demo of what that migration experience might look like.

I’ve spent a lot of time getting Anytype to work exactly the way I like it. The thought of potentially spending days manually recreating structures, relationships, templates, and workflows is probably the one thing that makes me nervous about the transition.

Integrations (especially Apple services):

I understand that the new architecture and AI agents can generate connectors on demand, and I’m particularly curious about what this could mean for Apple services.

Apple Calendar integration with two-way sync would be a game changer for me. For example, creating or modifying an event in Anytwo and having that reflected in Apple Calendar, and vice versa.

The same goes for Contacts. If a Contact Book in Anytwo could stay synchronized with my iPhone contacts in both directions… :heart:

Is this kind of integration technically possible with the new connector system?

Scheduled tasks + reminders:

If I understood the Town Hall correctly, agents will also be able to perform scheduled or recurring tasks. That sounds extremely powerful, but I hope there will still be a simpler native system for basic reminders and recurring notifications.

For something as straightforward as: "Remind me about this task every Friday”

or

“Notify me about this document in three months”

…having an agent involved feels like overkill and might become an issue if my computer running Anytype is powered off. For these kinds of simple use cases, setting a reminder or recurrence directly on the object would feel faster, simpler, and more predictable than involving an AI model at all.

I think there’s room for both. Native scheduling for deterministic tasks, and agents for more complex automations.

The name:

I understand that Anytwo is the name the team has picked for now, but I really hope you’ll reconsider it before the public launch.

I think using “Any” as a prefix is funny, playful, and incredibly versatile. It works literally anywhere. (I had to.)

But I’m just not getting Anytwo.

Maybe it would make more sense if Anytype was being renamed “Anyone,” but even then, “Anytwo” doesn’t quite carry the same wit or immediately communicate anything about the product to me.

Could I suggest putting together a shortlist of names and letting the community/members vote?

The Anytype team could obviously retain veto/last word power in case we collectively go off the rails and choose something completely unmarketable :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: But given how attached this community is to the product, involving everyone in the naming process could be a lot of fun.

I was thinking about:
AnyOne: I think would be my favorite, it’s easy to read and say, and carries the idea that it is a tool… for anyone to build whatever we want with it. But also “one” big unit that englobes the ecosystem (AnyDB, mini apps (AnyApps? :smiley:), Apple uses “One” kind of similarly for their subscription service as in “all in one”.

Just an idea.

Thanks again for all the work that has gone into this. Rebuilding so much of the foundation is obviously a massive undertaking, and what you showed during the Town Hall made me incredibly excited about where this is going.

I cannot wait to get my hands on Anytwo and signed up during the call!

31

As always thank you team for showing a lot of great stuff. Here are my 2 cents:

  • Most excited about interface flexibility to interact with the same data but most often use features would probably be rollup and formulas
  • Lexical by meta? Hm… two hesitation steps backward. Open source.. seems more trustworthy, but is it good enough? I ponder.
  • Since we would be migrating a second time and no backward compatibility, I wonder what back-up or export method would be most reliable.. markdown?
    • From last migration experience, not worried about transition at all.
  • Is there a reason why views pulling objects from different spaces require AI mode (as in the functions around Town Hall 58:40)?
    • If we can search across spaces and interact with multiple spaces with Raycast without AI, why do we need AI for showing a list of objects from multiple spaces?
    • I hope to be able to use this feature without AI.. :cry:
    • How will properties be managed and stored when created for such multi-spaced view?
  • In terms of backlinks and related “backlinks(?)”, is this a different connection type, like the difference between @mention or relation?
  • About synced block,
    • I imagine a use case where journal entries show all blocks/objects edited on that day. But since it is date record, it would be nice if it stops synced after the day has passed, e.g. no further sync.
    • To clarify, is synced block the only implementation of “embedded” blocks? Cause I am thinking we might want to one-way sync blocks to lock out edits but still show blocks e.g. Quote should not be editable on referencing articles
32

I’m a bit confused about the new features mentioned, such as Editor 2.0, Collections 2.0, Rollups, and Formulas. Are these features going to be added to Anytype, or are they intended for Anytwo? Or will they eventually be available in both, with Anytwo simply getting them sooner?

As others have mentioned, I also find “Anytwo” to be a somewhat strange and weak name. Something like “Anytype Legacy” (current) and “Anytype” (upcoming), or “Anytype” (current) and “Anytype 2.0” (upcoming), would make more sense to me.

Even if the goal is to move away from the current name, I’d at least prefer a distinctive name that doesn’t revolve around “two.”

For now, I’ll remain neutral in terms of feedback until I see some of the promised features and roadmaps actually delivered.

33

I will respond to individual points later, but I’ll address three broad topics that have been brought up.

Feature Parity

While I stand by our original statement about Anytwo not having feature parity with Anytype in the beginning, I believe this requires a better framing—after all, what does feature parity even mean?

  1. Every feature I showed during the 20 minute demo exists today on Anytwo but not on Anytype. Block links, synced blocks, formulas in table blocks, views across multiple spaces, mini apps, the entire integrations system, agentic workflows, and so on. From that narrow lens, it’s actually Anytype that is below parity compared to Anytwo before it’s even released. This is not even taking into account all the ‘under the hood’ changes we’ve made such as better files sync, faster application speed, vector search, data integrity, etc. which are very difficult to quantify.
  2. Not every feature that exists in Anytype makes sense to implement as a one-to-one clone in Anytwo because it’s architecturally very different. Widgets being a prime example because it overlaps heavily with mini apps. The sidebars and how you navigate a space is now fundamentally different. We are careful not to promise exact features in Anytype being replicated in Anytwo because it’s through a lens of first principles that we’re able to invent better user experiences. Had we went into this adventure from the lens of, “Let’s just rebuild the infrastructure of Anytype but keep all the features the same," I don’t think people would have been impressed with where we landed in Anytwo.
  3. Anytype today has so many features that many users don’t even use. Getting to the point of having ‘all the same features’ is a bad goal. The goal is to build all the right solutions in Anytwo, so that our users can accomplish their desired outcomes. For some users who only journal on Anytype, they may reach ‘feature parity’ within a short time from now. For some, maybe never because they don’t want the Collections 2.0 system. This is also ignoring the fact that many users who are not on Anytype at all today may just find Anytwo’s new experience incomparably more suitable for them than Anytype could ever be.

That all being said, at a general and vague level, it’s true that Anytwo won’t be able to accomplish many tasks that Anytype users need when it launches. So indeed, not ‘feature parity’ is a reality. We’d rather set that clear expectation now than disappoint later. And we’d rather release earlier, learn from real users, and adjust—not wait until the more distant future for an abitrary ‘feature parity’ moment.

Broken Promises & Anxiety

This is general response to the questions and sentiment related to:

  1. Feeling uncertain about the future of the project.
  2. Anxiety around if this product is right for you.
  3. Wanting guarantees on what we will deliver.
  4. Protecting oneself against broken promises in the past.

Firstly, I can 1000% understand why you feel that way. Completely natural. I’m not here to convince anybody that they should spend time on Anytype/Anytwo if it is not providing you value compared to how much it’s costing you. In fact, I would encourage you to use products and participate in communities of much more established companies and just come back to visit when convenient to you. There are many great products in the world today, even if we believe there’s nobody quite like us.

At the same time, we want to be real with you: we are a startup. We can’t guarantee things to even our own families in the long term, let alone to our global community of diverse needs. We don’t make promises to break them because we don’t care, it’s simply that we’re not in full control of our destiny. Things change because the ground beneath us shifts, not because we just change our minds.

We do our best to set expectations, answer questions, and in providing a clear picture of the future. But that should not be mistaken as us being in full control of delivering a deterministic outcome from our ambitions today. I would love for all of you to be with us in this journey, but frankly, what we’re doing is kind of crazy. You’re kind of crazy for reading this. You’re definitely crazy for deliberating on this. But maybe you’re the right kind of crazy. If not, no hard feelings and I genuinely hope to see you again in the future. But if you decide to stick with us, maybe the only thing I can truly promise is that it’ll be one hell of a ride.

The way I see it, the things worth doing are crazy. If it wasn’t, then somebody would have already done it. And I genuinely believe that nobody has done what we’re trying to do.

Why Now?

This is a general response to the feelings of:

  1. I expected Anytype to just get better, not that I have to switch to a new product.
  2. I’ve wasted all this time on Anytype being subpar, now I have to wait even longer.
  3. Why didn’t you make Anytype like Anytwo this since the beginning?

This feeling hits home, believe me. You’ve put hundreds or thousands of hours into your knowledge base and it just might not pan out in the end. We know it’s frustrating and we empathise with you because we are in this exact same emotional space—not only as users of Anytype, but as the builders of it.

If we could wave a magic wand and have it our way, then Anytype would be Anytwo. But the reality is, it couldn’t be—at least not back then.

When this project first started many years ago in 2019, local-first software barely even existed—it was a vision more than a reality. Our team literally had to build our own sync engine to prove that this technology could even work. Then we had to find a product use case to show that this technology could also deliver value to users. Then we had to grow a community who stood behind us and told us where we’re going wrong. It has been thousands of lessons over the years—failed experiments, wrong ideas, misguided architecture, and just poor decisions.

But to us, none of that was wasted. It’s the cost of doing something that nobody else has done. It’s the cost of, dare I say, innovation. Not only has our technology gotten better from all our learnings over the years, but we as builders have gotten better. At the same time, the world did not stand still while we were building. AI changed everything in the software landscape, and with it, so did the expectation of users, businesses, institutions, and the world at large.

What we’re building with Anytwo is possible because of the hard earned lessons and mistakes we’ve made. Are we going to make more? Absolutely, you can count on it. But you can also count on us getting better. It’s just a question of if we’re getting better fast enough for you.

34

About feature parity again:

it’s clear that what you’ve explained about the widgets and the side menu.
But that’s not the point for me.
If AnyTwo has a better navigation concept, then I don’t care about such things.

The point for me, if we speak about feature parity, is what we do inside of Objects.
For example the Embeds etc.
I want never lose any kind of data that are inside of my Objects.

In case that it’s de facto impossible to implement (for example) all the Embeds, then must there be a solution that ensures that the data itself are somehow stored inside the Objects, so that anything works as soon as the missing thing becomes implemented.

For example:
If there was an Embed with a drawing, or an Embed with a Open StreetMap, then should the raw data (for example, the geo coordinate) become somehow stored inside the Object, together with the information which Embed is needed.
If it later becomes implemented, the things should simply work again as expected, without manual user work.

In addition, there is exact information needed what functionality we must expect to lose in case that we migrate.

And in case that there are Objects that have lost some functionality after the migration, there must be a kind of Query, that automatically lists all these Objects, so that we can inspect them and decide what to do with them.

35

What happens to business users with existing licenses? When we have a Ultra plan renewing next year, how do we migrate to AnyTwo in terms of license not in terms of data, manual migration would be fine for us for the data.
How extensive will the chat functionalities especially on mobile be, we are using Anytype currently as our main communication tool on desktop and mobile.

36

RE: Feature parity

I should have explained this better in my message. For me, asking about feature parity is simply to understand what aspects of Anytype OG will be supported in AnyTwo so that I don’t add more of that data to Anytype while I wait for AnyTwo.

For example, let’s say AnyTwo won’t support images. That way, I won’t keep adding images to my Anytype.

Also, would be in preparation for transferring my data to AnyTwo. Maybe there’s some cleanup / organization I can do to my data for that eventual day. That kind of thing.

(This may be a fundamental misunderstanding of “feature parity” but just wanted to clarify why I was asking about it.)

39

Great presentation! The demo was :star_struck::drooling_face:.

I feel compelled to comment as I’ve been holy-grail-hunting for years. :sweat_smile:

Quick context: I own a real estate company, hoping to use Anytype for Business on the new foundation/stack. My background is software engineering with extensive relational database experience in Notion, Coda, Fibery, SmartSuite, Baserow, Logseq, and Tana. I prefer outliners, but need hybrid functionality with structured data. Tana was cool, but slow. Loqseq DB feels meh. Thymer seems promising, but I’m rooting for Anytwo. Nested Collections (like Supertags with class inheritance) and Formula Fields are critical for my data relations and calculations. I’m less concerned about the frontend Editor experience and more concerned about the ‘backend’ Architecture - i.e., how everything is actually referenced, enabling maximum modularity, flexibility, scalability, extensibility, etc.

That said, I never dreamed of asking for this, since I never imagined Anytype would fork into two completely separate apps built on different codebases - but now given that’s happening :astonished_face:, I’m desperately hoping the Anyteam can draw further inspiration from Tana (I see you Nested Collections :eyes:) and also somehow creatively implement the most natural/obvious/intuitive parent-child relationship that true Outliners atomically provide: Anynode can be Anyparent or Anychild. :nerd_face:

My wild hope is that block-level referencing (I see you Synced Blocks :eyes:) could perhaps pave the way for an optional/alternative Editor mode where Anyblock or Anynode could carry its own properties with Anytags so that Anyuser could build Anygraph as an Outliner tree with an infinitely deep hierarchy. The key would be the Tab key (literally), where indenting & outdenting means something. Pages feel heavy. Blocks feel light. Though if there’s absolutely no way to attach properties at a block level(?), one solution would be to treat every line as its own new Page title, only diving in to each Page when desired or necessary. I.e., I think there’s a way to deliver effective Outliner functionality regardless of whether properties can live at the Page or Block/Node level.

Or to summarize: I prefer atomic design, where every node is fully/equally capable, so I’d love to see block-level properties. But admittedly, a page is just a big fancy block, so if nothing else, I’d love the option to drop the ‘big fancy’ by default. :crossed_fingers:

40

Anytwo will be open source like Anytype, or closed source like Notion or Obsidian?

41

I totally get that a lot of the current growing pains come down to startup reality: you had to prioritize shipping new features over product stability.

But once an app hits a certain point, what users care about most isn’t an endless stream of shiny new features. It’s stability, safety, and peace of mind - especially when it holds something as irreplaceable as years of accumulated personal knowledge.

I just really hope the team recognizes exactly when that moment comes, and has the right strategy in place for it.

42

Actually, I’m not against Anytwo at all. Quite the opposite I’d be more than happy to migrate to it.

If the current app has reached a point where certain limitations have become fundamental barriers to the new vision and future, then I think it makes much more sense to build the next ship to be better, stronger, and faster than to keep endlessly patching holes in a sinking one.

From what you’ve mentioned, it sounds like the new features are being built into Anytwo, and that local use, local sync, etc. will remain free. Honestly, that is already more than enough for me. Anything beyond that being behind a paid plan is completely understandable. You have to make money somehow, and nobody is obligated to spend their time, money, and effort maintaining and developing a product for free.

That said, I won’t hide the fact that I’ve been very bothered by how things have gone over the last few months, or perhaps the last year.

  1. There were promises and a lot of hope for a month or two, especially around the announcement of Editor 2.0, Collections 2.0, and the updated roadmap.
  2. Then there was months of silence. No roadmap updates, no news about Editor 2.0 or Collections 2.0, no teasers, and eventually not even the Town Halls.
  3. Then the regular updates themselves became slower, with fewer bug fixes and less visible improvement.

At that point, I (and I imagine many other users) genuinely started feeling like Anytype was approaching its end and becoming an abandoned project.

I actually started migrating back to Obsidian because I had lost confidence that Anytype was still moving forward. Then you finally came back with the Town Hall and the announcement of what was happening behind the scenes.

I honestly hated how this whole situation played out. What bothered me most was that there were virtually no hints that you were working on something different. Even a few small updates saying “we’re working on something major and it will take time” would have made a huge difference.

For Anytwo’s future, I really hope this is something you avoid repeating. A long period of silence can seriously damage users’ confidence, and eventually the company’s reputation as a whole. Once people believe a product is dying, many of them won’t wait around to find out whether that impression was wrong, they’ll simply migrate elsewhere.

This is exactly what happened with Logseq. Its development gone quiet for a very long time, and by the time the DB version (like Anytwo thing) became visible to users, many people had already moved on to other applications.

So I’m not opposed to Anytwo. I’m actually optimistic about it. I just hope that, going forward, communication and transparency are treated as seriously as the development itself.