February community update

🥜 Start of the year in a nutshell

After being nominated for Product Hunt’s Golden Kitty award, crossing the 190,000 user mark, and pushing a post-holiday release in January, we kicked off February on a very productive note. 

On 14 February, we hosted our first town hall of the year. Our founders went into some of our milestones, answered community questions and covered the roadmap from now until the end of 2024. 

If you missed it, you can rewatch it here! We also answered extra questions in written format, including our plan to approach local-first communication with a chat feature and what prevents Anytype from closing or being purchased in 5 years from today.

🏗️ Product updates

🗃 Quick capture improvements
After introducing a revamped quick capture menu in our last update, we've further improved it to help you customize your workflows. You can now arrange different object types according to your preference by right-clicking on them and modify your default object type or delete objects directly from the quick capture menu.

🌈 More embeds
We've also added embeds for Open Street Maps, FigmaSketchfab, and GitHub Gist, along with other platforms. Extra thank you goes to @LavaCXX for helping us Kroki and Bilibili. Now, simply paste your links directly into the object editor and choose the 'paste as embed' option and voila! 🎉

🗳️ Vote for your next ANY Experience
Since launching the ANY Experience Gallery, we've been thrilled by the fantastic contributions and genius templates we've received. To further its development, we launched a 10-week challenge inspired by your requests, selecting 10 unique posts where community members have sought help building specific workflows within the app. Based on your votes, each week we'll showcase an Experience and demonstrate how to build it in Anytype

Now, it's your turn to cast your vote and let us know which one you'd like to see next! These Experiences will then be uploaded to the Gallery for everyone to install and explore. We’re already on week 3! 💡

If you're eager to lend a helping hand beyond voting, you’re kindly invited to prepare your own use case and submit it to the Gallery during its designated week. We've been incredibly grateful for contributions from users like @Hexara7777 and @ChristianHaake in the past, and we're thrilled to see what you'll bring to the gallery next! 🌟

🛠️ Improvements and bug fixes
In the background we’ve also been fixing a few issues including updating Electron and adding Linux build targets. For smoother sidebar navigation, we addressed several issues like auto show/hide, keyboard shortcuts, and resizing glitches. Additionally, tree widgets with linked collections now display their contents correctly, enhancing usability.

In Sets & Relations, improvements include better display of combo boxes, handling of tags in sets, support for years 0-99 in date relations, and clearer options in the relation select menu. The sorting of tag and status relations alphabetically and the grouping of system relations at the bottom enhance organization and accessibility.

The update also addresses issues in Tables, Editor, Spellcheck, Graph, and other miscellaneous fixes like resolving inconsistencies in spellcheck behavior, ensuring proper rendering of imported PDFs, and enhancing the overall stability and usability of the application.

🥹 Community love
We launched a page documenting all the supportive and wonderful things that people said about Anytype from across the web. When the going gets tough, one look is enough to give us energy to continue building.

Thank you to everyone and to those whom we couldn’t feature also 🖤🔋.

🧑‍🚀 What’s coming next

Multiplayer Release 
This is going to be a big one and will feature one of the most anticipated features on our roadmap for this season: multiplayer v1! We’re currently testing it internally with our team and every click, comment and collaborative action is a pure joy. This has been our vision from the start and it is almost here!

We’re also planning to unveil advanced search using tags and object types to make information retrieval within your workspace more robust. Once live, it will bring some improvements to the UX of featured relations.

This release is tentatively planned for April, marking the official start of local-first collaboration, and we would love to ask for your support to help others discover it.

Memberships
Soon after the launch of multiplayer, we’re planning to launch memberships to chart a path towards sustainability. This was one of the questions in the latest town hall and one that users have kindly asked us since the launch of the public beta last summer. 

As a kind reminder, a free tier will always remain in Anytype and your data will always be yours. Users who choose to support us, will receive increased limits for collaboration and storage, priority support, as well as other perks. We will detail all of those in a separate blog post over the coming weeks. 

Town Hall
In the coming weeks, we’ll be holding a Town Hall to introduce the concept of memberships in the Anytype network.

Please stay tuned for an official announcement from the team with the date and invite link.

🎈Cool things we enjoyed in February

The latest dispatch straight from our #random Slack channel:

🧊 GitHub’s arctic code vault
🪐 Alan Kay’s full talk at UCLA and the limits of humanity
🔒 European Court of Justice prohibits encryption banning 
🔮 Photographing dreams and thoughts
🌃 Robot Koch and Mickael Le Goff’s performance
📟 AI and (the different types of) trust
🛼 “Cast an optic” and other Victorian slang

And that’s a wrap, see you at the March Town Hall!