I’ve been casting around because Obsidian is still just terrible for the kind of task management I do. I’ve had my eye on Anytype for a long time, and am taking a bit of time today to play with it and see what it can do. I am dubious that it will compare to Obsidian favorably in most respects, but the task management side of things seems like it might be quite solid.
I thought I’d come here and see if anyone else has tried it, and was a bit surprised to find no threads about it yet.
I love Anytype, and I recommend it to my Notion-using friends. But it’s fairly irrelevant for Obsidian users which is probably why there aren’t any threads on it.
Even if they were the same functionality-wise, I think the biggest selling point of Obsidian is plain-text Markdown files. If I asked you what the storage format of Anytype was, you probably couldn’t say. I had to trawl through the code on their Github just to find that out.
Markdown great for longevity - random other storage solution not so much.
Agreed, that’s a huge negative, and will prevent me from ever adopting Anytype for most of what I do.
I tried Anytype, and it seems to be pretty cool, but for me it has the same problem as Notion and similar apps: the block structure of pages. Is is great when you need to create some complex layout, but in my experience it makes it very inconvenient to write and edit long texts. Obsidian is first and foremost the writing app based on the simple text files, and if is clearly preferable for writing (which is my main use case).
I have tried Anytype, and I think the whole sets approach to databases as well as their version of the graph is pretty innovative. However, it just isn’t as robust as Notion or Obsidian yet, so I haven’t used it for anything. I tried to use it for school, but Obsidian was just so much more convenient, so I went with it instead.
I want to like it, I think it’s cool and innovative, but right now I think Obsidian wins. Everything Anytype does exists in Obsidian already as a core feature or plugin. There’s even a sets plugin based on Anytype being reviewed for community plugins right now.
Does that matter if it’s exportable?
Exportable data is certainly a plus, but it’s not quite the same as knowing you can work with your vault of text files in any editor at any time. I’ve occasionally turned to Notepad++ and VS Code to do bulk search & replace and other fancy stuff that I didn’t see a way to do within Obsidian.
It says local first then asks me to create a “new account”? How is this a local first?
This is local account, it’s created on you device, your need it for syncing and the future p2p collaboration.