Looking Back, Moving Forward: Our Journey and Plans for 2025

Anytype Team -

Co-founder Anton Pronkin originally shared this letter on our community forum. In it, he expands on Anytype’s history and our priorities for this year. Its relevance is broad, so we’re also publishing it here.

This year has been the most exciting in Anytype’s history. We achieved record-breaking metrics and launched the long-awaited collaborative AnySync and Multiplayer v1. These milestones unlock powerful new possibilities for us. We’d like to reflect on how we got here and share our plans for the future.

We started in 2018 with a mission to bring digital freedoms and empower cooperation. These values continue to guide us, making the work both fulfilling and challenging. Building on principle has been our way to do things, and we remain firm in our commitment to this path.

The Prototype

We began with a bold vision: a Unified, Extendable User Interface for the decentralized web, built on a peer-to-peer, content-addressable architecture. In layman’s terms, one place that you can go to collect, capture and share your ideas and work in a variety of formats, that are encrypted and can sync with or without the internet, and that can be used with or without centralized servers. We decided to build on existing networking libraries, so that we could focus on front-end experiences as expanding to collaborative and social use cases has always been our goal.

Our 2019 prototype – a collaborative Notion-like editor in JavaScript on IPFS – worked, but flooded the network at our Berlin office, making it barely usable. Despite its flaws, it upheld our principles: fully local-first and truly decentralized.

We saw block-based editors as the future, not just for productivity but for social interactions. We centered Anytype on unique and extendable primitives: objects, types and relations. Why couldn’t a page be a blog post, a forum thread or some other object? Why not connect everything in a unified graph database, viewable as sets and collections? We were thrilled with the possibilities, though the complexity was immense.

Our early reliance on existing networking libraries was something that we had to revisit when trying to engineer our collaboration feature. The protocol we had used was slow, buggy and unscalable as it supported only one sync node. Then, two years ago that protocol was abandoned by its developers. With no other similar solution available, this meant we needed to put resources toward building AnySync in order to make local-first scalable.

A Huge Thank You to This Community

Today, AnySync beautifully supports truly local first spaces at scale. 20,000 people use AnySync daily. 80,000 use it monthly. It is the foundation on which we have begun the work to build a true alternative to the cloud. Additionally, we also have added Any-Store, a local-first database on which social experiences will be based.

Many projects choose cloud technologies, which are much more mature. But as you know, we are dedicated to creating a true alternative to the cloud. Thank you so much for all the feedback and support you’ve given us. Your belief in our vision inspires us every day, and we’re profoundly grateful to have such a passionate and engaged community with us on this journey.

We also have immense gratitude to our team for their hard work and dedication. Their persistence has allowed us to lay a solid foundation, enabling us to truly accelerate.

Going forward, our focus will be on simplicity, collaboration and quality. Let’s dive deeper.

Simplicity

We’ve heard your feedback: our software has a learning curve, compounded by unique terms in our information architecture and significant complexity. The greatest products are simple but robust, and that’s where we’re placing our bet now.

The first step is our simplified primitives project, introducing the concept of formats like Page, List, Bookmark and others. Each format serves a distinct purpose: a Page works as a block-based editor, a List functions like a database, a Bookmark saves important information for later and so on. This project also reimagines types to address one of our most requested features: applying templates to existing objects. With this, you’ll be able to set up a layout and fields in a type, and all objects will inherit its settings.

Collaboration

We’ve also heard plenty of feedback about multiplayer – the feature that makes Anytype so challenging to develop and is core to our purpose and our mission. Without it, why not just use another tool? Well-known alternatives don’t ask for keychain phrases, store data in markdown, offer a whiteboard and boast countless plugins. Competing with such simplicity is a great challenge when every small feature requires immense effort.

But what those alternatives can’t offer is stable, real-time collaboration over end-to-end encrypted data in a peer-to-peer way. A decentralized, collaborative network has always been our goal and a core part of our mission. This is our second big bet.

We’re bringing a social experience to Anytype by making spaces more interactive. We start with the concept of one space = one group = one chat. Then we’ll expand to include discussions on objects, enabling forum-like use cases. It will significantly improve collaborative use cases. You’ll chat and discuss your pages and files in the same end-to-end encrypted and local-first way.

As part of this project, we’ll soon release notifications and a redesigned vault organization – structured more like traditional messengers, reflecting how our Access Control system works. Our mobile development will be focused more on that.

What does this mean if you’re only interested in a solo experience? You can continue using our software, and its quality will improve over time.

Quality

Another priority is improving the quality and stability of our product. Bugs have piled up, and in our rush to add features, we’ve neglected technical debt. Addressing this will be our third focus.

Here’s what you can definitely expect from our team next year:

  1. Plenty of quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes
  2. Publishing to the web: coming in January
  3. Chats, Discussions & Notifications: starting rollout in February
  4. API & Local AI integration: early access coming in February
  5. Email-based login: while preserving self-custody of your account
  6. Improved collections, sets & lists: better filters, sorts, group and representation

We talked about a lot of these in our recent Town Hall and will be talking about the features we didn’t cover in future events. You can sign up here to be notified when those are happening.

For anyone, anywhere

A heartfelt thank you again to our active community, brilliant team and supportive investors. Together, we’re working to achieve our goals and build software that works for anyone, anywhere, without limits. Let’s bring digital independence to all.