I tested the new chat in Anytype. It’s nice. It’s clean, you can tell there’s work to be done. There’s still work to be done, but bravo for the job.
But I would never use it.
We’ve had FR postponed and so many others in this obscure Backlog. We talk a lot about UX and the improvements to be made.
Imagining how much time is spent on it, it bothers me because for me there’s a lot of work to be done on the elements at the heart of current usage.
Honestly, if the next surprise is a videoconferencing function, a collaborative mailbox or multiplayer games… funny but that would worry me a lot.
I can understand that the team or investors have specific priorities, so chat it is. No worries.And again, great work!
But on the community side, is it just me who doesn’t understand this prioritization? Do you need it more than anything else on the forum?
I’m asking for your opinions out of curiosity and to situate myself, I don’t want to play the grouch especially if everyone’s clamoring for this chat!
I need this chat and that must be prioritized.
I could use this chat but maybe not the most urgent need
It’s cool to have one day but there were more urgent things
tbh I would like to see critical things like ex-/import, sync issues with undeletable objects fixed first before we see a chat feature in shared spaces where no ACLs exist at all and people most likely have more sophisticated messengers anyway.
At this point in time I feel not very comfortable with so many bugs regarding data safety. I have no way of properly backup my data somewhere else and in case of an emergency I am not able to import my data properly again. At the moment it feels like a time bomb.
But sure, give me a chat to play with - sorry, couldn’t resist
While it’s not an urgent need for me personally, I’ll use it if it’s there.
Enterprise-level accounts are needed to support the large amount of free users for most apps, so it makes sense that chat for teams would be a priority.
I had the same initial reaction, to be honest. That said, I’m often cautious being vocal about my own priorities because I’m aware that they don’t especially align with the team or many users.
I’m going to say something probably blasphemous on this forum, but the whole privacy aspect of Anytype is completely secondary for me. I’m using it primarily because of the offline-first and amazing object paradigm, and I would prefer the whole editor and some key features (API, exports, publish-to-web, toggles) to be polished or implemented before seeing new stuff like the chat but in the end, I can understand why a private chat can be a game changer for some.
This is definitely not my priority. Network settings per space, relation function enrichment are way more important for my use case.
But I can also see how chat (and later quoting block in discussion) would be intertwined with the project of transclusion. So I am not against the current arrangement.
I’m on the “No point, it’s a waste of time” group. Maybe it makes the platform more appealing for possible enterprise clients. But small communities will hardly switch from whatever they are using now to yet another messaging app, and of course it will be completely useless for solo users. I think messaging app is completely different business.
Said so, the fact that will make anytype more interesting for enterprise clients can eventually be:
a good thing for everyone as more money, more updates
or also a bad thing for non-business users as who puts the money usually comes first
Frankly speaking, I think this is inevitable. In the early prototype stage of the product, our opinions as community individual users tend to be more important, because the primary goal at that time is to develop and perfect all the features. This requires a lot of volunteers to help debug and provide feedback. However, I believe that as the product matures, the weight of our opinions will inevitably decrease. This is because we seem to have overlooked something very important:
Anytype is a product with tens of millions of dollars in investment.
Yes, do you think investors would invest tens of millions of dollars just to create a small personal note-taking app? Certainly not. The development quality of Anytype is extremely high, and the team is top-notch. However, we must always bear this in mind: tens of millions of dollars are not a charity; they need to generate returns. Naturally, this means the product will need to cater to high-commercial-value B2B use cases, such as communication, collaboration, small team functionality, simple OA systems, and multi-tenant authentication. These will inevitably follow and will have high priority. I think this is entirely normal and predictable.
We also need to acknowledge this reality: Anytype is not merely a personal note-taking app (although it can certainly be used as one). If it were, would Anytype have become the personal note-taking app with the highest first-round investment? Of course not—that would be unreasonable. Even Evernote didn’t receive this much funding in its first round.
My small team and I need the features and functionalities Anytype offers, and we are willing to pay more than individual users. At the same time, we should also understand that the lifeblood of Anytype’s survival lies in team collaboration. There are almost no successful commercialization precedents for products positioned solely as personal note-taking apps, and such a positioning would be insufficient to sustain a team and resources as extensive as Anytype’s.
So, my current attitude has shifted from being a guide to more of a watcher. I think all of my visions for Anytype as a personal note-taking software have already been realized, though they’re not perfect yet — for example, in terms of user experience and consistency across platforms. But don’t worry, I trust that whatever Anytype chooses to do, they will approach it seriously and execute it well. By improving the core product of Anytype itself, these aspects will naturally be refined over time.
Perhaps requesting a completely novel feature has become quite challenging now, but the speed of refining existing features, as well as the development of features that have already proven to be highly useful in other products, will likely progress quickly. Anytype might soon enter a phase of rapid development and high usability. Of course, this is just my personal prediction, and both my small team and I are eagerly looking forward to seeing what happens next.
What is the end goal of Anytype, what is the vision that you want te realize with Anytype?
The reason I asked this because I am seeing mixed messages about what Anytype is going to become. Many apps like Evernote, Upnote, Notesnook, Obsidian, Logseq and others have their own flaws but all of them have a clear vision of what the app is! While Anytype (and its development) over the past few years switched focus and direction more then ones making it unclear to me if this is the app for me.
Anytype first started as a privacy local personal note taking app for individuals. Basicly offline Notion. Which really sounded like perfection!
Then there was talk about Anytype being an OS (operating system) that could run many things inside of it, like a future app you can run or do anything in (incl. notetaking).
However last year the focus has been on multiplayer which now includes chat functionality as well as paid plans. While I understand the need to finance the development it feels to early in the alpha/beta of this app since in my honest opinion many core functionality is, lets say, in need of improvement.
So Anytype went from a Personal Notetaker to an Operating System and now a Teams/Discord-like compatitor.
I’m not the first, nor will I be the last to realize this: Anytype is shifting its focus to making money, and that’s okay, Anytype has a big team, which needs money to keep going. This is the only possible reason why they’re focusing so much on multiplayer and chats.
But that raises another question: why is it so difficult for the community to help develop a theoretically “open-source” application? Open up GitHub, and you’ll see that it’s always the same people who make the commits. I’ve seen people on the forum complaining that it’s almost impossible for outsiders to develop anything in Anytype.
And so, in my opinion, Anytype will continue along this path. Despite being “open-source”, which is more like “open-code”, the community doesn’t participate in the development itself, which means they have to have a large team to keep everything running, which means they need more money, and consequently attract investors who aren’t going to invest in a PKM application.
I’m a single user, no need of a chat. Besides, I already use several services, including Teams and Zoom as corporate communication or meetings with subcontractors.
In best case scenario It would be nice but with very low priority.
In some cases it would be nice to have comments, but no necessary.
In my company, we had set up Evernote to manage notes, share meeting notes, do a bit of documentation, …
We had to abandon Evernote.
And Anytype doesn’t fit the bill at all, despite my strong desire to promote it.
And chat is clearly not a good point, we already have (too) many communication channels. Maybe when it’s possible to chat around an object, but then the prerequisites for using Anytype would already have to be met.
Our view: the team should have worked on other priorities before the chat if the aim was to sell Anytype to us (as a company).
The chat was on my wish list since I’m here (or since the first implementation of shared Spaces).
Actually it has become more important for me then ever (although not the highest priority).
— As many of you may have noticed, I’m not posting as much as before. It’s because I’ve started a new apprenticeship and will give up my old profession.
Now I study something with health care and have a lot to learn together with my fellow students.
Therefore I’ve created a new Space where we can share our notes and so on.
A chat in Anytype is very desired!
Some of us use only email, many others use WhatsApp, or Telegram, or …
– It’s a chaos with all these different communication channels!
It makes absolute sense to share our notes and pictures and PDFs in Anytype AND to do some chat in it, without the need to switch to some another communication channel.
There are some other and a bit more important things on my wishlist, but to have a chat function is really very appreciated in my new situation!
Btw.: I’m very happy that Collections and Sets finally can count and do some basic calculations!!!
I feel what you’re saying and unfortunately I missed the town hall and didn’t know what was discussed. But yeah, chat being a priority at this stage was a little surprising for me to say the least. Obviously I would prefer other features, UX changes and directions to be put forward but I guess that’s not something we can argue a lot especially given that Anytype is mostly a free software.
I hope the amazing creation that we have today continues to grow, prosper and flourish in the vision of the founders together with the community but yeah, the rate of development and the monetizing issue is getting a little bit worrying for the future state of Anytype. I can’t blame them at all but after Arc, I hope this doesn’t get abandoned in a year or too… .
I’m eagerly waiting for the screenshots to get a better sense of what chats look and feel like, but in the meantime I will say this:
I wholeheartedly agree that at a strategic level, it seems (not is) a bit strange to prioritize such a massive new feature instead of polishing existing features. I’m experiencing a lot of crippling bugs and issues, so I wish UX for existing features was prioritized.
The exception to point 1 is if chats are implemented in such a way that it serves as the basis for in-line comments and object-wide comments (and given Anytype’s development philosophy of hyper-flexibility, I suspect that this is the case). Meaning that yes, like @Code-Jack explained in their use-case, chats could serve as a full-fledged replacement for Mattermost, Signal, etc; but that by enabling in-line comments and object-wide comments, chats will get Shared spaces to a point where work-level collaboration can happen smoothly.
- sorry, couldn’t resist
a good thing for everyone as more money, more updates
or also a bad thing for non-business users as who puts the money usually comes first
.