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Anytype – local-first, P2P Notion alternative

anytype.io

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Re: Anytype – local-first, P2P Notion alternative

#11

Post by pshirshov »

In contrast with many others crappy things (Notion, Standard Notes, Joplin, Notesnook, Obsidian, etc, etc, etc, I tried literally dozens of notetaking apps, including some self-hosted stuff), Anytype is, at least, barely acceptable.

It can be used to write notes and share them between devices, it can be used in offline mode, it is cross-platform, it has acceptable navigation and more or less good editor with proper code highlighting. Also, you don't have to share your content with server owners.

The UX isn't that nice at this point (especially the graph view which is totally useless if you have at least hundreds of objects) but, again, that's something acceptable and it's free (at least for now).

Re: Anytype – local-first, P2P Notion alternative

#13

Post by pshirshov »

derbOac wrote: post #7

Can someone explain this is — what it does and what it's used for? I'm not familiar with Notion at all and the page — which basically says you can use it for everything — is not helpful in this regard. It sounds like a P2P shared note and document app but it's not clear to me.

It is a P2P note taking app with some object-oriented modeling capabilities.

Re: Anytype – local-first, P2P Notion alternative

#14

Post by Eric_WVGG »

mgrandl wrote: post #2

Just downloaded it. This looks incredibly polished and smooth! Will play around with it a bit, although I have never been good at taking notes.

iOS version is very well-crafted, but the type on iPad Mini is much, much too small. (I say that as a person who generally prefers small type.)

Re: Anytype – local-first, P2P Notion alternative

#16

Post by kwanbix »

jitl wrote: post #5

(I work at Notion) The Anytype model is really cool - in a way, they’ve rebuilt Lotus Notes with 21st century E2E encrypted protocols and technology. They’ve built a really solid personal knowledge app with many of Notion’s features - and some clear improvements over Notion. However they also demonstrate the complexity and tradeoffs of the E2E approach. Anytype has been a work-in-progress since at least 2019. Their d…

It is so interesting that you are mentioning Lotus Notes because that is exactly what I was thinking when I was setting up our Confluence pages: it is exactly like Lotus Notes' Knowledge Base template, with some additional funtionality. Crazy how we keep reinventing things.

By the way, and this is just my point of view: we moved from Notion to Confluence because Notion has no free tier for small teams (4 people). We were working on a project for a not-for profit org and their money is always tight.

Since you already give Notion free, have you ever evaluating doing like Atlassian that up to 10 (or 5) people the thing is free?

Re: Anytype – local-first, P2P Notion alternative

#17

Post by lewisjoe »

jitl wrote: post #5

(I work at Notion) The Anytype model is really cool - in a way, they’ve rebuilt Lotus Notes with 21st century E2E encrypted protocols and technology. They’ve built a really solid personal knowledge app with many of Notion’s features - and some clear improvements over Notion. However they also demonstrate the complexity and tradeoffs of the E2E approach. Anytype has been a work-in-progress since at least 2019. Their d…

Google Docs have somehow solved E2E encryption with safe sharing and collaboration. They haven't advertised it much, just a mention here and there as an enterprise requirement or something, it's good how they've implemented it on top of an existing web-first collaboration product.

They do have technical challenges implementing add-on services on top of content - For example, the grammar checker or any content assistance is disabled in E2E encrypted docs, which makes sense.

Surprisingly they support spellcheck: I guess they are shipping dictionaries to browsers and use a local lookup. (Google Docs doesn't rely on browser's dictionary because their editor is not based on `contenteditable`)

Re: Anytype – local-first, P2P Notion alternative

#18

Post by whywhywhywhy »

lewisjoe wrote: post #17
jitl wrote: post #5

(I work at Notion) The Anytype model is really cool - in a way, they’ve rebuilt Lotus Notes with 21st century E2E encrypted protocols and technology. They’ve built a really solid personal knowledge app with many of Notion’s features - and some clear improvements over Notion. However they also demonstrate the complexity and tradeoffs of the E2E approach. Anytype has been a work-in-progress since at least 2019. Their d…

Google Docs have somehow solved E2E encryption with safe sharing and collaboration. They haven't advertised it much, just a mention here and there as an enterprise requirement or something, it's good how they've implemented it on top of an existing web-first collaboration product. They do have technical challenges implementing add-on services on top of content - For example, the grammar checker or any content assista…

Operating systems should be providing spellcheck to textboxes everywhere anyway.

Makes no sense every app rolling their own and not using my operating system dictionary with my own corrections.

Extremely frustrating every Electron app just rolls their own rubbish spellcheck, or doesn't have it at all.

Re: Anytype – local-first, P2P Notion alternative

#20

Post by squirtlebonflow »

derbOac wrote: post #7

Can someone explain this is — what it does and what it's used for? I'm not familiar with Notion at all and the page — which basically says you can use it for everything — is not helpful in this regard. It sounds like a P2P shared note and document app but it's not clear to me.

It's much more complicated than that and that's it's biggest downside. I've been trying to learn how to use it but it's quite confusing figuring out their terminology and UI.

One thing that I did with it was make a Recipe type that has any number of Ingredient types in it, takes any number or arbitrary Dietary Restriction tags (e.g. Gluten, Dairy, Vegan), and takes parameters like cooking time and number of servings etc. So not only is a Recipe a note that explains how to make it, but it has a template with the boilerplate information pre-filled so when writing down a new Recipe, it's faster, and it has all that metadata, which allows you to construct Sets from the Recipes.

For example, I can have a document called Quick Vegan Crowd-Pleasers that is a Set of all vegan Recipes with cooking time under 30 minutes and 8+ servings. If I really wanted to go psycho mode with it, I could track every ingredient currently in my kitchen and filter recipes by what I can make with what I have on hand.

You can really do a lot with it. It's just time intensive to set up and also to keep up with entering data.

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