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Show HN: Anytype – local-first, P2P knowledge management

anytype.io

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Re: Show HN: Anytype – local-first, P2P knowledge management

#51

Post by pronkin »

thecupisblue wrote: post #43
monkeydust wrote: post #40

Tried it. It's polished so well done and the p2p / e2e aspects are novel but it's too heavy and complex for what I need a bit like Obsidian. I personally find a lot of these note taking apps relish in the act of note taking itself and lose the purpose of the note itself, which for me, is to drive forward intent. With that in mind I have started to play with Heynote from recent HN post a few days ago ( https://news.yc…

Got the same feeling - this is designed for people who turn taking notes into a _thing_ in itself. The productivity nerds. Linking their notes, categorising, organising, diligently making sure their knowledge base is up to date. And that is the complete opposite of how I use notes - as notes. Just a place to write stuff down and get back to it later. Wish there was an app that organises them for you - instead of me h…

Thank you for the input! If you're looking for a clean space, you can easily create a new one by clicking on your profile icon in the panel at the bottom. It will contain only a few sets. You can always delete spaces that are no longer needed.

If you need a simple notepad, there are better tools out there. Anytype is more suitable if you're looking to create something like a database or knowledge base, not just a list of notes.

The next year we are working on simplifying the user experience and introducing multiplayer+communication

Re: Show HN: Anytype – local-first, P2P knowledge management

#52

Post by apantel »

junipertea wrote: post #45
orthecreedence wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No note application does this Yes, the app Turtl ( https://turtlapp.com ) does do this and it's not slow at all really. It only decrypts data upon viewing, and immediately re-encrypts when saving data. So this is actually entirely reasonable and entirely doable. The benefits are that malicious applications can't read data just sitting on the hard drive, which removes an entire class of attacks. An encrypted hd does…

How would you search through thousands of notes? Decrypt them all in memory, search and encrypt them again? How does this scale with attachments?

I have a private note app that I wrote for personal notes to keep them off the cloud.

This is the one problem I don’t know how to go about solving for tens of thousands of notes.

If anyone has any solutions, please share.

Re: Show HN: Anytype – local-first, P2P knowledge management

#53

Post by pronkin »

CrypticShift wrote: post #3

Previous (recent) discussion : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36799548 Commendable breadth in your vision ! but might I suggest going more... atomic? As someone who leans towards outlining, your "tasks" type caught my attention. Ideally, I wish each block could behave like an object in a similar fashion. While transforming blocks into objects is possible, it somewhat defeats the purpose of an outliner's "bird's…

We definitely plan to enable effortless transformation of any block into an object, for example, by adding a tag to it or simply by mentioning it in another object 'transclusion'.

We also have plans to develop a simpler local API and a local AI helper that will be able to assist you with import/export tasks in ways you might think of

Re: Show HN: Anytype – local-first, P2P knowledge management

#54

Post by epoch_100 »

I use Anytype and like it. I do hope they’ll invest more time into the editing experience — there are a few sharp edges that will probably alienate people coming from more mainstream tools like Google Docs and Notion:

- Typography is a bit weird, especially with headings; there is very little line height on headings, leading to cramped documents.

- Bullet points look weird when you look closely at them. (On Mac, they’re not perfectly circular; perhaps an aliasing issue.)

- Can only use cmd+b and cmd+i for bold and italic when selecting text; can't use them to switch on/off boldness on the cursor.

- Can't specify type when creating a new object with the @ symbol inline (Capacities, a related tool, does).

- Bullet points flicker when you first create them.

- Linking inserts a space even when you don't want it, as does formatting using markdown characters (e.g., providing the closing ** in italics.)

- Relatedly: Entering closing markdown characters (e.g., the second **) does not end the formatting effect (the cursor should not have the formatting applied after they're entered, but it does).

Anytype is overall a fairly polished app. I hope they’ll iron out these editing issues — when they do, it’ll really be exceptional.

Re: Show HN: Anytype – local-first, P2P knowledge management

#55

Post by orthecreedence »

junipertea wrote: post #45
orthecreedence wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No note application does this Yes, the app Turtl ( https://turtlapp.com ) does do this and it's not slow at all really. It only decrypts data upon viewing, and immediately re-encrypts when saving data. So this is actually entirely reasonable and entirely doable. The benefits are that malicious applications can't read data just sitting on the hard drive, which removes an entire class of attacks. An encrypted hd does…

How would you search through thousands of notes? Decrypt them all in memory, search and encrypt them again? How does this scale with attachments?

Yeah, decrypt them all on startup and index them in-memory via SQLite. Regarding attachments, good question. Turtl doesn't index files.

Re: Show HN: Anytype – local-first, P2P knowledge management

#56

Post by eternityforest »

diggan wrote: post #29
2color wrote: post #16

As someone who's been active in the IPFS community, it's really exciting to see how Anytype uses content addressing to manage and sync data under the hood ( https://github.com/orgs/anyproto/discussions/15 ). I think the fact that local-first P2P apps cannot be built directly on the web is a shame, some of the building blocks, like WebRTC are there, but browsers still lack some APIs to allow for more bottom-up innovat…

TLDR for others: Anytype is using IPLD ( https://ipld.io/ ), which is a project that came out of IPFS, but Anytype doesn't use IPFS itself (nor libp2p, or multiformats). Seemingly they felt it was necessary to write their own network layer and more as stable identifiers and logic for merging documents was too complicated to put on top of IPFS: > We also considered using IPFS, but its approach to content identifiers d…

IPFS last I checked still has an extreme bandwidth wasting habit. Unless something has changed, which would be awesome, They spam want lists to all connected peers just in case they have a block of data, and there can be dozens to hundreds of peers at once.

Re: Show HN: Anytype – local-first, P2P knowledge management

#57

Post by eternityforest »

dboreham wrote: post #37
2color wrote: post #16

As someone who's been active in the IPFS community, it's really exciting to see how Anytype uses content addressing to manage and sync data under the hood ( https://github.com/orgs/anyproto/discussions/15 ). I think the fact that local-first P2P apps cannot be built directly on the web is a shame, some of the building blocks, like WebRTC are there, but browsers still lack some APIs to allow for more bottom-up innovat…

You could make a chromium fork with the server-required measures disabled but so far nobody has succeeded in finding a business model to fund that long term.

There's no server required measures. There's even a flag that lets you treat a specific IP as a secure context for domainless stuff(Hopefully nobody ruins that).

The problem is actual missing features that would need to be added. Mozilla tried with FlyWeb but abandoned the project.

Re: Show HN: Anytype – local-first, P2P knowledge management

#58

Post by eternityforest »

orthecreedence wrote: post #4

I found Anytype a few months ago and thought "wow maybe I can ditch Turtl (I am the creator) and just use this." A few things bugged me about it: - It's a source-available license. - You can't share with others (yet) even though they promote this as a feature. - They call it e2e encrypted, but all your data lives unencrypted on-disk. In other words, it's encrypted in transit but not at rest. Anyone/anything that can…

Turtl is gonna be P2P? That's exciting! Maybe we'll finally have a Google Keep killer.

So far SyncThing is the best P2P system I've ever seen, I wonder how hard it would be to just make their engine into an embeddable component and use that, so we could keep notes in plaintext folders.

Re: Show HN: Anytype – local-first, P2P knowledge management

#59

Post by jweissman »

Longtime user too and overall it is great. The local first speed is hard to beat. The open core model is interesting too. But yes the writing experience is sometimes a bit messy, copying is sometimes awkward. There’s an annoying bug in the iOS client where you have to reopen the app to play a different audio file, which is not awful but a bit grating.

Re: Show HN: Anytype – local-first, P2P knowledge management

#60

Post by pronkin »

jweissman wrote: post #59

Longtime user too and overall it is great. The local first speed is hard to beat. The open core model is interesting too. But yes the writing experience is sometimes a bit messy, copying is sometimes awkward. There’s an annoying bug in the iOS client where you have to reopen the app to play a different audio file, which is not awful but a bit grating.

Big focus for the next year to smoothen an experience. Thank you for being with us. I’ll check about this annoying bug on Ios.
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