State of The Archive
Over the past few months I've become a fan of The Archive. I haven't found anything that presents less friction when working with notes. It's a deeply considered app, and looks good too (if dated on Tahoe). I find almost everything I do within it feels just right, and that doesn't happen often.
I realise that The Archive is a side hustle for @ctietze and @Sascha. I'm interested to know whether it's a side hustle that has a future, or is something that is being tinkered with occasionally and may or may not keep going, depending on circumstances. I'm not judgemental about the latter possibility – all projects have a lifespan – but if the The Archive's future lies within the range of "it depends...", I'll stay alert for other possibilities. I'll keep using the app until there's a forceful case for not using it, but not invest too heavily in app-specific protocols.
A difficult question to address without over-committing or sowing doubt, I understand, but I'll drop it in here anyway. :-)
Howdy, Stranger!
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@amc I'll let Christian and Sascha speak for themselves, but I will say that The Archive has been under active development for the past 5 years that I know of, with no sign of slowing down or being neglected. If you were a long-timer on the forum and reading it regularly, you'd know that both Christian and Sascha are heavily invested in both the forum and The Archive. I'm not worried about either the web site or the app fading away.
The Archive is in development for 8 years already!
But you're right: the app is a side-hustle and by no means paying our bills. (Well it does cover the hosting for the website and then some, but it's nothing to live on.) With everyone on the team being a father now, doing stuff that pays the bills is important. For me, priorities shifted from doing what I love first to doing what keeps us afloat first. All of this is still website is a labor of love, so expect that kind of commitment, which likely outlives profit-oriented work anyway
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
That probably tells me all that I need to know. And that you've both been doing this because you want to, not because it must pay the bills ... although paying the bills would be good too. Wonderful, in fact, especially with young families.
The visual refresh will be welcome, but I don't have any big asks of The Archive.* I just want to know that it will keep being regularly serviced and kept on the road for the time being. Thanks for all the thought and care you've put into it. I appreciate craftmanship wherever I find it, and I see it in The Archive.
/* (Although I could probably find some if I thought about it.)
In a world eager to replace innovation with the repurposed historical statistics of LLM's, The Archive is refreshing. Facts are one thing. The interconnections and relationships between them is where the real value emerges.
To me, the archive is more than adequate. Any significant feature added would necessarily be opinionated to one particular methodology, IMHO, rather than being agnostic to how not taking happens, and as such I don’t expect anything more; I have built my own opinionated layers on top of it that I don’t expect anyone else to like. And as someone else pointed out above, the simplicity and avoidance of the LLM bandwagon is what makes archive so amazing.