He replaced TickTick and Roam with Amplenote in 2021 I believe. Last year he produced a video entitled, 5 Best Productivity Features that Made Me Switch to Amplenote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voEkgvYETdM&t=315s

as well as Why I Stopped Using Todoist and Ticktick, and What I Use Now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ8ljrXYva0

He continues to concentrate on instructional and review videos for productivity tips and software and app/browser plugins, including Logseq, Napkin (a peculiar favorite of his), Obsidian, Notion, etc

I agree in general. Shu Omi makes informative videos. I shun his recommendations, but find his demonstrations of the software in question very useful.

NickG wrote:

I'm wary of commentary from people who make their
living out of talking about these tools (as opposed to those who use the
tools to help make a living)

By the way it looks like Anytype is gearing up for more stable support and growth, as they just completed a $13.4 million VC round.

https://blog.anytype.io/anytype-raises-13-4million-usd-funding/

That about what Craft got from its first round of funding (Craft also completed a second round for a total of $42m), but a drop in the bucket compared to Notion, which anytype is most compared to. Notion has pulled in more than $340m so far (and went on a small spending spree, picking up the Cron calendering company, Flowdash and Automate.io).

Anytype is gearing up to start charging for the product when it exits beta - which appears to be soon - as well as offering additional features at an additional charge. Right now users who weren't in the Alpha get 1Gb storage on Anytype's backup node (if and only if you want to use it), but "Once that's exceeded, additional files are only synced P2P. They're planning on providing extra storage for a cost and soon anyone will be able to self-host their own backup node."

They had a page on the beta to allow you to self-host your backups but then they pulled it, and now say it's planned for 3Q of this year.

The advantage of the data being encrypted is that your computer's file manager cannot read it, which is potentially problematic if the app crashes and borks data. An Anytype rep responded, "we have described our data format, so your data is yours, you can write any adaptor to read/write"

https://github.com/anyproto/any-block

This highly geeky suggestion shockingly means the company has little interest in offering strong export features itself. If third parties step up, great, but will those solutions be supported? Might they break as the app develops (or data formats get changed or amended)? Seems like s bit of a mess.

It does seem like this space is getting so competitive and filled with VC money (ClickUp has received over $500m in funding) that sooner or later (probably sooner *than* later) there's going to be a shake-up: products will fail, or some of these otherwise-unprofitable companies (and most [all?] of them are unprofitable) will stop getting cash injections and fail from cash flow problems. I've never seen so many web-connected productivity, writing, todo, calendar and wiki apps (and the huge variety of cross-pollinated iterations) and it seems it just cannot last.

satis wrote:

some of these otherwise-unprofitable companies
(and most [all?] of them are unprofitable) will stop getting cash
injections and fail from cash flow problems.

The bootstrapped programs should all benefit when that happens. That includes Obsidian and Capacities.

satis wrote:

I've never seen so many
web-connected productivity, writing, todo, calendar and wiki apps (and
the huge variety of cross-pollinated iterations) and it seems it just
cannot last.

It's slightly off-topic, but I've started experimenting with Mindomo as a notes app. It's established, presumably profitable (founded 2007, no funding rounds) and relatively feature rich compared to the newer apps. I don't know how many mindmappers and outliners have a feature set that can compete in the note space but presumably those that can will also gain from a VC APPocalypse

What are the touted benefits of anytype vs. Notion? I don't use either, but Notion seems stable and established, and it is relatively cheap for this type of app, where the subscription prices seem to be going up.

Steve

Local first. Privacy, security, encryption.

The 3 major weaknesses of Notion (deepening on your use case) are:

- No full offline mode: if you don't have an internet connection, capabilities are limited to what can be dome with the local cache.
- Data is not fully encrypted, e2e and at least at both ends. I tried to use Notion for work, but had to put it to one side because I couldn't use it for confidential client data.
- It can be slow to open/respond on mobile devices, which makes quick capture painful

AnyType keeps all data locally (so internet only needed for sync between remote devices) and it's fully encrypted. @Satis made the point in his post of early Sunday that that's two-edged, because you can only see the local data via the AnyType app (not via Finder or similar). There is a Markdown export facility, but of course that doesn't preserve all the relationships and non-text content. The local storage also makes it pretty quick and responsive on all devices.

I think it's worth emphasising that Notion is far more feature-complete and mature generally than AnyType. If you need a system you can fully exploit right now, and the weaknesses aren't critical, then it's a better bet.

Anytype needs (among other things) collaboration (later this year), repeating tasks, derived relations (formulae), some key external interactions (e.g. Google calendar) and some fit-and-finish work before it's a full alternative. It's working well for me with its current limitations (I'm not using it professionally - I'm retired from my project manager job). If I were still working, it would have a (limited) place in my workflow.

As to how this segment will play out - I think AnyType will be a niche product for people for whom security and privacy are overriding factors.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

What are the touted benefits of anytype vs. Notion? I don't use either,
but Notion seems stable and established, and it is relatively cheap for
this type of app, where the subscription prices seem to be going up.

Steve

NickG wrote:

I think AnyType will be a niche product for people for
whom security and privacy are overriding factors.

Which is what concerns me. Is that a big enough market? When you take VC money you're forced to try to recoup the funding, typically resulting in the Silicon Valley madness of shooting for moonrocket growth to gain mindshare and marketshare to charge $$, necessarily pivoting to a corporate focus (which is where the real money is).

Anytype has the potential to be a lesser competitor to Notion, while being a supercharged Joplin or Standard Notes with its e2ee and privacy focus. But I worry that's not a big enough ecological niche to support itself, and it risks becoming diluted with feature-bloat (or spends all its time playing catch-up with Notion) to appeal to a broader market.

Thanks all for answering my question.

Steve Z.

Well, contrary to many expectations (my own included!), AnyType continues to flourish and thrive.

The latest version has had some nice upgrades to the UI.

And the UX has improved too, now that universal search works across all document types (including tables, which previously were missed out of searches!)

While the AnyType model still isn’t as transparent as e.g. Obsidian, it doesn’t take long to familiarise yourself with the basics, and once you start experimenting with database tables, you soon get quite excited about the possibilities (as already mentioned, not dissimilar to Notion. But cheaper!)

It’s also still fully cross-platform, too. It’s well worth looking at again, especially since shared workspaces are now a thing!

Cheers,
Bill