Thread by @houshuang

The founder of @logseq, @tiensonqin recently gave a long interview to the Chinese podcast ByteTalk (@lzzy @laike9m). I thought I'd share some key points here for all of the non-Chinese speakers. Hope I caught it properly, 请多多指教！:)

https://twitter.com/tiensonqin/status/1474668346498969608

Tienson used to work remotely for a Canadian company, and used Emacs and org-mode. He began developing Logseq because he wanted something that he could use on iPad/Mobile, and dreamt of a tool that his daughter could one day use to learn and grow. Initially built it for himself.

He began building a tool based on org-mode and Workflowy, only came across Roam Research 5 months into the project, but really liked it, and took many inspirational ideas from it.

The community really grew out of Discord, after half a year they had almost 2000 users there.

Around Christmas last year, decided to form a company with two other ex-co-workers (all mainland Chinese). They received investment from users of Logseq (some had even written plugins/contributed). People who really believed in the product, and took a very long view...

Might need 3-5 years to become sustainable - is OK.

They had a lot of people switching from Roam, some were believers and wished they could transfer the remaining "believer years" to Logseq.

They've grown the team to 8 people, including internationals. One Clojure expert who used to work with Rich Hickey. Time zone and language is a challenge in the team. They rely a lot on written communication, writing in a shared Logseq db that they sync through git.

But this is very awkward, so work is ongoing to implement a native collaboration system that is local first, and secure - perhaps based on CRDTs - block based rather than page-based synchronization. There will also be an alternative backend data store, more like a database...

But they will always maintain the file-based storage, because standards and long-term accessibility is very important. (They're also interested in community coming up with shared standards for block/graph-based knowledge).

References the Solid project by Tim Berners-Lee where your data can live independent of web apps, controlled by you, as an inspiration. Real interest in distributed web, shared protocols, interoperability of knowledge tools.

The storage needs of Logseq might become much larger - not only used for notes, but for all kinds of data that individuals and organizations want to interlink and work with. Working on a brand new database backend in Rust, might be 10-20x more performant.

But it's a long way until they can replace Datascript. Also looking at using Rust for compression, encryption, syncing and other performance-sensitive areas.

Mobile apps are webviews, with local storage and backend processing.

Current team mostly has experience with backend, looking for stronger front-end devs, very interested in hiring a strong designer, and also people with experience with real-time collaboration, CRDTs, OT, etc.

Asked "When do we get a stable version?" says that most users seem OK with what exists, not a clear definition of 1.0. However, they have many buggy releases - will slowly improve tests and reliability.

They still feel like they are very far from their visions: whiteboard, more non-linear note taking, collaboration, sync. Logseq Pro (for pay) might include "assistance" while you're taking notes, like data from Wikipedia, APIs, GPT-3 etc, as well as collaboration.

Long term, the vision is to help people to study and learn - to become a Github/Wikipedia 2.0.

When I suggested reviving Roam inter for @logseq, the team said enthusiastically yes. But given this I wonder what the use case would be? Inter-tool communication is one possibility. But for logseq-logseq, native is probably much more robust?