Stumbled on this program called Anytype a while ago, a note-taking application similar to Notion. It’s surprisingly well polished and works for me.

They have a lot of aspects which seem like they’d appeal to more privacy-conscious people. Plus decentralization should appeal to Lemmings of course. But as far as I’m aware I’ve never heard anyone talk about this program. I was wondering if this is just due to obscurity, or if there are reasons it’s not often recommended.

  • MangoPenguinEnglish
    24·
    1 year ago

    I gave it a try, but what turns me off is the weird decentralization that’s sort of black box? Like I have a recovery phrase which I associate with blockchain stuff, and there’s a vague button that says “offload data to our backup node”. And then I seem to have an account with them? The settings mentions deleting an account which is weird, because I thought it was local/lan sync only.

    Their website says “No server”, but in the settings on the app it says I’ve used xxMB out of 1GB of remote storage, where/what is that if there’s no server involved? Where is my data being uploaded to?

    I can’t seem to find where it stores data in a standard format on my local filesystem, so if anytype shuts down how do I migrate? It looks like my local data is even encrypted for some reason??

    Basically both on their website and in the app it feels like the concept is all over the place, it can’t decide if it’s local where you own your data, stored on a server somewhere, or some sort of weird blockchain decentralized thing where your data just might vanish one day.

    For the app itself I can’t figure out how to get an editing/format tool bar like I have in onenote, to change font, size, headings, insert tables, and that sort of thing.

    Navigation is also confusing, I created a new note (page?) and now I can only find it in “All Objects” which is just a giant mess of stuff, whereas I’m looking for something like a tab bar with my sections and pages organized in a tree or something like onenote does it.

    Overall my impression is it’s very confusing to use and understand, with a lot going on in the UI but still missing basic editing tools and organization.