Edit: Link to town hall recording here; Passcode: FJ=M3j*L
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Hello dear Anytypers!
Now that our Open Beta launch is behind us, we’d love to share an hour with you and chat about what’s next for for Anytype: what to expect in terms of roadmap and future milestones, as well as some reflections on our journey thus far.
We’ll keep the same format as prior sessions, kicking things off with a 15-minute presentation from our founders and leaving the rest of the hour for Q&A.
Feel free to drop your questions below so we can better prepare. For those who can’t join us, the session will be recorded and shared here afterward.
Thanks to everyone who came and for your thoughtful questions! We loved seeing you and please let u know which topics you’d be interested in for future town halls.
Recording has been added to the main post, also copying here:
Follow-up question to clarify: the Any Association is registered in Switzerland but it covers the whole team? No separate company/organization name for the Anyteam in Berlin?
Thanks!
There is just one Anytype Team, but we have a few different orgs to serve specific purposes. We’re an international team but the largest group is in Berlin, so we have a GmbH to take care of our operational and employment needs in Germany.
This might have already been asked and answered, but why use Zoom when there are open source and free alternatives such as Jitsi? I find it strange that a FOSS-minded collective would use closed source tools, especially one with such a shady and controversial past.
It’s an interesting question you raise regarding our approach towards vendor and partner selection. When selecting software - or any service provider for that matter - we consistently face a tradeoff between the least friction possible, versus software whose ethics we support. By ‘least friction possible’, I refer to:
That whose performance/reliability is known and verified
That which requires little maintenance from the team get up and running
That which requires the least effort from our community
In the case of Zoom, we use this tool because we know that it’s reliable, most people with office jobs already have an account, and any information we share there, is intended as publicly available information. We previously hosted our town halls on Discord, but the relative friction faced by our community in creating an account and getting a high-quality recording, meant low engagement and poor feedback from the community.
We are not opposed to switching service providers, but in doing so we always weigh the performance and time cost that arises: First, would using this solution permit us to deliver the same standard of service that our community expects in terms of efficiency and quality? And second, what is the resource cost of testing, verifying, and implementing this solution? How much focus should we dedicate to this versus other priorities?
That means that we are selective about how strictly we apply the criteria of open-source, self-hosted, and/or privacy-preserving towards our vendors. In our ideal world we wouldn’t need to make this choice, but the reality is that we face this tradeoff more often than we would like.
If it is important to you that we switch our platform for community calls and other software, please do voice your concerns about why (and I would welcome other members of the community to do the same). We will gladly evaluate the motivations and alternatives raised, and use it to guide our vendor decisions moving forward.
Thank you for the kind response. I honestly don’t know your requirements but Jitsi doesn’t require an account. I know for a fact that I will never create an account with Zoom, but I don’t know if that will lock me out of your conferences.
We use Jitsi all the time with the public instances provided and never had any complaints nor with video, audio or screen sharing. Except of course when some guestq had poor mobile connections. We had at most ten people, so I can’t vouch about the performance for more on the public instances.
But Jitsi is very easily self-hostable, and you could scale with your own servers. This is an instance where I think that the FOSS is on par with the traditional “closed-source” offering. Like Krita vs Photoshop for digital painting
Honestly, if I can join without a Zoom account, I’ll be sastified that at least an option is offered to those who do not want to support this company.
But on a matter of principle and philosophy, I do not understand it I did not decide to use AnyType because it was providing something that was not offered elsewhere. Though I am happy that it does!
I switched to Obsidian because it was mostly Markdown with an easy way out and community plugins. Also, my data was local.
As soon as I heard there was a nice PKM solution that was open source, I decided to switch over it. That’s the main factor. Otherwise I would be using Notion
I know that we do not live in an ideal world where we all have the time to setup open-source tools. I just thought that the AnyType team, who provides a FOSS service, would be leading by example and use mostly open-source tools.
I understand if that is not the main focus, it just happens to be mine, and I hope a sufficient part of the community that we can communicate this to the team!
This does not mean to belittle the effort of the team, I’m just trying to add, what I think is, coherence to the project Thanks again for all the team’s hard work, I really love what you’re creating! And also, that’s just my opinion, most people probably do not care that much
Thanks for voicing your concerns, it’s good for us to continue hearing these perspectives, especially after Zoom’s recent terms update. Will definitely have a closer look at Jitsi and do some trial runs to see if it can suit our needs. Cheers!
Hey Team, I have just started using anytype just from less than a week, I just watched town hall recording! I I just wanted to say Anytype team you are rocking! I really admire and appreciate all your efforts, openness and vision! Thank you! Keep going!
Being an Enterprise- Technical Consultant & Principal Developer myself, I can say I don’t see much of a team who is equally delivering, being open and clear in their vision and mission. I am looking forward for multi spaces, collaboration and many more features, I am sure you will deliver it. Also like many other patrons, I want you team to thrive. Whenever you start pricing plans, please do not forget the core philosophy. I would like to mention, after Bitwarden I am seeing AnyType as similar product in productivity space. Please try to look into their model, such an amazing simple plans. Most can even stay at free plan and get most, even pricing plan is so less don’t have to think twice. As you’re using P2P device model and only using node for sync, I am sure you can come up with similar strategy. They have shaked up the competitors. This is just my opinion, hope its all in good spirit
Hi @_camille Wanted to follow up here - we looked into both the web and self-hosted versions of Jitsi and it seems that performance does seem to take a hit above ~20 users for the web version (in my case 2 users were enough to freeze my browser :().
Regarding the self-hosted version, as we’re regularly holding conferences for more than 200 people, we would need to monitor the peak loads on our server and make sure we have enough memory and CPU for these specific dates. Given the cost and effort, unfortunately it seems that it’s not an ideal solution for us right now. We also checked Whereby (max capacity of 200 users) and are now looking into BigBlueButton - if that also turns up less-than-ideal options, unfortunately we’ll need to shelve this project for the moment until some of these solutions become more established.
Thank you so much for the detailed feedback, @Charlotte ! This is amazing.
I’m really sorry that things have not worked out yet. Hopefully the Anytype project will grow enough one day that you can afford server costs for such big events. I’m already very thankful that you’ve tried.
This is an instance where I think that the FOSS is on par with the traditional “closed-source” offering. Like Krita vs Photoshop for digital painting 
And also, that’s just my opinion, most people probably do not care that much 