Thank you @kaye for all your communication, both here and in the town halls! It’s very helpful.
Count me as one of those average citizens using AT under normal conditions but who was still confused and not fully comfortable regarding how exactly AT works and what “local-first” actually means. @Code-Jack’s concerns are on point, and I appreciate your (@kaye’s) honesty about how your business plan affects the related privacy/security design choices. I don’t believe I personally have any reason to be worried about the kind of peripheral data leakage @Code-Jack described, but I still very much appreciate knowing where the edges are. You said that a deeper exploration might be a bit much to include in the app, but I would vote for having it at least somewhere online or in the documentation or whatever, if it doesn’t already exist in a place I haven’t seen it. (This thread is a great start, and I’m glad I came across it.)
For what it’s worth, my ideal app would be local-only until and unless I manually synced it, and also I have no need of collaboration yet. But AT is still better for my needs than any alternative I’ve seen. And even if it’s not quite what I would magic up if I had a techno-genie to command, the more straightforward and open the design team is about what AT actually is and what it’s meant to deliver, the more comfortable I will likely feel with the difference. So thank you again for stepping up and communicating like this!
Thanks for this message, @Astro-L. I agree that ‘local-first’ will be interpreted as ‘local-only’ to many new users who are coming across this term for the first time. It’s unfortunate, because the greater software movement is literally named this (from conferences to docs, etc.). We also do have documentation and posts about this across the internet, but it’s not realistic to expect our users will read them.
We will need to figure out a better way to communicate this, but frankly, it’s not easy. Most users won’t spend more than a couple seconds to read things during onboarding—let alone dry text on explaining networking and security.
It’s great that you enjoy Anytype even though it’s not what your genie would magic up. There are many private/local-only note taking apps out there, they’re also much easier to build than Anytype. The simple truth for us is: there’s not much point to build local-first infrastructure to power an app if the primary use case is to be local-only and not use any collaboration features (complete single player experience).
Anytype attempts to solve a very unique problem, which is that people want the benefits of cloud apps (multi-device syncing with real-time collaboration) but without the data sovereignty, security, and privacy tradeoffs that you give up. That’s the vision and the goal. It’s great that people want to use Anytype as a local-only app, but at this stage of our development, it’s a side benefit but not the product vision.