Chats

[wemiprog]

“It would be nice if the chat be included. The application would become the ultimate tool for small group or team.”

>
So, I add the request from the community chat here to be able to discuss

A few suggestions:

• As a sidepanel which can be openend / closed
• Switch between public chat (comments) and internal (shared by name not link)

I think there are more suggestions from other people here

[BGray]

A simple chat function might be useful but I don’t think it should be enforced with the main releases. There will be a lot of people using Anytype individually and chat would be completely useless to them.

[wemiprog]

@BGray Yeah completely agree

[Oshyan]

In my view chat should absolutely be a plugin. It’s a pretty big, open question how the collaborative aspects will even work at this point also.

[Eleanor]

I would like my screen to be as clean as possible and I don’t need any collaboration features. Chat, if it happens, definitely should be a plugin

[maxitg]

Will it be possible to implement a chat using the future databases/objects functionality? I.e., the chat history could be a database (with fields for the sender, receivers, time, etc.) If then there is a button that automatically creates entries using the current time (aka “send” button) and a view that shows a custom representation of the database (aka chat history), it would be quite a powerful feature. As it will allow one to query the chat history, attach other metadata to it, and link to/from it from other objects. Imagine deep-linking chat messages from a personal journal, a description of a calendar event, etc.

Given that it will also be running on top of IPFS (so, messages can be sent locally without internet connection, large files can be shared through the local network, etc.), this might well be quite competitive as a general chat tool with existing centralized apps.

I’m new here, so I’m not sure if there is a plan to make the database/object functionality powerful enough to allow all this.

[ei8fdb]

At the risk of being flamed, please don’t devote valuable dev and design time to building YAMT (Yet-Another-Mesaging-Tool), there are literally hundreds.

The earlier comment of making it available as a plugin makes 100% sense.

[underbyte]

I am also wondering, is this what people using Anytype need/want? Maybe I am biased by this Forum (probably not the core target group of users, but still I feel like Anytype is “selling” best to people like us, privacy-focused, structured,database-oriented,logic-based,simplistic,…) but looking through it, I find a lot of requests about core object-relation features, functions, automations but even some basic quality of life things like proper templating for relations.

Granted many of these features are a lot of work to plan and realize, but I feel features like Chat or Web publishing don’t do Anytype justice. It’s such a cool architecture that just gets pushed to the side and left behind for features that build on top of it. Things like collaboration, chats, and even CMS-like features are great, but in my opinion, they belong in later development stages rather than the jump from beta to a proper release.

Many of those things could even be added as (first-party?) plugins later in the game. But wouldn’t it be amazing if we could structure and manipulate our data sufficiently already and build a good framework and foundation FOR these plugins?

I have the same feeling about Notion’s AI features and many other things they do. It feels like they just want to add cool things to make it more appealing to a broader user base but completely forget their core concept and clutter the application. Maybe they are in the right stage to do that, but I really think Anytype is not.

(I know this doesn’t sound great to the investors, but this is truly how I feel about this community.)

As this all sounds a little too negative: Let me say, I am extremely thankful for your work and overall vision. I know this is nitpicking at a high level.

[Shampra]

Yeah, I was asking myself the same questions, I had launched a poll on it.
As the key feature I’m waiting for to leave Evernote has been delayed, I confess to having a rather subjective opinion

Your opinion about chat inside Anytype and this need

I tested the new chat in Anytype. It’s nice. It’s clean, you can tell there’s work to be done. There’s still work to be done, but bravo for the job. But I would never use it. We’ve had FR postponed and so many others in this obscure Backlog. We talk a lot about UX and the improvements to be made. Imagining how much time is spent on it, it bothers me because for me there’s a lot of work to be done on the elements at the heart of current usage. Honestly, if the next surprise is a videoconferen…

[underbyte]

Sure, I understand that everyone wants development to evolve in a slightly different direction, which is totally natural. But I think, especially for such a committed and great project, it’s easy to get lost … the app should truly master what makes it unique—it’s definitely not a chat app. In fact, what impresses me most that the app is already really powerful considering its architectural simplicity. It’s really well thought out so far.

I mean there are ~13% participating in your poll that want it prioritized, but I wonder what they expect from such an application. There are a lot of alternatives to get very similar (or even better) results and productivity in combination with a chat app, but our data is (as long as the API is limited) just in there, so I think it’s natural to think that these data and logic related features are most important objectively. I would even consider things like MFA not as important as my current workaround is to self-host with custom precautions. Although it’s not ideal in the long run, many features are just for convenience or time saving, which I understand but development is costly too. Tbh, if the API really comes to live within the next weeks (or months) I am more than happy

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Ad:
“get lost” in the sense of value what the app is best at. Of course this does not mean that this is where the commercial value lies.

I think HAN said it very well:

@HAN

the lifeblood of Anytype’s survival lies in team collaboration. There are almost no successful commercialization precedents for products positioned solely as personal note-taking apps, and such a positioning would be insufficient to sustain a team and resources as extensive as Anytype’s.