I have no reason not to trust Anytype, I’m happy about the team’s responsiveness and excited about the project. However I have no objective arguments in favour either.
The little I do know comes via scattered and unstructured information I found online, mostly from various comments here in this forum and from a couple of very early videos with one of the co-founders.The website makes several exciting claims, although none of them are backed up by actual verifiable evidence or credentials.
The way I usually assess if software is reliable is based on one or more of the following:
professional experience, portfolio and/or education background of their founders/developers;
the existence of a business model that makes the developers accountable for their claims;
positive reviews from a big enough user base, and/or by specialists.
With Anytype, I have access to very little of the above information.
I know there is no obligation for a software developer to reveal such things, however considering Anytype aims to be a huge/central element of our professional and personal lives, I feel it’s fair to ask about this.
This is mostly for the Anytype team to answer, though users are free to comment if they have any relevant information.
I apologize in advance if this post is received in a negative way - please let me know if that’s the case!
So far, we get to use a free app that is kinda awesome. There is the stated intention of going open source and plausible reasons for not yet being open source. There is a way for some developers to get early access to the source code and contribute (some community devs can probably attest to having seen the source code).
As far as I can see the risk we as early testers/users face is that:
this will never become open source
it will become or already is a data mining operation and all the promises of decentralisation, privacy, and security are lies (which is contingent on risk 1 being the case)
Do you see any other risks?
The devs seem genuine enough in their interactions with the community, which would be hard to fake for such a long time. You would expect people to break character and say weird things every now and then. And unless this is a 3 letter agency covert operation, I don’t see what the point is of lying about the nature and roadmap of this application. So yeah, unless you are a political dissident or other person with above average opsec needs you should be fine using this app, and you can always choose not to use it for sensitive private information.
Having said my two cents, I haven’t followed the forums and development that closely and not for that long either, so take my opinion with a grain of salt and look at the evidence for yourself. And feel free to disagree, because I would like to be corrected if I’m wrong.
Quickly replying to this just to clarify: by “trust” I don’t mean in the sense that they are shady or anything. I meant in the sense of “Why should we trust Anytype that this is solid app, and that it will continue to be so, in order for it to be worth it for us to spend time contributing to its development, and then the time spent adding all our lives in it.”
My quick reply would be: you can either trust these investors or just not trust and wait for the public launch.
But maybe this is a topic that needs a more in depth answer from someone inside the company c:
Good one! Though I personally don’t understand how that works. The fact there’s people investing means they probably know it’s good - is that it? If anyone is more knowledgeable on this side of things and could elaborate on what the info there means, would be helpful!
If none ot the factors I mentioned changes, how would public launch change things? Is it because then the code will become public and people can check that it’s solid/trustworthy?
From the crunchbase link, I see Anytype is listed as having over 100 employees. I didn’t know the team was so big. Or is it a mistake?
I would not be surprised if Crunchbase is taking that information from LinkedIn, where quite some people have indicated they work at Anytype while they don’t. This is a common issue on LinkedIn that also past employees are linked to a LinkedIn page of a Company. See also here:
As described here in LinkedIn’s documentation (yes, with typos )
It’s not possible for an admins to remove employees from a Page because members have provided this data.
More in general I’d say that it’s still early to talk too much about this, in the end it’s time that will tell if they keep the promises (first and foremost the open sourcing of the code, which will make everything better when it comes to trust) but the ideas and values that the company is already following are (for me) enough to give them the credit needed at this stage.
So far we added two pages with more in depth view on our team an values and of course we open sourced our code and start receiving contributions on the github.
)