This bittersweet town hall.
- They presented a complete overhaul of Anytype that will require a data migration (which is understandable since they had the audacity to revamp everything for the better). It will be a new, separate software program, codenamed “AnyTwo,” for which users will need to apply and get involved in the testing phase.
- They will continue to update Anytype at a drastically slower pace, even though the product is doomed to disappear, so I really don’t understand the investment in what is sure to be a waste of time.
- You really aren’t ready for the software’s evolution—the demo was incredible. The mini-apps, the 2.0 editor with new features we’ve been waiting for for ages!
- But the ending is going to be a real letdown—some features we’ve been waiting for and that were promised long ago were explicitly mentioned as uncertain in this new version. I don’t remember all the questions and answers, but the equivalent of Tana’s Supertags, like inline tags, is no longer a sure thing either. They’re not even talking about priorities anymore—they’ve completely discarded the current roadmap and are reevaluating each of our requests. Years of promises have gone up in smoke; everything is starting from scratch. They should have called it AnyZero…
- And to top it all off, a stab in the back. Forget about the perks you’ve earned through your long-standing involvement, your valuable feedback, and your support. Now, in their eyes, tangible support is nothing but financial. They’ve burned through too much cash—it took them three years to understand basic UX needs, and four more years to muster the courage to rebuild Anytype’s foundations—so now it’s time to say goodbye to your perks.
No more free remote storage, P2P or local mode only for free users, regardless of your service history or your initially promised quota for free sync to Anytype nodes.
No more “10 shared channels” on the free plan. This will be drastically scaled back. It will be 1-to-1 shared space, limited to a maximum of three.
Unless, UNLESS, you become a paying member.
Welcome to the world of broken promises and fleeting gifts.
Could somebody link the recording please? (Soon?)
Thought: Hey, today you pull an update and enjoy editor and collections 2.0.
But this sounds weird.
Will the recording be available soon this time? There is no software update alongside this town hall too. 
EDIT: I hope @Marie.D is wrong or have misinterprated the town hall! Nobody else to give a summary of it?
@Perlsowisdom What is this “Any — Early Tester Registration” form? The Anytwo app?
That’s a negative take on what was said, but it’s not entirely inaccurate.
Anytype is still moving forward, albeit at a slightly slower pace.
Anytwo will be released by the end of the year; it’s a completely new app, not backward-compatible, and it will include many, many of your requests (Collection 2.0, Editor 2.0, templates, anchors on blocks, synchronized blocks, etc., etc.). But since everything is being redesigned, I’m afraid some hard-won improvements from Anytype might disappear—we’re starting from scratch, after all…
And as for the licensing… yes, it wasn’t entirely clear, but I also get the impression that the free version won’t be very usable. I’ve managed to gradually attract users thanks to the free version: first a shared space, then a chat, and once people get used to it, they often end up upgrading to the paid version… so I have some concerns here. And having both Anytype AND Anytwo at the same time… hmm… I’m not convinced.
People have build some quite extensive set of data over the years… They could not release this without some sort of data migration process. Hopefully I still didn’t use anytype as a production ready app, but many many does.
I guess it was necessary to move forward, it’s a bold move nonetheless.
About your concerns, I hope we will have clarification by Kaye and a release of the recording too. Maybe they have use some bad wording to express the change. I hope so.
@Marie.D Excuse me what?! I really hope that’s a joke… I joined the meeting on time, but it got delayed by 15min because of some incompetent stuff… Had to leave before the end so I got to see almost nothing, the beginning of the meeting was about nothing interesting, then amazing stuff about the formulas etc then I had to leave. They promised there would be a recording where is it?
And if on top of that they plan to “kill” anytype (slowing developpement and making a new app IS killing anytype) that would really suck. Hopefully there would be a new branch of anytype to avoid all this enterprise crap. This is not what open source projects should be.
And this is not how such an app should behave imo… Hopefully the playback will be online soon to answer all those questions.
I will share a quick update, as I’m very preoccupied at the moment. It will take some time for the Town Hall video to be shared. Ideally up tomorrow. What to expect from the Town Hall:
- A breakdown of community feedback, our learnings, and what we believe are the right decisions to make going forward. In short, minor improvements here and there is not good enough. We need to make some foundational and drastic changes to really make a difference.
- In order to do that, rather than having past decisions hold us down, we imagined what the future should look like and what kind of product truly deserves to exist in 2026 and beyond.
- We prioritised product experience and development speed to bring to users what they want, but we sacrificed backward compatibility to do so. Instead of rebuilding Anytype and supporting all legacy features and decisions (even ones that no longer exist in the app), we built the new product from scratch. It resolves practically of the major issues with Anytype, but it comes at a cost: a migration from Anytype—which we will support via some bridge/import functionality.
- The new product, which we’ve codenamed Anytwo, is functional today and ready for its first phase of testers next week. It has editor 2.0, collections 2.0, and many other things that users did not expect—because it’s a different product.
In my reception of the Town Hall, we felt a lot of support and appreciation from the live audience. But understandably it comes with a lot of details and interpretations of a cloudy situation. To be frank, even my above summary is poor and really, one needs to watch the Town Hall to truly grasp how significant the latest update is.
First of all, I’m sorry to hear that you feel that way. I try my best to show appreciation to all of our community members who have helped get Anytype to where it is today, but maybe that doesn’t always land. In no unclear terms do I want to say that I recognise the crazy amounts of efforts that people in the community have contributed to Anytype. Most recently, the Spanish translations of the updated Anytype docs have been unreal and must’ve taken incredible amounts of time. On a personal level, I even felt guilty to see all of those contributions to a certain extent. We did not take these decision lightly.
However, I don’t feel it’s accurate to paint the situation as you’ve described it. The perks that were promised for Anytype were delivered, still exist today, and will forever exist as long as status quo remains. Anytype is sustainable thanks to 2% of its paying user base and will remain so indefinitely if nothing changes. You have Anytype software forever, and with it being open sourced, self hostable, etc. nothing is being taken away from you. What you seem to be upset about is that these ‘perks’ don’t transfer over from Anytype to Anytwo—which we did not make any statements about.
While I’m not here to make promises, I want to clear up the points about the new membership model. One, it’s not set in stone but it’s how we see it being one viable path forward to support local-only mode. Two, this is the standard model that products like Obsidian offer as is (in fact, less than our model because we plan to offer forms of sync and collaboration even in free mode). Three, one of the biggest mistakes the Anytype team made was not thinking about monetisation properly since the very beginning—which has been an extremely costly mistake. And as we’ve mentioned in multiple Town Halls, we are not shying around from the fact that the company and project needs paying members to function. This doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate all the other forms support from the community, but without money, doors close. There’s no way around it.
We plan to support Anytype as much as the community does. Indeed, if the community is not interested and decides to completely move to Anytwo (or whatever else), then that dictates to us where we should allocate our resources. But I will say that we consistently still get lots of traffic for Anytype and business leads approaching us to adopt it into their organisations. As expressed during the Town Hall, if there is still a lot of support for Anytype from the community, it will have its own life. That decision is not entirely just ours to make.
Thank you, but I think I’ll have to see the recording for all of this to make more sense, at least to me.
I’m glad that a migration tool is planned. And yes I understand the foundational reset, it was obviously necessary. But you build it so fast! unless you were cooking it for a very long time. I didn’t expect a whole new app!
I keep my other questions for later, hoping that the recording is helpfull enough.
Don’t worry, if you have the video shared by tomorrow than that is really quick compared to past town halls. It has taken weeks before it was shared in the past haha.
But damn, another complete rework of the app within 4 years of the last one is harsh. I still have Anytype Legacy on my phone from the last rework…
And I know it is not set in stone yet, but not transferring perks from those (like myself) to the new app would really be a stab in the back for those who have put in a lot of time and effort to help test and give feedback.
How I would do it is transferring the perks to the new app but with that transfer/migration would mean the perks are removed from the old app! And make sure this is communicated clearly with the transfer. I think this would be fair for everyone and you don’t have to maintain the perks in both apps.
I would also not maintain both apps, as I see it Anytype always had slow development so extra work from maintaining two apps would not make sense.
Really curious to see the complete town hall since I had to leave halfway as well because of the delay sadly. So all above is only based on what is said here in this topic.
Honestly, I’m very HAPPY that the new AnyTwo was rebuilt from scratch!
Yes, honestly, I’m here since nearly three years and I’ve thought more then once that the whole thing is a long way from ever being fixed.
Nevertheless, I helped a lot to report bugs again and again. But the whole App feels always as slow as a snail.
All these little lags that sum up significantly; disappearing characters while editing an image’s name, and so on and so on.
I’ve always thought, that the whole ting needs a rebuilt from ground up, but that they will surely never do that.
– What I’ve seen now in the Town Hall flashed me!
Everything what was shown was as quick as a bolt of light!
And in addition to that, all these features that we are longing for since the beginning:
- Formulars in the Simple Table, as well as in the Grid View.
- Block linking
- Nested text styles, for example Callouts with all kinds of wild mixed stuff in it, like Toggles, headers, lists, etc.
- New ways to organize our data.
- And so much exciting stuff more! I like it!
But: I really hope that the team puts serious effort in the migration routine, so that we don’t lose any data, nor connections between them, nor filters and sorts.
Thanks, Marie D., for your summary, and to everyone else for the additional thoughts.
I’ll wait to watch the town hall for myself before forming a conclusion, but I just spent the last week working through the revamped help documents to really get familiar with Anytype.
So that’s really frustrating. Again, will remain open-minded.
Just wanted to bounce on my message, I do fully agree with you here, I am frustrated by how it sounds, I invested a ton of time in anytype, really learned to love the app, recommanded it to everyone who needed a notion like app etc. I know how this situation usually end up and I hate the outcome.
Even more on an app such as anytype (fitted the way I think, got used to a great workflow etc)
But maybe I’m wrong and anytwo will just replace anytype, will stay self hostable etc. Then all would be great. But I do have custom scripts using the API, I hope it will stay compatible.
Another question: will the list of new features (formulas especially) be available on anytype or on anytwo?
I attended the town hall and while I don’t necessarily agree with everything you’ve said, I mostly feel the need to ask: and I’m not trying to be rude here but why do you think you’re entitled to a free product? I’m really not trying to be inflammatory, I just legitimately don’t understand the shock behind a paywall for an entirely new product. The team is making a product. Them charging money is good, it means they can survive as a company and continue to develop it and expand it.
From an engineering standpoint, I completely understand why a ground-up rebuild is necessary. Technical debt is real, and sometimes a clean slate is the only viable path forward.
However, as someone who genuinely cares about this project, it’s hard not to feel a sense of disconnect. Whenever I took the time to share thoughtful feedback, the intention was always to help Anytype evolve. Realizing those inputs were channeled into a separate product while the current app is left behind makes it difficult to stay motivated to contribute.
It also reinforces the perception that the current app is effectively reaching a dead end. Reassuring users that perks remain on the legacy platform offers little comfort when that platform is entering maintenance mode.
I don’t think Marie thinks she is entitled to a free product. As I read it, it is about the perks earned from being a alpha or beta tester, a thank you for years of testing and feedback.
I also don’t see AnyTwo as a totally new product but an evolution of Anytype and therefor I also feel the perks should transfer. Because that work/reward accumulated towards the evolution of Anytype/AnyTwo.
But I’ll be honest, I am biased because I also have a lifetime perk of extra sync capacity, as a reward for being an early adopter, extremely active user/feedback giver, being in the nightly ops group, etc. If this perk is not transferred to AnyTwo, which by then would be main Anytype branch, it would upset me and break all trust I have in the team/company if I am honest.
And I feel it is a really easy and cold to say:
Yes the perks have been delivered and no, AnyTwo was never mentioned because not even the idea of AnyTwo existed! It really feels cold to get out of this promise on a technicality like this because AnyTwo will be the evolution of Anytype, it will be the main branch continuing forward and the Legacy version will slowly die out along with the perks. It’s basically update 0.6 but named.
It is like an early access game you bought and when it goes into version 1.0 the developers say you need to buy the game again because with this update it is a “totally new product”.
And bought is the time and effort invested in the above example and no AnyTwo is not a new game because the first one never got released into a finished 1.0 state.
Edit; but will have to wait and see how this plays out. For now all is based on what has been said in this topic, I have not seen the Town Hall yet.
You absolutely did, and we’re still incredibly grateful. Everything that you can see in Anytwo is thoughtful synthesis of the true needs of our users. I’m not sure if you were present during the Town Hall, but I just finished reading the chat log and I can definitely see how heard and excited the community was by what they saw. Many things they’ve been asking for (for a long time) are now possible in the new build.
I’ll leave it at that for now, as sleep is what I require at this point. Video will be up tomorrow and I’ll circle back then.
It’s a business. Marie said, begrudgingly, that the devs seem to think the only support that matters, is financial. To me that reads as entitlement to a free product. I understand not being super happy about losing perks for beta testing, but the implication that the team focusing on financial feasibility is somehow a moral failing is what confuses me. What’s the point of keeping the perks of the company doesn’t survive because of cash flow issues?
Startups are tenuous and it’s up to the community to support them, yes with beta testing of course but also, financially. Companies don’t survive on vibes. And I see your analogy on video games in early access but I personally don’t think it applies here as they will be continuing to develop both simultaneously, meaning it is arguably, a new product.
re:Anytwo testing, do we have to migrate our Anytype data? What if I became a tester and just start over? (or at least until a reliable migration method is established)