Im not a fan of tying in installation with account (and just one installation), even more so when its planned for offline use as well (and open source). I understand this is intended as part of the alpha, as testing the sync in action live is important now- but i thought it better to ask for some options now, before those options and settings are set in stone in some other implementation then after the team working on a release asking for changes.
Separate installations: having the choice to choose the data directory of Anytype (a commonly requested feature), and allowing the same setup to install it in multiple harddrives or the one installation on a machine being able to open, move and create a library(and means to switch between then). Opening a existing library would probably require recognizing a directory structure with some key files, and of course would ask for the keyphrase.
-or not even that, if the keyphrase makes more sense in regards to account and syncing, perhaps a local only library would skip that. Witchever works best
-installing as a portable application would perhaps work best, so its clearer wich instance/exe would open wich library
Usecase: i like carrying external hard drives, and whenever possible i have a separate setup to use alongside the external drives. For example i wouldnt ever want to carry out a personal pkm on the drive. Also as means to have a more separate setup between cloud syncing and local only.
Accounts tied to syncing, usage without account/syncing: would make more sense in my opnion- for example, in the usecase above, i would rather not create multiple accounts being the same person just to have multiple installations (pointing to different libraries, i dont mean syncing between machines), just so i could use one to never sync. Wouldnt make sense and just be one more entry in the user database, using a separate e-mail(probably) to set up a second accountā¦ a lot of headache that doesnt make sense for local/offline use
Workspaces and Syncing settings: being able to setup workspaces into one library/account (like different dashboards), and having sync settings to turn on/off syncing for each.
a nice to have, but i wouldnt take this over separate installations above.
Giving a better picture and explanation (my usecase):
I have two very different things things/areas i prefer to keep separate (maybe more in the future), and a portable setup/workflow that i dont want to ever require a internet connection to use.
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- general usecase, personal agenda, wiki, etc: my main use of anytype, where sync would be more then welcome. Theres some few private data that i dont feel the need to sync to mobile or in other machines, so if theres no internal syncing options (like wokspaces and sync settings) i wouldnt like to include then in anytype, just to have it locally and have it needlessly sync elsewhere.
I have a small ssd, and i prefer my top performing apps there- its where i would setup anytype for syncing, and the library would probably be smaller overall.
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- Portable, offline usage: i have some archives in external storage i carry around, one of then other useful tools and portable apps. Id love to have some notes and a general catalloging of the contents i could update and having a wiki-like and or database that i could carry with then was something ive been looking for (and what led to me anytype btw). I was searching for ānotion similarsā local-offline, aiming for that. I often dont have access to the internet and i wanted the drive to be one neat package- no need to rely on my main machine or a notebook, no need to bother with logins nor anything like that.
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- Bigger projects: i have just one right now. When possible i dont like mixing up a project with day to day notes. When possible things like workspaces in notion can be handy to create this kind of separation (so searches in one doesnt show results from the other)- but since were talking syncing and storage data here, this one could become too big- too big for the small ssd id like to have number 1, more expensive if i had to pay fo cloudstorage for that one
Numbers 2 and 3 could become big easily and quickly- depending on how anytype evolves, since it works with local storage, i would very likely be putting a lot of assets like pictures and videos inside of an anytype installation- and would be able to acess it all together with notes and classification in better ways then folders. I dont know the extent i would do that (too early to tell), but for example just one folder of recordings, courses and lectures is above 1 terabyte in size- 1tb of things that i have no need to sync, since thats an archive of past references i browse as needed.
When anytype matures and pricing tiers appear, i would rather have any backup storage there for the most important things (usecase number 1) wich are valuable to have a cloud backup (not to mention anything id want to access from anywhere).
And all of the above isnt even taking into account IPFS. I have yet to understand IPFS fully, but if i understood correctly even when someone isnt hosting as a server every file and entry becomes another id to be shared and have copies all over the networkā¦ i see no need to bloat these dht tables or whatever they are with useless ids of files that wouldnt ever be shared
