Why Can't Words Be Objects

Talk
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1

What do you need help with?

I’ve been following Anytype since 2020, and I feel like it’s maybe close enough to consider trying to use full time.

However, I still cannot for the life of me understand why it’s impossible to turn words into Objects. What’s the point of having a graph view if only blocks can become Objects? Words are how humans understand the world. Words are how humans store concepts and make connections. I do not understand why Anytype built a neural networking function, if the only things the graph view can connect are blocks.

If I’m writing, why does the entire paragraph (block) have to become the object?

If I write:
“Elon Musk is the CEO of Telsa, Boring Company, Starlink, and Twitter.”
then I want to be able to click into Tesla, Boring Company, Starlink, and Twitter as different objects.

I have written about this before years ago, but apparently it’s designed to be this way. I don’t understand any use case for wanting the entire block to become an object and then be used in the graph view. If someone can explain this to me, I suppose that’d be helpful. If some people are able to use that, that’s great. But please please make it so the parts of a block are able to turned into or linked to an object!

It seemed to me in the beginning that Anytype was trying to take elements from Notion and Obsidian. However, even though the graph view seems to imitate Obsidian, it’s nowhere near as useful.

Please help me understand why this, why it can’t be, or if it can be… then please help convince the Devs to fix this! So many people have been wanting this for so many years.

Additional Context

I attached a few photos for other reference or context.

Image or Video

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OS

Sonoma 14.1.1

Anytype Version

0.44.0

Network Mode

AnySync

Technical Information

NA

2

Great question.
You can very much accomplish what you are asking for…albeit a little less frictionless than it ought to be.

I agree, highlighting a word or words and having a contextual menu pop up (which we have for formatting) and chose “make object” would be preferable.

in the meantime, you can do it like this:

  • go into the sentence.
  • position cursor right before the first word (no space)
  • write ‘@’
  • press ctrl+ → till you reach the end of your word(s)
  • press enter. It will create a linked object out of it
  • you now need to unfortunately erase the word(s) left behind, because you will have both the link wording AND your original wording left behind
  • you can then click on each link and at the top chose what object that link ought to be (note, page, bookmark, etc)

So yes, it is doable, with few extra steps. As you can see, it can be done, it’s just the UI needs to be refined. Really, should not be too much dev work. File a FR for this please.

image

3

Unfortunately, to my knowledge, Block as Object is nowhere to be found…

I can’t adapt to object icons that interrupt my reading. Underlining would be much more appropriate, because as it stands, the workaround we’re talking about is far too time-consuming, restrictive and unreadable for many users.

This is where we realize that the UX is just as important as the backend, because their perceptions of Anytype usage, whether through the metrics collected or the feedback, in no way reflect what is expected and hoped for from a tool with this much potential. This dampen the interest and enthusiasm of newcomers and Anytype veterans alike.
Work on the UX has always been delayed, and although it’s supposedly been improving for months now, I’ve got the impression that the UX is degrading even further. But surely it’s a sensible subject for them. Their “UX” may have been developed internally by one of their executives, which would explain their delusions on the subject.

4

Due to technical limitations, we currently store objects in local databases, and blocks are just part of these objects. In contrast, Notion stores each block as an individual object in its databases. This approach provides advantages, such as the feature you and many others are requesting, but it also introduces some limitations: the databases can become large and slow. In our case, in-memory databases could potentially run out of memory.

We have addressed this issue with our new database system, Any-Store, and plan to allow every block to become an independent object.

5

Our perception may be subjective, but the metrics are not. Over the last six months, we’ve seen significant improvement, with Anytype growing more than fourfold. While individual experiences and perspectives vary, these metrics indicate that we are moving in a positive direction overall.

6

Thanks for all these clarifications, but even if Blocks as Objects are awaited, what about @UnwokeNetizen 's excellent feedback? Why doesn’t the person working on UX answer these questions themselves?

As a layman, I may be wrong, but let’s take the following example: In terms of metrics, moving the “Bin” to an icon only visible on mouse-over drastically reduced the Bin use, but that didn’t mean that users were no longer interested in cleaning up their data. The problem is that this kind of forgetfulness accumulates and some users reach a point of saturation that doesn’t encourage them to make their voices heard in the forum, precisely because of the lack of consideration they’ve seen for the UX over the time. It’s a vicious circle.

Let’s take another, much more striking example: Toggles, their functions are useful, but you must have far fewer people using them routinely or intensively than the competition. Simply because you haven’t yet taken into account this tiny UX correction that would simplify life for everyone who wants to use them.

This UX oversight, which has been there from ages and has never been taken into account, especially in view of the overall work time/value, is a perfect example of what many users perceive as poor prioritization, which is very unfortunate.

Now we come to the worst example: The Anytype search, whether global or in a Set/Object, is so unreliable and dysfunctional that it makes me sincerely reconsidered my desire to use Anytype I’m not talking about possible improvements, I’m talking about the fact that I have a Note whose first word is “Anytype” and which appears in search results if I type “An” or “Anyt”, but which is invisible if I type “Any”.

Making it not worth searching for an object, so not worth create them afterward. And this problem is global and has such a negative impact on Anytype that I can’t understand why it hasn’t been prioritized and fixed! How can new users project themselves with such unreliable search?

The voting system for a feature request is IMO an unrealistic one, because for it to have any value, each member would have to scrupulously discover and evaluate the usefulness of each of the other requests. I think we should prioritize bugs and FRs as follows:

Bugs :

  • The most severe and impacting first.
  • The fastest to fix and which concern the broadest uses in second place.

Feature requests :

  • Fastest to implement and concerns the broadest uses first.
  • Most requested in second.

Now that we know that two developers are in charge of the desktop department, I’m left with a rather naive question: why not hire a few more people, given your current growth and the funds you’ve raised?

You’ve created a base of users who deeply love your values your vision, but some are disillusioned by your management. I think a lot of users are still hoping for a change, but it’s no longer a heartfelt journey as hope fades with each update where it should be growing, what a paradox.

There is no anger, just sadness.

7

Looks like we are talking about inline relations.

8

You are spot on 200%

  • bugs / features do not appear to be prioritized properly, as in - most impactful for the lowest amount of effort and moving from there - at least in the UX/UI
  • I come across such deal breaking bugs that I now have to re-evaluate if I can continue using AT at all. In a dashboard, where inline sets are pretty much 90% of the ‘component’ used, assigning tags to objects at times do not ‘stick’, other times disappear. Moving fields in sorting is buggy as all hell. And on and on the list goes.

We try to look for alternatives, but with each temp ‘solution’ we find, there are more issues…till we ran out of alternatives of how to even use AT.

If the 2 devs are not increased and/or code opened up for the desktop/mobile so devs at large can MEANINGFULLY contribute (not like today), I fear that significant people will see this as a LITMUS test and leave. I might be one of them. We will leave with heavy heart. Yes we like AT for all it COULD BE, but we also need tools that just simply work.

Notion is coming out with offline support this year (but no linux app so no go for me)
Capacities is churning out at decent rate new FR and bugs. They offer enough offline support for it to be usable and they are improving it further.

None of these are my first choices. By far. But at the end of the day, I need a tool I can recommend to a NO DEV and collaborate with them and have a tool that works enough that I can get work done. I’m all for beta, but perpetual beta…well…we’re always told not to use beta in production right?

As @Morgan1989 said: I too am hopeful, but with each release, and the way things are answered and addressed on the forums, that hope ebbs a little…

In closing I will say this: as a former dev of 25y…if I hear “it’s coming, be patient”…it’s not a good sign. I used to say the same thing at times…and I said it precisely when I was in trouble code-wise and had no clue if I will pull it off and when!

What you want to hear is a range of dates, realistic ones, when things will be delivered. If you do not see this, it means the team is not well organized, has mediocre devs or there is some other chaos.

Remember AT team: many of us here are devs, former devs etc, and we’ve been where you are…so we know red flags when we see them.

Cheers

9

Most of the things you mentioned have been fixed already. Except for your toggle request—does it really need to be a priority right now? We’re still in Beta, and I think your expectations are just too high. That’s okay, but things aren’t always as simple as they might seem.

I feel your sadness, but it doesn’t help here. We’re aware of the problems and are working on them. Many people are happy with our software and use it every day. That doesn’t mean what you’re saying isn’t valid or that we don’t have challenges to address.

Honestly, though, I feel like you’re spending your time writing the same things over and over again. On one hand, I’m happy to see this much attention, but on the other, it feels a bit pointless.

If you want to help, be kind and constructive. If not—please don’t spread this sadness here.

10

These ones in our roadmap on the GitHub. Unfortunately we can’t offer more than this. Aa we plan features only for 4 months in advance.

Overall I feel disappointed reading something like this. If you’re a developer, you should understand the technological complexity behind what our product offers. You should also recognize that what we’re delivering is remarkable, especially given the time and effort it takes to deliver it.

These negative and overly critical vibes don’t help—in fact, they do the opposite. People on our team work day and night, and reading notes filled with disappointment and blame can be really demotivating.

We’re always happy to hear feature requests, bug reports, and general feedback. But when the tone shifts to blame and negativity, especially without understanding the full context, it’s just disheartening.

I’m sorry if I come across as too harsh—I truly appreciate your input, and many of the points you’ve raised are valid. But the overall it doesn’t feel supportive. Your support matters!

11

Sorry for the tone. The search is still completely broken on my side, nothing is fixed about that. And it’s the biggest pain point.

I get what you said, that’s valid reasoning from your POV, but some valid questions are left unanswered. If only that could be adressed, we could understand more and complaining less.

  1. What about Devs on the community asking about let them contribute to the code?
  2. What about the UX departement to answering themselves to this kind of questions?
  3. What about hiring more people, or explaining why it is not wise despite the millions you’ve raised?

You don’t have to answer us, but if we asked it’s because we care about your present as much as your future.

12

I don’t have this problem on my side. It seems a bug. Would appreciate if you would fill bug request.

It was answered many times. Last time here

They have a lot on their plate. However, I think it could be a good idea to dedicate people who are responsible for certain features to communicate here. It happens occasionally, though.

I’ve answered this a few times. The current bottleneck isn’t on the front-end side but on the core tech side—adding more people wouldn’t help and could actually slow things down. Sometimes we just need time to properly “cook” the foundation; after that, front-end development can be faster and more scalable. We’re not there yet, but with Any-Store, we’re very, very close now.

Thank you for these constructive questions!

13

@anton - I think you have noticed that by now, I take a balanced approach.
I don’t use profanity, I am not aggressive, I highlight in many posts what anyType does great, I defend the product where it makes sense…and I also criticize.

Criticism is never easy to hear - for none of us. But it is necessary.
The precise reason people here give criticism, is like a parent to a child: because we love this product and believe in it. But we are taking also as users a risk putting hours upon hours of data entry into anyType and we need to feel confident that our efforst are not in vain. Again - exports are never fully mappable to any other eco system.

So, thanks for the interactions. I think you continue hearing us loud and clear. Many here are very fair in their criticism. There are many things anyType does well.

I look forward to seeing some of the most important pain points mentioned throughout the forums addressed in the upcoming months. Especially in terms of communication and allowing smoother experience - and more work to tackle - by devs at large.

Cheers

14

Sorry for kicking in, @anton but I can’t believe that you don’t have the problem.
And it was already reported – even more then once (also by myself).

Surely you have Object’s that have the name “Anytype”.
Do a global search for them. Type the name slowly, one character after the other → you will see how search results appear, then disappear, than come back.

Last month, I’ve reportet six or so bugs related to search.
This was one of them.
Here you see it (I have made three videos for that topic):

15

Stop. What you’re describing are known bugs, they are already under investigation. However, I wouldn’t go as far as calling it a completely broken search.

We recently changed our library from Bleve to Tantivy and search experience improved dramatically. If these bugs aren’t major Tantivy issues, they’ll be fixed in the next release.

16

Yes, I also would not not go so far as @Morgan1989 to call it “completely broken”.
– Although, in the sum, there are indeed a lot bugs with search, especially for Apple users.

What I’ve meant is this:
Morgan1989 described this:

In his next post he unfortunately exaggerated it to “completely broken”.
And you answered this:

Your answer sounded for me as if you don’t know anything about bugs with search, not even the thing Morgan1989 described in detail, one post before.
(At least that was my impression).
But this was not believable for me at all – the ARE bugs and it is downright impossible not to recognize them if one uses the search function daily.
Indeed, we have here a bunch of bugs and they are mostly obvious.

– I take the opportunity to say you something from my personal point of view:
I spent here hours every day in the forum; sometimes I write more then one BR per day. It costs me a lot time to record all these videos and to write detailed step by step instructions for the devs.
And this feels often … “strange” (hard for me to find the best fitting word in English), because many of the bugs are so obvious that I can’t even believe that the team does not already knows about them. — More then that: the essence of my six bug reports (with all these videos included) related to search could be condensed down to only one sentence:
“Simply try to use search in a real Space and you will see that it makes problems!”

Instead, I’ve spent hours to write al these reports and to record my screen again and again, until good videos resulted that I could include into the reports.

I can tell you, this effort feels really very very “strange”!
Quasi as if the devs don’t want to see the obvious issues, or as if nobody from the team really uses Anytype for real purposes.

– And the thing with search is is only one of dozens other possible examples.

I appreciate what the team does here, no question!
You know I’m a “fanboy”! But I’m also honest, therefore I can’t give only nice feedbacks. We don’t speak here about very complex things or about a few “suboptimal” cases between lots of success stories. We speak about (often obvious) things that peeve us users every day and cost us all a lot time (especially us Bug Detectives).

17

Hey again,

I think you misunderstood me. I truly appreciate your time and efforts—they are very valuable. However, you framed your comment in the context of “the search is completely broken” and mentioned bugs that aren’t related to a “completely broken experience.”

Please be sure if you reported a bug it’s in our tracker.

This is simply untrue. I’d appreciate it if you refrained from making such false claims. We use Anytype every day ourselves. If reporting bugs feels too frustrating, it’s okay to take a step back—we’d rather avoid complaints than receive feedback at the cost of negativity.

We genuinely do our best to fix bugs as quickly as possible, but no software is without its flaws. The bugs you mentioned were added to our tracker just before Christmas :ghost:

18

You can see a record from our wiki space—it’s clearly a bug in some combination, but I cannot consider it as critical. It’s on our tracker - hope will be fixed soon.

19

This is not a false claim, because it is not a claim at all.
I simply give you my feedback how it feels from us user’s point of view – that does of course not mean that it is the truth.

I mean, if you use a software and day for day some specific bugs peeve you, again and again, then you would start to think that the developers obviously not use the software themself, wouldn’t you?
It must not be true, but you would get the impression.

I don’t want to step back; I’m an enthusiast and I do my most best here to make Anytype better. Or, better to say, to help the devs to make it better.

The point is not that it would frustrate me too much to report bugs.
The point is, that it feels often unbelievable that the devs not recognize the bug themself, or - if already reported (as precise and step for step as possible) - they ask for a video … or they can not reproduce it …
– That may be true in some very special cases, But I’ve seen it in cases where it was simply unbelievable.
I could give examples from the past but it would again shredder my time for nothing – as well as yours. And I don’t want to shredder your time.

And I want to assure you that my feedback is ALWAYS meant constructive!
If it gives you another impression some times, then it has two reasons:
1: My bad English; I’m not able to formulate as good as in my native language.
2. You simply don’t know me personally. :slight_smile:
I’m honest even to beloved ones, but there is never a negative mindset behind it.
I simply want to give a true feedback about the impressions and emotions from the users point of view.

The moment when I wrote my “kick in” is a good example.
@Morgan1989 exaggerated, but he described precisely one specific example of the bugs he experiences. And your answer (to his next post) gave the impression that you don’t know about it … :-/
You didn’t wrote at this point that the bugs are already on the tracker.
– Btw. of course they are, because I have reported them and I did it although already other users complained about them, but seemingly nothing happened.

That’s why we users feel (have the impression) that some things here are a bit strange.
We all experience these bugs many times per day, but in this specific case, even although already reported (more then once for some of them) the team (in this case: you) gives at first the impression to not knowing about it.
After lots of discussion it changes to something like “we know it since long, wait a bit, it will become fixed soon”.

But enough said – the day has only 24 hours; that’s so for me and that’s so for you and the whole team.
Each of us all does his or her best; we all want only that the project shines and flourishes!
– Good night!