New pkm app out after 18 months in private beta.

https://sublime.app/

https://sublime.app/pricing

Welcome guide (old version?): https://sublimeapp.notion.site/Welcome-to-Sublime-e377615d0874406aad06050b4461bb50

Year-old Reddit thread from devs: https://www.reddit.com/r/PKMS/comments/1e08d3z/sublime_a_pkm_tool_for_people_who_hate_pkm_tools/

Anyone using Sublime? I tried it briefly but didn't really understand how I'd use it. It is like a mashup of Twitter and an app like Supernotes, where you can tap into other people's notes. That didn't appeal to me, but as I said, I'm not sure I understood it.

Steve Z.

It seems like it takes shoebox & search/related-search concepts from DevonThink, then adds the option of a sharing/importing component, with storage flexibility, as a service.

Any info goes onto a Card, cards go into specific folders, but cards can go into multiple folders. To me this is like a graphical representation of hashtags. Text, pdfs, links, highlights and images can be saved. Import from Readwise or Kindle. Supposely anything can be exported, no lock-in.

They call it a place where notes can be captured and reside, be combined and connected with other notes and discover related ideas... including related ideas publicly posted by others. Notes can be public or private, so you can collaborate/share/comment, or you can keep notes to yourself. Public notes can be discovered and recombined onto yor personal Canvases. Service has natural-language search. You can use Canvas to create a Miro like board to mix ideas.

No calendar, no todo lists.

Good overview, and comparison to Notion (which I don't see as a direct competitor, but the author calls a Notion clone).

https://medium.com/@theo-james/sublime-app-review-another-notion-clone-3eef67ec3b07

Satis, thanks for the information on Sublime. Do you use it yourself?

Steve Z.

I've been using the free version. (50 cards, 3 private collections, limitations to related-cards and integrations.) The app will improve over time, but what will be really exciting is if it takes off enough for the network effects from people sharing note info. Its success depends on how well and fast you can use the service, and usefulness is dependent on network effects, which aren't there yet. (Early Twitter and BlueSky weren't useful until suddenly they were.) And 50 cards for the free version can't really build up enough data points for the service to really shine either. But the potential is there.

With all the file types (images, highlights, text, pdfs, social media links/posts, podcast links and embedded audio/podcasts) and the use of canvases which can be reused/remixed, it's a bridge between a collection of information, a Miro/Pinterest, a personal shebox like Devonthing, a website, and a bit of a social network. And it's married it to apparently powerful natural language search that looks at and inside images.

It's like a mix, and upgrade, of Tumblr and Pinterest, which I find potentially exciting. I'm a big Pinterest user, a site which isn't as used in the US as elsewhere, and has huge network effects from its 500 million users: as my collection of dozens of boards has grown (and the number of Likes of other peoples' pins has increased) Pinterest has been able to learn to better recommend similar or interesting new pins based on my (mostly private) pins. I have narrow-focused boards dedicated to topics like pinhole photography, scan art, grid typologies, photograms, Italian product design, Cephalopoda, typefaces, 1950s illustrations, and home furnishings: the site's use of machine learning has allowed it to suggest really fantastic options from other users that are spot on for my interests, and many are items or links I would not normally have encountered. And when I'm shown a public pin it shows who created it, and if I click over to them I can subscribe to interesting boards/board feeds by that user or even *to* that user, which informs my feed of new pins to look at (or not).

And that's where Sublime has the potential to go. Take the ability to create Miro/Pinterest-style boards of Cards of virtually any data type, share the Cards and/or the Boards/Canvases, see a flow of related published items (which you can add to your own folders/Canvases), do natural language searches to find related items, and build knowedge nests that can be exported.

That's the potential at any rate.

It seems like just another of those apps where people share their information for free (or even pay for them like here), then that information gets leveraged to generate profits for the tech company, and in this case specifically train AI, which they can then leverage for profits in the best case and far worse in the worse cases. The world would be so much better if people kept their thoughts to themselves in face of malicious actors.

This is a service whose data is by default private, but offers people the *ability* to share data and have it remixed and shared. Don't want to share data? You don't have to. Denying the value and popularity of all Miro- and blogging services (not to mention social media) with one grand wave as being the product of (gasp) capitalists seems off-base.

Michael Dean, an architect-turned-writer, was recently awarded an O’Shaughnessy Fellowship Grant to develop Essay Architecture. He found 2nd brain apps weren't working for him so he started using Sublime, and shared some of his work in it

https://tinyurl.com/ykffuwkm

He's also one of the people Sublime put on their YouTube channel and discusses how it helps his writing and sharing process.

https://www.youtube.com/@sublimeapp

How's this any different from Glasp or Hypothesis (the latter one can search for annotations of others by tag/by user/ keywords without even needing an active account) other than the visual component? I just don't see the added value other than the rebranding. But the app does seem to be a lot in the spotlight recently (eg a random presentation going viral) indicating a hidden hand propelling it to mass adoption.