Very exciting update. As always, the fact that you’re investing so much time (on December 31st!) to communicate with us, despite our never-ending list of complaints, is a testament to how much Anytype values its community. Thank you for that!
All of the plans you described make a lot of sense and, I believe, is what Anytype needs to reach a point where anyone can start using.
One doubt
I only have one doubt, which I would love to hear a bit more about: the idea of collaboration through “one space = one group = one chat”. The Anytype team has mentioned in the past that you are adopting this model, in part, because ‘classic’ access control (dedicated access management per object rather than per space) is hard to do in a peer-to-peer environment. I understand that, and still, I have a hard time picturing the “one space = one group = one chat” model work at scale.
Here are two concrete examples:
Example 1: access management in team collaboration
I’m looking to use Anytype with my wife, and even though she isn’t willing to use it so far because she doesn’t find it usable enough, I’m optimistic that the focus on quality and simplicity in 2025 will get Anytype where it needs to be for her to join. In this case, one or several shared spaces between me and her will work great–just like we have just one Signal chat, and it does the job.
However, I would like to get my work team on Anytype. This is a team of 11 people, so small by organizational standards. We currently used Google Workspace for collaboration–which sucks from an ethical and privacy point of view, but works great for access management. We have “shared drives”, where each team has their own drive (operations, projects, marketing, etc). If we move to Anytype, I believe a shared drive would be replaced by a space. So far, so good.
But documents stored within each drive get shared with members of other teams all the time. The marketing team may be working on a proposal that is stored in the marketing drive, and wants to get input from the entire organization; without having to move the proposal to a shared drive that is accessible to the entire organization, they simply change access rights for this specific document.
How do you envision this working in the one space = one group = one chat model? In a team of 11, I cannot imagine have enough workspaces to cover all the possible access configuration, and it would be completely unmanageable anyway as objects would be spread in so many spaces. And this is a small team of 11. Imagine a team of 200.
I know that we may need to change how we think about some things when moving to Anytype because its decentralized nature means things cannot work exactly like on the cloud, but still, this seems to me like a critical use case we can’t really move away from.
Example 2: Building usable dashboards
The second issue I see with the one space = one group = one chat model is that one of the big things that Anytype can do differently is dashboards. Despite some missing features and limited mobile support, both of which I’m sure will get fixed eventually, Anytype’s model allows to create incredibly powerful and flexible dashboards.
In the context of a multi-space and collaborative environment, this means that I could theoretically build a dashboard where I see my workload from personal projects (in my private space), from work spaces, and from other collaborative spaces, all in one place, such as my private space. I could also create dashboards with quick access to objects from all these various spaces.
How would that work in the one space = one group = one chat model? Would I be able to bring into my private space objects from other spaces that I have access to, so I can build cross-space dashboards? Or would this powerful (extremely powerful in my opinion) feature essentially only work within a space, not across spaces.
Thank you 