[__jonas]

Do you use Anytype productively?

I have it installed but I find it kind of daunting compared to Notion for organizing my notes, it seems to want to be a more abstract kind of 'knowledge management system'.

I just opened it again and it popped up a 'What's New' with phrases like 'Relations are now properties' and something about 'types', 'templates', 'sets' and 'queries', I really just want to take notes and organize them in a straightforward hierarchy.

[tummler]

Anytype recently made a significant change to the way certain types of information are categorized and related-- which resulted in the "What's New" note you saw. That's just unfortunate timing on your part and was a one-off change that's long been in the works. Not a regular occurrence.

I will say Anytype (and the like) can come off daunting at first, depending on your specific use case. Especially if you're just using it for notes/info/etc, I would recommend not getting too lost in examples and templates. Just make something simple for your purposes using the built-in types. (The "notes" type should suffice for you.)

Then as it evolves over time, you can expand and elaborate as needed. But trying to dive straight into the deep end and create some overarching master system right off the bat will definitely leave you feeling overwhelmed and questioning whether it's worth it.

[__jonas]

I just gave it a try again, unfortunately I couldn't really figure it out, my issues were these:

The Notion import didn't work correctly, I've got tons of links to 'missing pages' and messed up formatting – fine, this I can live with.

I want to see my hierarchy of pages and jump through them intuitively like I would in Notion, instead on the left sidebar there is something called 'widgets', one of them is called 'Pages'. This does not show all my top level pages, instead it seems to show all pages, regardless of how 'deep down' they are, and it also only shows a maximum of 14, so it's kind of useless for me.

Same with navigating through pages, I want to be able to click through to

  /Projects/Some Project/foo/bar

And then quickly go back to 'Some Project' or 'Projects' again through a breadcrumbs style navigation at the top.

That's how the file system and Notion and most things on my computer work and I like that I don't have to think about it or learn some system to use it, it seems to me that Anytype just fundamentally doesn't work that way, it appears to treat pages (or objects) as nodes in a graph, with links and backlinks, which doesn't really fit with my way of thinking.

Not the software's fault, I'm sure some people like this style of knowledge organization but it's not for me I think.

[bGl2YW5j]

These concepts have been copied directly from Notion.

I’ve found Anytype to be more streamlined. I’m highly familiar with Notion though, so adapted easily.

[__jonas]

Fair enough, maybe it's the way they are surfaced that makes them hard to parse to me – I may just have to give it another shot