I received an email for beta invite of Anytype. It’s open to everyone. I had a look at their mobile app which is promising for beta release. It’s open source, E2EE, and funded by a Swiss organisation.
What are your initial thoughts?
This app looks more like a collaboration tool (such as Notion) and less like a notes app. They state this on their Github:
Our long-term vision is for Anytype to enable large-scale collaboration to create a global repository of interconnected knowledge.
Besides what you said it also stores your data locally — but as of now, local data is not encrypted, only data synced to a backup node is E2EE.
They do not store data on a centralized server, but rather on a private IPFS network. I am not an expert on this and I cannot find more details, so feel free to pitch in. Furthermore, here is an excerpt from their FAQ page:
TLDR: your account is protected by a seed phrase only you know; all of your data is sharded, E2E encrypted, stored on-device, and synced in your local network or via anytype nodes that can’t read your content.
And indeed, they appear to be based in Switzerland and also have an EU designated representative, which would suggest they are GDPR compliant (as per their Privacy Policy).
From what I can gather, their product looks promising and might be a viable replacement for Notion in the future, but it still appears to be in beta.
Edit: Changed wording for clarity.
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Indeed, it’s more like a knowledge management app. There were two apps which I have waiting to replace obsidian and notion: appflowy and Anytype. Tried the first one, but not satisfied. For Anytype, they are generously giving 1 gb for cloud.
Tbh, as long as E2EE is properly implemented, it’s not important which cloud provider they use.
We will see after beta.
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Anytype is now in public beta. They have also made all of their source code public on Github making it finally verifiable, and in addition you can now try self-hosting it.
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have you tried logseq?
I used both apps. Anytype is more powerful than Logseq and has templates and customisation like Notion. After looking back to Logseq, it comes to me a very simplistic app.
I nearly forgot about Anytype. I downloaded it when their private beta first launched, and I generally liked it. I don’t personally have a place in my workflows for an app like it though, so I didn’t get much use out of it unfortunately, but I could definitely see how it’d be useful for a lot of people.
I’ll give it another try sometime. We don’t typically recommend “beta” software, but given that their beta over a year ago was relatively decent, I wouldn’t mind adding it if the current beta isn’t too problematic.
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I also have tested Antype for a long time, and I decided to completely switch to it. It is more than a note-taking app and a real competitor to Notion. In the end, I am planning to move my notebooks (notesnook), task manager (icloud reminders and notion) and knowledge management data (logseq) to anytype.
The app seems really promising, and they plan to release a lot of features. If they release the ability to change the local folder, I plan to test the syncing via proton or another cloud provider. Otherwise, I am planning to pay after I hit 1 gb limit since i am planning to move all of my documents and personal stuff to anytype.
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