The first experience after installing Anytype was super, it looks great, it has very nice tutorial. It even has a dark mode! I felt like a small kid wondering about all the possibilities, linking stuff, creating lists, all my ToDos, notes, how everything would look like…
I had read about Notion and disliked their cloud-approach, I don’t like my data anywhere else than on my local PC. Storage is very cheap nowadays, I can backup locally, local network or encrypted to cloud with my chosen encryption.
Maybe I am too early here as I don’t like current autosync option. I would have preferred an option in the beginning to let me choose: go local only, where I need to understand there is a higher risk of data loss, etc. Or then choose current in which data is synced to nodes.
Just having Anytype open, without doing anything there, I can see it has been connected to Amazon, DigitalOcean and even some dynamic.kabel-deutschland.de, all this is freaking me out.
I can see this is widely discussed here, developers have acknowledged this and I fully understand my type of user maybe isn’t the target group, so definitely not a priority, but for me this is currently preventing me to consoliate all my data into Anytype :(.
Putting this aside, everything looks and feels great, very modern! Thank you for all the great work so far.
As far as I understand the sync is forced in alpha because they or we are also testing sync (which has a whole lot of issues so testing is crusial hehe).
Ones out of alpha you can choose to make use of sync (probably paid feature) or have your own local storage / sync solutions.
Do understand that Anytype is as Alpha as they come, with bugs, missing features and in this case, force sync! Though, this is the most promissing app in development at this moment in my opinion with an active develop team.
Actually, I don’t believe anyone ever said for lifetime, but surely for a good while. Long term benefits for all Alpha Testers still have yet to be defined. The basic services of Anytype will always be free for everyone. Things like backup node sync & storage will be part of the subscription service for new users after we go public. Some of those kinds of premium services will be gifted to our Alpha Testers, and rewarded potentially on individual merits. Exactly which services and for how long, still needs to be decided by the Team (and Community), but certainly for a substantial amount of time.
Hello, thank you for your post. We are in the process of developing the sync protocol and sometimes we change the data structure, so in the case we change it, with our nodes we can assure that your data is converted to the new format and can be used by new clients. If you’re not comfortable with what we have right now, it would be better to wait some time. If would allow you to opt-out now then there is always a chance that your data will be incompatible with future versions. When we will establish the protocol and the data format, it will be not a problem anymore.
It will probably be something like Obsidian, where you select where you store your notes/vault on both your PC and phone. Then sync those folders with a sync solution of your choosing and done!
But the biggest issue with self hosting sync is the sync part. You often need a third-party sync-tool which can be argued is just as save or unsave as using Anytype sync.
For example to sync folders on your phone with for example your PC you need a sync tool like FolderSync Free, but why trust a free sync app and not Anytype sync? These free tools often require an online storage location like Google Drive, Onedrive or Dropbox as well.
I have a Synology NAS that comes with it’s own sync tool (DS Cloud if I am correct), which works fine to sync with but not great. Ended with some duplicate files because sync didn’t work properly and often needed to manual force sync. Used this with Obsidian for a long time.
I might be a rookie when it comes to syncing but I always wondered why people trust free sync tools over (paid) sync options from the note taking apps themself.
I do understand people not wanting something like Notion that is always and only online!
If you dislike the auto synch option you could also restrict network access to the app with your firewall. I’m sure as an alpha tester you would still be able to give useful feedback to the development team without this connectivity
I’d recommend looking into Syncthing for an open source replication mechanism that allows private network and optional public network replication of encrypted data.
Well, it’s not really the syncing I was thinking about.
I would rather have Anytype take care of that. I agree it would be a smoother and better overall experience that way.
My concern is with the amount of storage I would have and then how much it cost for more?
Now, it would be good though to be able to have a copy of all my Anytype data, along with the AnyType as the sync and storage.
AnyType is almost like you’re creating your own little corner of the internet, so there will be a lot of pictures and videos which would take up a lot of space over time.
@Jason_Eleazar Our vision for current state of the app: we want to provide all users free experience for using anytype for private personal purposes. However we are now not considering ourself a file hosting service such a dropbox for example so we want to introduce a limits for a users for uploading gigabytes of data such as videos to Anytype. It will be possible to self host your caching server and use unlimited storage limits or pay for more storage on our servers. But common user with private knowledge management use case should not encounter this limitations.
I think that is great direction.
I think you could let other platforms or on-prem solutions would be a great idea too!
This does lead me to the next question…
Would there be a way to use other storage providers for the storage of media?
2 prime examples that I can think of are
Now if AnyType offers storage as well, that would be great too but if not, I think some like these 2 would be great!
there are more like them but I don’t remember at the moment all of them.
Also, you mentioned “caching” which I think would be great also!
It would be cool to see 3 options
On-Premis (self-hosted) or caching the big media files
AnyType storage
3rd part storage like Internxt or Storj, or something like it.
Thanks for suggestions @Jason_Eleazar
We will definitely consider this options. The open market for infrastructure is a part of our essential vision on how open network should exist. So external storage providers is highly likely to appear in the future.
Support subscription service, but really hope that the storage capacity can be more, I think this is also a lot of what is expected. I used craft before but the 50G capacity under their subscription service was too small.
You also have lots of images, maybe even audio files and other types of files like PDF, epub and more. 50Go for a PKM can go very fast if you like to dabble in lots of projects involving multi files types.
