Anytype has finally followed through on their promise and open sourced their repositories. Self hosting is now possible though there is no docker container available.
This is a major step forward for all PKMS and I wholeheartedly congratulate them.
btw Anytype is free, even their included sync service, which is the best of any offline-first style PKMS I have experienced. Anytype is top 3 PKMS for me, followed by Logseq and SiYuan. They're in good company and now it's only going to improve!
I couldn't find a good one on their site so I downloaded the app. It's a fancy notes app with templates for a bunch of different things. The hook seems to be the decentralized sync system.
Right - I wanted to like Notion but you can't use it without an internet connection. That's when I found Anytype and really liked it. It's offline first too, so no worrying about not being able to open your notes on a flight. Or in a tunnel, etc.
It looks interesting as an app, but in context of self-hosting there are couple of speed bumps:
The server side is quite complicated. (compared to Joplin for example) It's multiple services and it also needs Mongo, Redis and S3. Makes sense for them to do it this way to be able to scale up, but for few users hosted locally it's quite a lot of moving parts.
You need to compile client apps to self-host. This effectively kills this as an option on iOS.
Oof yeah if you can't use their app store client with a selfhosted instance then that's a major barrier. You'd have to use xcode to build and sideload it, so yeah effectively killing ios. I think that'll come up in the self hosting discussion as that's a pretty major omission. I assume that will be easy enough to remedy in the near future
To be fair, the onboarding experience in the app is impressively good. It's extremely straightforward with no unnecessary buttons or steps. So I kind of see why they might be hesitant to add complexity by supporting self-hosted backend as an option.
I just tested it and it looks amazing. I wonder if there are any templates for a Bullet Journal.
This software is insane feature-wise, a lot of things to play with.
I'd definitely suggest Logseq over Anytype for a bullet journal type use case - and the good news is since they're both free you can still use anytype for anything else. I'm currently a logseq backer and it's my main, but I discovered SiYuan recently and it's absolutely fantastic as well. I had been using Anytype before I switched to logseq but it lacks transclusion.
IMO Anytype is better for managing projects while Logseq is better for your typical PKMS, creating a knowledge base and journaling. In terms of task management, logseq edges out anytype though they both have pros and cons, but nothing you can't work around.
That's right - I'm not sure the format, and their markdown export is honestly pretty garbage. Though Logseq I believe is moving to a db type infrastructure as well though you will always have the choice to store in plaintext.
I prefer Anytype to Obsdiain, and I prefer Logseq to both, though primarily because logseq has transclusion support and anytype doesn't appear to be putting that in their priorities. If transclusion isn't important to you, Anytype is really great. It has a OOP kinda philosophy where everything is a type or a relation between types. And each type can have several templates - let's say I create a type called journal. I can make several templates - a daily journal, a meditation journal, a therapy journal, etc. Then I can use sets and inline sets to show all journal entries of a particular type.
Speaking of Journals, I prefer how logseq handles it, with daily notes and a daily note template. I still have main repositories of notes, which I embed in my daily note template, and then I have my daily musings for just quick notes and stuff. I also have a page that queries all of the daily musings from all of my daily journals - essentially extracting the more fleeting stuff from my daily notes.
I recommend also looking at SiYuan.
Though in terms of price, Anytype is currently king as it's completely free
Transclusion is somewhat important to me so thanks for pointing out that Anytype doesn't support it. It does still look interesting though, so I'll at least try it out.
I haven't tried logseq much yet either, but it did seem more org-like than anything else which was pretty appealing to me. I was mostly just waiting to see how it matures and for it to get a good mobile app. Obsidian impressed me by supporting basically the same plugins on mobile and desktop (meaning I can use a 3rd party sync plugin on both), but there are parts I don't like about it.
SiYuan
Thanks for this recommendation, it's the first I've seen SiYuan but it looks pretty good too. I added it to my ever-growing list to try!
My current solution is VSCode with Dendron and Excalidraw self-hosted using coder.com's code-server. It's not perfect, but fits well enough for me as a knowledge management system.
If someone repackages AnyType as a web app I can self-host in a similar way, I'll be over the moon.
There's a discussion going on right now about packaging using docker compose. I'm not certain about the possibilities for a webapp. I think it's built on electron which is essentially just a chromium tab disguised as a native app. If that's the case it would be very easy to make a web interface
Wow, thank you for this! AT will become my next PKMS, their features plan are dope and in line with their philosophy about freedom and humanity. Never thought PKMS reach the deep understanding as this..
I think it's just the default that people are used to. It has some good features as well but I think it's really just because it's the most well known.