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Comment by hosh | Hacker News Reader

Although a big selling point for Anytype is that it is local-first.

My main gripe with Evernote now, is that in its effort to be a collaborative app, there is a lot of network latency for edits on my mobile device. By comparison, NotesNook is local-first and super fast.

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I forgot to mention, affine.pro is self-hostable too... and it doesn't require any account registration whatsoever on their website.

What I mean by “local-first” is not the same as “self-host”. Local-first software are architected in a way where the local device is the source of truth. It usually uses CDRTs or something like git to sync with other peers. It is not a client-server architecture. Uploading files to a personal server is more of designating the server as a peer and regularly syncing with it, similar to how git works with remote repos.

Local-first architecture allows for better control over what you are storing. For me though, local-first architecture lets me take notes with little latency, and I don’t have to wait for timeouts so that the app realizes it is offline. I just want to get to typing in my note quickly and think about syncs later.

Yes, but Affine is local-first. You don't need a container infra or anything, just run locally without an account, data is stored in a user folder.

How does the P2P syncing aspect work with Affine? I didn't see much of anything written about that on the Readme.

EDIT: Aha, https://github.com/toeverything/OctoBase

Indeed, AFFiNE is also local-first! Anytype does have a lot of distinct functionality though, and the P2P model is a big plus there over other options..

That said, AFFiNE also appears to be genuinely open source, while Anytype is only source available.

I am in favor of genuine open source rather than source-available. I also see the OctoBase project, which enables local-first, p2p collaboration using CRDTs.

What about importing Evernote into AFFINE? Do such tools exist?

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