Balderton Capital, VCware, and Anytype’s Future

Talk
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1

Why I’m writing this

After reading Steph Ango’s reflections on vcware and quality software, the contrast between Obsidian’s funding model and Anytype’s became hard to ignore. Obsidian chose to remain 100% user‑supported; Anytype is source available but backed by multiple venture funds. I want to lay out what that means for Anytype’s future, and ask openly whether our interests as a community are still aligned with the incentives of its investors.

What we know about Anytype’s funding

Anytype has taken three rounds of external funding so far:

  • 18 February 2019 – $200k from Techstars
  • 12 March 2020 – $1.2M from Altair, System.One, Tiny VC, Ash Egan (source)
  • 23 August 2023 – $13.3–13.4M Series A led by Balderton Capital, with participation from Connect Ventures, Foreword Ventures, Inflection.xyz, New Forge, Protocol Labs, Script Capital, SquareOne, and several angels (source)

Venture funds operate on fixed lifecycles: they raise capital, invest it, then must return significantly more to their own investors. That model structurally pushes toward exits—typically acquisition or IPO—within a predictable window. In 2024 alone, 966 U.S. tech startups shut down, a 25.6% increase over 2023, which is one symptom of this high‑pressure environment.

Anytype’s legal and governance story is more nuanced. The Any Association in Zug, Switzerland is presented as the body that “governs” the software, but this sits alongside a cap‑table with multiple VC funds and a Balderton Partner on the board. Those investors still hold equity and have clear expectations of financial return.

Patterns that worry me

One concrete shift was the 90% reduction in free storage, from 1 GB to 100 MB. New users are now on a much tighter free tier, and paid memberships have become central to the product story. That change looks a lot like classic vcware behaviour: subsidize early to drive adoption, then squeeze once conversion to paid becomes the main priority.

On the positive side, Anytype explicitly rejects paid user acquisition, and has committed to 100% organic growth through community, referrals, and content. In that respect, it is closer to Obsidian than to ad‑driven industrial software. But where Obsidian reached 1M+ users without VC funding, Anytype’s slower growth now has to coexist with the expectations attached to a $13.4M Series A.

The 2025 roadmap underlines this tension. The publicly shared plans include:

  • Web publishing (January)
  • Chats, Discussions & Notifications (February)
  • API & Local AI integration (February)
  • Email‑based login
  • Improved collections, sets & lists

(source)

The emphasis is on ambitious expansion: multiplayer, communication, AI, and publishing. Seen through the vcware lens Steph describes, this looks like the familiar pattern where priorities gradually spread out to support ever‑bigger narratives, rather than consolidating around reliability and depth.

VC pressure, Colin Hanna, and the roadmap

The Series A from Balderton and others does more than add cash. It adds structural pressure for an exit: a $13.4M cheque from a growth‑oriented fund is not patient, indefinite capital. Balderton Partner Colin Hanna joined Anytype’s board as part of that round, bringing a background shaped by SoundCloud’s period of explosive growth, where he helped drive aggressive user acquisition and product‑market fit.

Hanna’s playbook is visible in Anytype’s current priorities:

  • Simplifying the UI to reduce cognitive load and appeal to a broader audience
  • Pushing collaborative and social features: chats, discussions, notifications
  • Building network effects through spaces, groups, and shared contexts
  • Monetizing engagement via memberships and paid storage tiers

This is classic vcware product strategy: optimize for viral loops, network effects, and metrics that translate cleanly into “we’re ready for the next round.” The shift to chat‑first development—with Chats, Discussions & Notifications added to the roadmap even though they were not at the top of community requests—fits that pattern.

At the same time, the bug backlog keeps growing. The community forum shows:

  • Long‑standing issues like lost audio files, broken space switching, and heavy iOS CPU usage
  • Core integrity problems with import/export workflows
  • Platform‑critical issues on Android interaction

While these are being addressed gradually, Anytype’s own 2024 recap highlights hundreds of new features and improvements, but only around 600 bug fixes across desktop, mobile, web, and API combined. For a mature tool, 30–50% of engineering effort is often dedicated to fixing bugs and improving robustness; Anytype appears to be spending less, while pushing hard on new capabilities.

If you put these together, you get a clear signal stack:

  • VC funding with board representation
  • Pricing changes that squeeze the free tier
  • An aggressive roadmap heavy on social and AI features
  • A large and persistent bug backlog

This is exactly the cluster of behaviours Steph flags when he talks about vcware.

What the exit path could look like

Given Balderton’s model and track record, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that an exit is not a hypothetical—it’s the default scenario. Anytype was founded in 2018; its Series A closed in August 2023. For most funds, real exit pressure starts five to seven years after a company is first backed at scale. Balderton’s own growth funds, like Balderton Growth Fund II, are designed with this kind of window in mind.

A plausible sequence looks like this:

  1. 2026–2027 – Anytype demonstrates strong DAU and MAU growth, particularly around spaces, chat, and collaboration, plus credible revenue from memberships.
  2. Optional Series B – If growth curves look steep enough, a larger round (e.g., $200–500M valuation) extends runway and ramps expectations.
  3. 2027–2029 – A strategic acquirer appears: a major productivity vendor, cloud provider, or Web3 infrastructure player looking for a local‑first knowledge graph and community.
  4. Acquisition in the hundreds of millions delivers 15–60x returns on the Series A, which is exactly the kind of outcome a fund like Balderton is built to chase.
  5. Post‑acquisition, the Anytype brand and team are partially retained, partially absorbed; the product roadmap and community priorities are now downstream of a much larger corporate strategy.

Along the way, Anytype continues to emphasise community ownership and user sovereignty. But in practical governance terms:

  • Board control sits with Balderton and other VCs, not with the user community
  • There are dozens of equity investors; “community” has, at most, an advisory voice
  • The Any Association can guide values, but it cannot veto a high‑value acquisition offer

When that exit happens, investor equity is cashed out by design. Community ownership becomes, at best, a moral claim—one that doesn’t show up in the transaction documents.

Sovereignty, vcware, and an open question

Anytype’s stated goals are “digital freedom, privacy, user sovereignty.” In some ways, the architecture backs this up: local‑first data, source‑available code, open protocols like AnySync, and a refusal to buy growth through ads or surveillance capitalism. Users can export their data and, in principle, migrate away if things go bad.

But true sovereignty also means no reliance on investor‑driven lock‑in: no need for deep moats, no dependence on network effects that trap users, no pricing patterns that slowly ratchet up switching costs. Right now, the direction of travel points both ways at once. On one side: local‑first design, organic growth, open infrastructure. On the other: VC money, a board seat from a growth‑focused fund, chat and social features built for engagement, and a free tier that has already been narrowed dramatically.

That contradiction is what this post is trying to name. Not to accuse the team of bad faith, but to ask plainly: is Anytype ultimately being steered toward a vcware‑style exit, or is there a credible path where the product, the community, and the funding structure all genuinely align with the values it advertises?

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Hi @Kyanite,

first of all: we actually agree on one your point.

If you care about digital sovereignty, you must be self-sustainable as a business.

That’s exactly why we’re trying to make more money – not to “go vcware,” but to stop depending on VC at all.

Now to some assumptions in your post.

1. Anytype vs Obsidian

Anytype and Obsidian are very different products with different ambitions and markets.

To build something like Obsidian you don’t need a big team or huge capital. Our own desktop app was ~90% written by one person (Razor), so I know that model well. For a focused markdown app, bootstrapping makes total sense. Obsidian is intentionally niche and VCs won’t fund it because it’s a good business, not a venture-scale one.

We, on the other hand, are not just building “an app.” We’re building a network and infrastructure layer on which many applications can run. Anytype is simply the first client and a way to battle-test the stack.

If this works, you get a decentralized network (think “Ethereum, but for apps like Anytype, Obsidian-like tools, etc.”). That’s a very different level of ambition and cost.

2. Facts about control & licensing

Just to correct a few things:

  • Obsidian is closed source. Pricing and terms can change at any time at the founders’ discretion. Sync & Publishing are paid-only. It’s bootstrapped and controlled by a for-profit US company under US law.

  • Anytype is a mix of MIT-licensed and source-available components with a clear commitment to go fully MIT over time. Nobody can be prevented from using the core tech for free. We also keep a free tier for Sync & Publishing. Anytype is built by a non-profit Swiss association controlled by two founders and Colin Hanna, with founders holding majority voting power.

So yes, we have VC on the cap table, but the structure and licensing are deliberately set up to keep your data and the infra sovereign and forkable.

3. Why we care about revenue

The “pattern” you’re afraid of (endless raises → loss of control → misaligned incentives) is exactly what we’re trying to avoid.

To stay independent we need:

  • less dependency on future VC rounds

  • more direct funding from users and community

  • a sustainable business that can pay for infra, storage, support, and salaries for the long term

So when we push to improve monetization, it’s not because we want to be more like “vcware,” but because we want to stop needing VC at all and keep control of the protocol, the apps, and the Association.

Being concerned about the future of the project is great, it shows that the community truly cares about digital sovereignty like we do. However there are simply many nuances that make the situation notably different from what is described. Nonetheless it’s a good discussion to have.

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Firstly, what’s incredible about this is the level of detail you’ve gone to research and then share your thoughts with others—so people can make informed decisions. That’s the world that we want, people taking time to understand the power dynamics behind the tools that power their lives. Thank you for opening this discussion.

I don’t want to ‘convince’ anybody that they should ‘trust’ Anytype; because that’s the same pattern that all SaaS companies do today with your data—you build a relationship on ‘hope’ that they don’t mislead you. Like we’ve done by deploying end-to-end encryption, where you don’t have to trust that we won’t misuse your data because we literally can’t, it’s better to look at the technology decisions to truly understand where a company’s priorities lie. In that respect, I think it’s clear that Anytype is deeply invested in decentralisation and user control, it is a world of difference between us and other apps.

The funding model is only one part of the story. But since funding is the focus of your post, let’s only focus on that and ignore all the other decisions (like decentralised, open-source, self-hosted technology) that have been made for the time being.

I agree with what you’ve stated here, reliance on investors means no true sovereignty. Unfortunately, Anytype would not exist today if it was not for investor funding because of the enormous effort required to build the local-first infrastructure. It’s been 5 years in the making up until today and it still has issues, this goes to show how difficult of a task this is. The fact that no other product on the market exists like Anytype speaks for itself: you can’t just build this as a few solo developers on the weekend, launch it, and be self-sustainable.

To be frank, if you could do that, that would be amazing haha. It’d save us a whole lot of trouble and be great for the world. Alas, that’s not the world we live in. There are other great local-first projects, but none of them are mature enough yet. Hopefully this will also change in the future thanks to our contributions as well.

100%, it’s true that being VC-backed means that Anytype is like any other startup: it can fall prey to dynamics of fast capital. Especially if it loses voting control over its company, which fortunately is not the case today. But if we continue to take more and more funding rounds, then of course, eventually that will happen. The question is, how do we stop that from happening? How do you stay on path to the vision even though you need money to survive? This is the counter-intuitive part that should be clarified:

Focusing on free usage makes us more reliant on VC funding, because it means the only way we can pay the bills is if investors pay for it. Prioritising free usage without any concern for paid membership means that we bet our entire future that one day that we can pay the bills from free users. This is a bad bet to make, simply because many free users will never pay regardless of how good you make the app. For anybody who has built a startup before, you will know this very well. Some people will never pay for things, and that’s 100% ok. They can always use the free product, and with us, they can even self-host. But betting our future on free users who have no intention to pay would jeopardise our vision.

By focusing on paid membership, it brings more self-sustainability to the company—and ultimately more control for us to drive towards this greater vision of digital sovereignty. Indeed, Anytype is not a charity and many people are working here for a salary. However, it’s essential to clarify that the need to get paid does not mean that the desire is to squeeze money out of the community. There is nuance here and not all money is ‘evil’.

In your post, you outline 4 ‘strategies’ that you believe are all optimised ‘for the next round’ and don’t serve the community’s interest. This is one way to frame it, but it’s not the only way. All four of those points are in the best interests of building a long-term, self-sustainable network as well—which is a good thing for community members. ‘Appealing to a broader audience’ is exactly part of our vision. We want local-first architecture and digital sovereignty to be the default in society. We don’t want to serve a small group of ‘in-the-know nerds’ like us because that’s not impactful. Having collaboration, network effects, and a self-sustainable business all serve a vision where we can continue to build tools for digital independence. The way it’s being framed is as if it’s against the vision—which I 100% disagree with. There is no other way.

There are many other points I could make about our ‘plans’ for a decentralised future with user control, but I won’t because that’s based on ‘hope’. In the end, it’s more important to look at the decisions we’ve made and from there derive what our motivations are. From that standpoint, I hope it can be truly understood that we’re not here to make a quick buck and bounce.

In short, we’ve put ourselves on an incredibly difficult path, which is why we’re investor reliant today. In order to make ourselves more independent—that’s why we need to focus on paid membership.

4

I’ve noticed Razor putting in serious work, but if ~90% of the code is coming from them, that’s wild to think about.

Obsidian is closed source. Pricing and terms can change at any time at the founders’ discretion. Sync & Publishing are paid-only. It’s bootstrapped and controlled by a for-profit US company under US law.

That’s exactly why I went hunting for open‑source or at least source‑available options. After trying a bunch of them, Anytype was the best thing I could find: source‑available, fast, with widgets and block behavior that actually felt refreshing. And yes—if your model is 100% user‑funded, it makes sense that sync/publishing live on the paid side.

Obsidian is a bit of a special case: even though it’s closed source, it still behaves unusually well by keeping your data local and in plain files.

Anytype is a mix of MIT-licensed and source-available components with a clear commitment to go fully MIT over time.

That’s encouraging, but it raises a precise question: does “fully MIT” mean a standard, unmodified MIT license, or some tweaked variant that tries to block commercial forks from building on Anytype?

Nobody can be prevented from using the core tech for free.

Similarly, Obsidian’s choice to keep vault files unlocked and never locked in is a real safety net for users today, even if the app code remains closed.

So yes, we have VC on the cap table, but the structure and licensing are deliberately set up to keep your data and the infra sovereign and forkable.

That’s the crucial part: if Anytype ever gets acquired or exits in some way, the combination of exportable data and forkable infra means people can, in principle, carry on the project’s legacy without being stranded.

So when we push to improve monetization, it’s not because we want to be more like “vcware,” but because we want to stop needing VC at all and keep control of the protocol, the apps, and the Association.

That makes sense. The pattern I was reacting to is the usual VC dynamic, where monetization pressure often precedes an exit. Hearing that the explicit goal is to get off VC and become self‑sustaining does change how those moves read.

However there are simply many nuances that make the situation notably different from what is described. Nonetheless it’s a good discussion to have

Yea that’s why I’ve gone out of my way to deeply research and what I’ve found publicly available. Its nice to openly talk about this :blush:.

Hey there @kaye

Firstly, what’s incredible about this is the level of detail you’ve gone to research and then share your thoughts with others—so people can make informed decisions. That’s the world that we want, people taking time to understand the power dynamics behind the tools that power their lives. Thank you for opening this discussion.

Thank you, thank you im flattered :smiling_face:. Im 100% agreeing here. I was curious about what’s behind the tools I use, and I wanted to dig deeper. I wish more people would do the same. I honestly didn’t expect the level of friendliness and openness around this topic.

I don’t want to ‘convince’ anybody that they should ‘trust’ Anytype; because that’s the same pattern that all SaaS companies do today with your data—you build a relationship on ‘hope’ that they don’t mislead you.

I really like the qoute here: Trust our code not our words

Unfortunately, Anytype would not exist today if it was not for investor funding because of the enormous effort required to build the local-first infrastructure.

I get that. It’s not easy to build something from the ground up without sufficient funds.

you can’t just build this as a few solo developers on the weekend, launch it, and be self-sustainable.

Hahaha true true.

It’s been 5 years in the making up until today and it still has issues, this goes to show how difficult of a task this is.

I’ve imagined what it would be like if I developed a note app myself. First I’d pick Rust and maybe a framework like Iced for cross-platform support. Then I’d build the editor, the file saving, the formatting layer, maybe a single Markdown-view system. Then settings. Then file management. Maybe encryption. Once that’s done I’d realize I forgot UI/UX design. Then comes polish. Then adding fun features like databases or kanban. And honestly, the editor alone would take up to a month. The difficulty stacks up quickly, the bugs pile in, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

There are other great local-first projects, but none of them are mature enough yet. Hopefully this will also change in the future thanks to our contributions as well.

Yeah, your hard work as a team definitely benefits the open source community, even if most people don’t notice it directly.

But if we continue to take more and more funding rounds, then of course, eventually that will happen. The question is, how do we stop that from happening? How do you stay on path to the vision even though you need money to survive?

It’s a tricky situation. You need starting capital to fund the project, the storage, the Anytype server, the website, the developers, moderation, and everything else. Following the mission purely isn’t simple. It’s always a middle ground between funds, VC, and staying on the mission.

Some people will never pay for things, and that’s 100% ok. They can always use the free product, and with us, they can even self-host. But betting our future on free users who have no intention to pay would jeopardise our vision.

That’s understandable. It gives me the image of the “this is fine” meme where the dog sits in a burning room. Most free users stay free users, and letting the house burn down for them isn’t exactly a winning strategy lmao.

However, it’s essential to clarify that the need to get paid does not mean that the desire is to squeeze money out of the community. There is nuance here and not all money is ‘evil’.

I’ve only been observing the patterns of what venture capital tends to do to companies it funds, and since VC is involved here, I assumed similar pressures or decisions might be happening. Money isn’t evil — it’s a form of power, and depending on how it’s used, it can either destroy or build.

The way it’s being framed is as if it’s against the vision—which I 100% disagree with. There is no other way.

That’s really good to hear.

From that standpoint, I hope it can be truly understood that we’re not here to make a quick buck and bounce.

I genuinely sense the compassion for this project, and I’m sorry if I’ve overstepped anywhere.

In short, we’ve put ourselves on an incredibly difficult path, which is why we’re investor reliant today. In order to make ourselves more independent—that’s why we need to focus on paid membership.

I really hope this plays out well so true independence comes closer every day. I’m rooting for y’all.

5

It’s a great conversation to have. No overstepping at all. People and communities should always keep companies and governments honest by questioning what’s going on. As long as everything is communicated thoughtfully, I think it’s great.

There are many ‘plans’, so I don’t want to make any false promises, but I do want to make a video to explain how difficult it is to build something local-first from scratch vs. what other companies do with cloud software. This can hopefully also provide a real tangible example for the community to understand what we truly mean when we say, “it’s really difficult”. The purpose of this would be to highlight why getting to self-sustainability is hard in a competitive world where not everybody cares/sees the benefits of local-first. And hopefully that provides some additional context/nuance to this discussion of the funding of Anytype.

6

Am I misunderstanding, or does this imply that Anytype is primarily a showcase for the Any Protocol rather than a fully committed note-taking app? That would explain the dev team’s recent focus on building a chat system that pushes the boundaries of the protocol instead of addressing UX issues and long-standing feature requests from note-takers.

7

You’re misunderstanding the relationship here. Anytype isn’t a “showcase” for the protocol — the product and the protocol are fundamentally intertwined.

You can’t build a great app like Anytype without solid underlying tech, and you can’t build a great protocol without real applications pushing its limits. Most of the UX issues and missing features people point out actually come from technical constraints we had to solve first.

While building Anytype, we learned a huge amount about what the protocol needed to be. That’s why we built Any-Store — our new local database. It powers Chats today, and it’s exactly what will let us rebuild large parts of the app with far better UX, performance, and reliability.

So no, it’s not “protocol first, app second.” It’s a single system evolving together: stronger tech → better product → better tech → better product.

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But which app are we talking about? It feels unnatural to assume that a better “note-taking” app must also evolve into a “chat” app. The protocol could have been strengthened simply by pushing the boundaries of the note-taking experience that most users actually expect.

However, by expanding into broader, unrelated features, Anytype now has to maintain a much wider surface area, which creates an explicit and ongoing burden for the team. Recently, a critical input bug that disturbs making hyperlink in Korean was reported by me and was fixed not by the dev team, but by an independent Asian contributor after a month. During this time, the dev team appeared to be fully committed to building the chat system and its interface.

I also have several basic yet essential feature requests that are unrelated to the protocol (mostly around text editing), but what I found is that many of them were requested years ago and have effectively gone nowhere. I understand that every great app needs time to mature, but Anytype appears to be growing wider rather than taller.

9

Honestly @geesecross , although I also often can’t understand the teams priorities, and although chat wasn’t my highest priority, I must say that chat was relly a missing big puzzle piece.
– For us, as well as for the product.

Why for us?
– It was always my dream to have a database for all my notes and most important files AND to be able to send them as “email” to different partners.
But email is not secure. It’s open as a post card. And email stresses me with endless amounts of spam.
Anytype on the other hand, can be considered as secure. And (at least at the moment) there is null spam.
Also the chat is faster in it’s usage then email.
And that we can have separate chat threads is something I’ve always missed in Thunderbird (but I use a very old version admittedly).

It’s simply better and quicker to send information that are already in Anytype direct from it, instead of pasting or attaching them to an email.
And it’s better to have all kinds of information (also emails are information) under one roof in one single program.
I like the chat function a lot! And it will soon become even better!

Why for the product?
Because chat is a big “bait” for luring my different partners into Anytype.
That brings new customers to the association and this is important for the success.

And why is chat such a big bait for luring people in?
– Because of the benefit I’ve already mentioned.
No postcard-like email; no need for WhatsApp and feeding Zuckerberg with lots of data. Fast and easy to use, and so on.
I trust Anytype more then I trust the usual messengers. And we don’t know if Telegram and Signal etc. will still be alive in 10 or more years. But I believe that Anytype will still exist (in some way) and that they don’t built in backdoors for the govs.

I don’t believe that Anton would sell one day the whole thing to Zuckerberg or Bill Gates so that nothing is private anymore.
But for the different messengers, I wouldn’t be so convinced. And some of them are already in the hand of the big tech bros.

I hope that Anytype becomes a big success so that it solide stays on its own feet, without need for investors anymore.
As mentioned, I believe that chat will bring a lot new customers in some time – a step in the right direction to stay on own feet.

And yes, like you, I would wish that bugs and UI/UX issues would become solved much faster.
But if we are honest, most of them are relative trivial, we can live with them. They become solved. Slowly, but steady.
But living without chat we couldn’t live for ever, I believe. It’s simply too important.
It’s like a computer without internet. An isolated island with narrow borders.

10

Well, @Code-Jack, although I may be a different kind of Anytype user than you are, I’ll try to explain my perspective in terms that align with your priorities.

First, spam is primarily a matter of incentives rather than technology. Every communication platform carries the potential for spam. It will inevitably emerge once Anytype has enough users to make spam worthwhile and provides an easy, low-cost channel—such as chat—for distributing it.

What disappointed me was that the developers effectively placed all Anytype users into this potential risk surface without giving us a choice. That didn’t feel like a sovereignty-first decision. For me, Anytype had been an offline-friendly Notion plus a multi-device-friendly Obsidian. Then suddenly I found myself having to worry about spam because chat was forcefully integrated. Neither Obsidian nor Notion includes chat, and both let users freely choose whatever communication tools they prefer. A more responsible approach would have been offering a standalone, optional chat product—say “AnyChat”—whether or not it shared parts of the protocol. That would have meaningfully reduced the attack surface for users who prefer to avoid those risks.

I have no reason to trust Anton more than Zuck or Gates, so they all begin on the same starting line for me.

If I were truly prioritizing security, I would deliberately choose technologies that have withstood the test of time. Telegram, for instance, has been criticized for adopting their own MTProto protocol, which was not battle-tested. By the same logic, why should Any Protocol be considered more secure than long-standing, proven technologies like Signal—especially one that has already been targeted by the very government actors you worry about, and has survived those attacks? From a purely security-driven perspective, the wiser path would be to observe Anytype for a decade before trusting it with sensitive communication.

My main concern, however, is business robustness. Security means nothing if Anytype cannot survive in the harsh realities of the market and is eventually shut down. That, too, is a form of sovereignty. Others in this thread have covered that point well, so I’ll move on. Instead, I want to focus on whether the developers’ current direction supports long-term viability.

Here I disagree. The users Anytype has attracted so far were drawn primarily by its note-taking features, not by the promise of secure chat. Many competitors thrive without chat and provide a smoother writing experience than Anytype currently does. As I mentioned earlier, even basic linking in content was broken—and the fix came after a month, not from the paid developers, but from a user who went through the trouble of installing the source code and debugging it simply because he/she desperately needed the feature to work. This is hardly a sign that chat will become a game-changing differentiator, especially given the current quality of the core writing experience.

I was also surprised to discover that Razor appears to maintain the majority of the desktop codebase. I am strongly respectful to Razor’s commitment over years, but is he or she essentially the only person standing on the front line of the product’s UI/UX development? This structure reflects the dev team’s strong bias toward building an elegant protocol rather than addressing the needs of existing users. It may also hint at why Anytype is struggling to retain its audience despite having technically advanced foundations and a promising sovereignty narrative. It looks impressive at first glance, but becomes uncomfortable once users try to entrust their real data to it.

Edit: Does the chat interface play an important role in supporting an embedded AI agent or in helping with fundraising? This is another possibility I’m considering for why chat was introduced.

11

Yeah, but I can imagine methods how Anytype could prevent spam.
Methods that wouldn’t work for email at all and only badly for normal messengers.

Also consider, that the chat function is very new and still not finished.
At the moment there are more urgent things to do, for example a search function for chat. But if spam starts to become a problem, I’m fully convinced the devs will take measures to prevent that.

One of the methods I imagine is this:
Sending a chat message is only possible for paying users. AND each sent message costs a little bit. Let’s say one cent.
One cent is not much for normal users. But for spammers, that send their trash a million times per day, it’s simply too cost intense.

One could discuss a lot about the details, but you got the principle.

Another possible measurement:
It could be detected if an account sends unusual masses of messages to many many different users that was never connected before. If that happens, a mechanism could kick in that asks for solving a Captcha each time when an account tries to connect to a new user.

Again: one could discuss a lot about the details, but you got the principle.

It’s hard to argue against that. But the fact that most parts of the source code is open and that they plan to make everything open at some point, is one reason why I have a better feeling for Anytype, then for Zuck & Co.

Anton has addressed that concern multiple times in past.
You are never save against such scenario. But your data is local! For your usage it should already be enough.
And it will later be (or already is?) possible to work with a cloud provider of your choice, if you need to sync your data with other devices. Or you could self host.
And again: the source is mostly open, that makes it probable that someone else will step in to hold the project alive. There are a lot open source or crowd driven projects that was a big success over a long period of time, for example Firefox, or Linux.

I knew that you would come with that. And I’ve thought that my example with a PC without internet would prevent that argument.

When the internet was relative new, there was a lot people that said, they don’t need that. They simply didn’t see the advantages. Everything was “local only” (not local first, but local only). They didn’t know any reason why this should change.
But over time, that mindset changed totally.
If you use the chat, then you will use it more and more over time.
And there will be a point in time where it becomes not only normal to use it daily, but as good as indispensable. – Same as it once was with email and web browser.

Also my personal need was a note taking program. “Local only” would have been enough for me.
Anytype comes with the feature to sync the data. First I was skeptical, because I see every internet connectivity in software as a potential danger. But the benefit is big: if your house burns down, including all your backups, you have still your data somewhere and you can get them back if you haven’t lost you key phrase.
Now we have chat, Another kind of internet connectivity. And I must say, it fits very very well in a bigger concept how to work with data. There is always something you need or want to share. Normally you would use email, but we spake already about its disadvantages. Or you would use a messanger.
But if you use a messanger, you have again a bit of software that you need to install and to trust etc.
And it is cumbersome and redundant to copy and paste your data from Anytype into a messenger to send them. Same with received data. Often you will forget to transfer received data from a messenger into Anytype. Then you need to search them in two programs instead of only one.
I know how how easy overwhelming with too many communication channels can drive one into a burnout.
Looking into email, looking into telegram, looking into WhatsApp, looking to the phones mailbox … some information here but not there, other information there but not here, some other pieces of information untraceable …

I would very much like it if Anytype at some point also could exchange messages with (for example) Telegram, so that there would be no need anymore to have Telegram installed.
Same for email.
– All information under one single roof!
No redundancy anymore, no confusion about where to search. An “everything App”!

You have that bad feeling everywhere, no matter what software you use.

I’ve always assumed that having the possibility to chat with AI is part of the plan.
Also AI is still “new” (three years) and we see the same kinds of discussions and vehement opposition as it was when the computer boom was new, and later when the internet was new.
"We all are totally doomed if this and that comes into our lives, blah blah!!

Fact is: AI is there now and it will stay and it will grow a lot.
Same as it was with the internet when it was new.
It has dangers, yes, but it has also benefits. But it will stay and it will become de facto impossible to avoid using it.

Having the conversations with AI in Anytype frees us from the need to open or buy an account for ChatGPT or Grok etc.
I mostly use Perplexity or Grok, but not logged in. Therefor I lost a lot information if I close the session and have not already transferred everything manually into Anytype.
But if the woul conversation would happen directly in Anytype, I would never lose any information and I would always know where to look if I search for something.

12

And that concern wouldn’t even be necessary if Anytype simply did not include chat in the first place.

That was one of the reasons I chose Anytype as well. I think many serious users came here with the same expectation: a local-first app whose distributed protocol acts as an automatic, disaster-proof backup in case of fire or any other catastrophic event.

You already understand the core expectation users have for Anytype: they want a reliable, sovereign Swiss-army-knife for their lifelong private knowledge, protected from lock-in and accidental loss.

To align with that expectation, the following attitudes would be appreciated:

  • Zero tolerance for small bugs, reinforcing confidence that the team is proactively preventing any potential systemic failure.
  • A smooth, dependable writing experience for a tool people use every day over their life.
  • Steady, disciplined, long-term decision-making from a team that knows they are building an “ark,” not a trend-driven app.

However, the current situation looks different:

Maybe these red flags seem trivial to you because you are satisfied with chat and with Anytype’s current direction. But on the other side, many users—including me—are increasingly worried about whether the dev team is genuinely committed to building the reliable, sovereign knowledge tool we were promised.

AI and chat can be fine additions—if the developers remain aware that existing users have more foundational expectations that must be prioritized. Instead, the team appears swept up in hype at a moment when cool-headed triage is needed.

13

Just don’t use chat if you don’t want to.

I want transclusions, reminders and fomulars; all of which I’ve been asking for many times, and the infrastructure behind chat will make that happen, so I have no complaints, and you shouldn’t either because this improves the notetaking part of the app too, which is what you want. Read this:

I’m sure you also want Anytype to survive, don’t you? Because otherwise what’s the point of your requests being met. Well, chat is what will set Anytype apart from other notetaking apps, it’s a strategic approach to the market. Something you may not see if you only care about your immediate front. Anton talks about it in the latest townhall:

14

You’ve given me a clearer and more reasonable explanation of why chat might be necessary for Anytype’s sustainable future. Thank you.

Edit:

That’s not really my point. What I’m concerned about is that the maintenance burden is getting heavier with the addition of chat, which could further delay existing issues.

Chinese, Korean (and likely Japanese) users continue to face basic usability problems with their languages in Anytype. These issues rarely affect Western users, but Asian users encounter them constantly:

I don’t believe these input issues are tied to Editor 2.0 or AnyStore. They should be fixable without waiting for either of those projects. Yet all of them have been consistently underrated—even before chat was introduced—and will likely be pushed even further down the priority list by Editor 2.0 and chat.

Given the pervasive censorship and authoritarian environments in several Asian countries, I don’t understand why Anytype isn’t paying closer attention to the voices of Asian users. Asia has a massive population of sovereignty-aware audiences, and these users are exactly the ones who stand to benefit the most from what Anytype claims to offer.

15

Yeeeaaahhh!
And we wouldn’t have to bother about YouTube ads if web browsers simply “did not include” video support in the first place.
We would have only pure HTML and we all would be so much happier!!!1eleven!!

Chat messages (like email) are information.
Anytype is an app for storing information and working with them.

As I understood them, they are well aware about the issues with search.
But if they indeed prepare “to build advanced search functions for chat”, then it seems to make sense for me.
Why?

  1. Because chat has at the moment no search at all and to solve this becomes more urgend every day, the longer our chat lists become.
  2. I believe they have to program the search for chat from scratch on, instead of including existing libraries.
    If so, they could maybe reuse the new routines also as replacement for the existing search in Anytype.
    → Less code redundancy, same UI and features for chat and the main App. – Makes sense fore me.

Nope.
In principle I’m with you in some general points. But I find you’re exaggerating.
Some things are simply as they are, because their brains work like they work. You couldn’t change that.
What you wrote was dozens and hundred times wrote before (partially also from me!). But somehow it doesn’t help.

I also wrote commercial software years ago. And I know the effect: some thing seem to be sooo clear for the customers. But the details behind the veil are sometimes incredible complex, even for simplest things that make the impression that it could be doen in three minutes.

And there are other things:
With “Editor 2.0” they plan to rewrite the whole editor from scratch on.
So, why should they now much bother about the endless lists of small bugs in the existing editor?
– It would only bind manpower that would be better invested in simply programming that Editor 2.0 (maybe it would even be faster!). But there are some more important things to do before Razor has the time for Editor 2.0

This was only an example.
You know, I suffer like you because of thing you’ve mentioned.
But no matter how it bother us – every software products has its flaws, includind obvious long-term flaws. And in the sum I must say: “Anytype is great!”
Seemingly they do a lot right.

– But yeah, the obvious flaws (in the software, as well as in the team’s communication etc.) suck, thaat’s true.

Maybe Notion makes 1000 thing sooo much better. But they force the user to be online all the time - a no go!
Maybe Obsidian makes 1000 things sooo much better. But (at least) I couldn’t get warm with their UI/UX.
Maybe paper and pen, or a typing writer, would be the best solution? – No stupid bugs, maximal security and a lot of other benefits.

16

there is also no secure competitor to something like slack and teams where you can manage your team, do the documentation, eventually store your business’ documents securely. this is where anytype could create a whole new market, within that niche.

also imagine you work in an office and your ISP has an outage. you could still do your work within your local network without being dependent of other infrastructure.

also for private use chat can become very handy. I personally plan to switch from Signal to Anytype with my partner. In there we can plan our future, store our sensitive documents, plan trips and at the same time chat and directly link to objects within chats. upload things in a chat, put that file afterwards in an object if needed. there are so many possibilities.

18

Hey, I never argued for any kind of purism. What I’ve been talking about is priority and maintainability—whether the team is aligned with users’ expectations and can manage the product even as its surface area widens. That’s what my initial question to Anton was about—so please don’t misunderstand me.

The town hall meeting video wasn’t available when I wrote my original post. If Anton and the team genuinely care about what existing users need, and are willing to shift focus back to long-delayed requests and unresolved bugs, I’m certainly happy to hear that. But Anton’s reply in this thread felt somewhat vague and merely theoretical, which is why I wasn’t satisfied.

It seems that the dev team has redefined Anytype as a collaborative work app by introducing chat, likely to attract paying audiences. The move toward B2B sounds reasonable and beneficial to me—steady revenue is important for sustainability. Just please remember that the editor still needs meaningful refinement before current users can confidently recommend Anytype to colleagues.

Because colleagues will have even less patience than I do, and they won’t care about what’s happening behind the scenes. They’re more interested in whether Anytype can get the job done for them, and that’s completely normal.

That’s exactly why I switched to Anytype from Notion. It was an embarrassing experience when I couldn’t access my travel plans during a 10-hour flight simply because Notion needed an internet connection.

I also really appreciate being able to write memos while jogging—running tends to spark creativity—and having them automatically available on my Mac afterward. This workflow wasn’t nearly as smooth when I tried doing it with Obsidian.

I’m sorry if my post made anyone uncomfortable. I’ve been a bit anxious about whether I should move away from Anytype because of my negative experiences over the past few months.