I’m sorry that my tone also came off a bit strong. I know the Anytype team is made up of very patient and kind people, and I understand that development resources are tight. However, I also hope that the team can truly empathize and connect with the community users. Even though many of us haven’t used Anytype for a while, we still keep an eye on the Anytype community and GitHub; we haven’t really left. When we discuss noteworthy note-taking software, Anytype still holds a top position.
Most of us are tool users rather than fans of a product we’re just following; we have to use tools to do our work. This means that while we often appreciate the vision behind Anytype, we are sometimes reluctantly forced to turn to faster-developing and more mature software because we need to be responsible for our work. It’s not feasible for us to be debugging our work software constantly, especially knowing that major issues may not be resolved in the short term. This is also true for team collaboration. If I were to ask my team to collaborate using Anytype now, they would respond with even harsher words.
Of course, I’m not here as a principal investor pressuring the team to do anything. I believe that most of us haven’t paid a single cent to Anytype so far. I can’t speak for others, but personally, I’m a complete “waiter”—I’m waiting for Anytype to be fully developed. Having a lot of waiters is a luxury, thanks to our marketing team. In the other software I’ve switched to, many don’t have as many people waiting for them as Anytype does. They have to keep releasing new features to attract users, until they’ve exhausted every last bit of development energy, and then they end up reluctantly announcing the cessation of development. As I’ve explored various alternatives, I’ve seen dozens of such software die out within a year.
In my view, by comparison, the Anytype community has been very patient through this long wait. Forgive them for being so frustrated with the progress. Many may not understand the difficulties of developing P2P and its related tech stack. I’m not sure whether it’s the community’s expectation management or the team’s expectation management that has faltered, or if communication issues have led to one side’s expectation problems. But a prolonged and unclear wait will always make those waiting feel more weary and neglected than the developers, especially when the expectation is not for a specific feature but rather just “making the software better.” This kind of expectation is easier to accept during the early development stage but feels somewhat inappropriate now. It makes us feel like: “Oh, so? After all these years, the software still isn’t on track?”
It’s perfectly normal that such frustrations and complaints are surfacing after so long. At the very least, the community users can’t be blamed for lacking patience anymore. I hope the team doesn’t get discouraged. Compared to countless projects that have quietly died in a corner over the years, at least there are still many people eagerly waiting for you. When you’re waiting for your beautiful girlfriend to arrive for a dinner date, and she is late—even if she explains that she’s been carefully putting on makeup—before she explains how elaborate her makeup is or actually shows up, you too will be extremely anxious and will probably blow up her phone wanting to question her.
As for the issue of extreme insecurity in login, it actually refers to the unchangeable recovery phrase. I understand this mnemonic phrase, much like a Bitcoin wallet, is currently the only login method. It seems we’ve placed it in a position where it might be called too frequently, making it hard to ensure that in the countless times we log in, not a single one will be captured by the clipboard or something else. If it leaks just once, then our account is doomed. I believe we should take other approaches to implicitly call it (such as a secondary encrypted certificate) or adopt other authentication methods that can be easily changed.
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