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Comment by chambers | Hacker News Reader

The proportion of philosophy to features in their marketing seems off. They say "trust our code, not our words" and then spend several paragraphs of words talking up their ideals. It feels like something is being hidden or talked around.

Data-independence may be one aspect that's not transparent. Compared to https://obsidian.md/, I can't just use raw Markdown or CSV file with Anytype. I've paid Obsidian $300+ just because it's data independence with a few obvious strings attached. By the same token, if I pursued a local-version of Notion for my team, I would also want the same freedom that local, open-standard files offer.

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Anytype's functionality cannot operate using Markdown or CSV, as these formats are limited for our specific use-cases. Instead, we've defined our data format in a protobuf file, which is open and MIT-licensed. You can always compile a version yourself and use your data without relying on Anytype. We hope to include data adaptors in future developments

To be fair, you can compile the code (including the protobuf format) and implement your own export to any format. It's a bit obtuse, but I had a obsidian vault full of markdown files that are also completely useless as they have a bunch metadata that needs the obsidian plugin to render. This is not a critique of obsidian, but there is a limit of markdown and obsidian is bypassing it using a lot of extra code. If obsidian got deleted from the internet, I would have my markdown files but a lot of the processing would be gone.

If we were to store markdowns only with linking and no advanced tables, do we need any advanced app on top?

Obsidian as I recall, is closed source, and they give some weird non reasons for that, so it’s not radical to assume they’re doing something ‘not in the open’, so not a good contender when talking about owning your data and data independence!

Moreover, the statements just meant you don’t have to take our ‘words’ for it, here’s the proof. And in a different context, developers explained their motivations and what they’re inspired by, to work on this kind of software. There’s absolutely no over the top ‘marketing’ to any type as well, as they explained in different post, they don’t want to market, buy built in customer base with VC money and so on.

Markdown sucks in some ways though. Not being able to merge cells in tables? Come on.

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