Athens helps research teams capture and synthesize networked knowledge. Athens leverages a graph network to accelerate insight and nonlinear problem solving.
We are very excited to announce our official 1.0.0 release! Download it at No new features, just a well-tested data-loss-free app.
Who's excited for Multiplayer next?!
Collaborative & Collective, Distributed & Decentralized, Knowledge Graphs
More soon๐
1/ 3 months ago we raised $1.9M. Big updates since then:
TLDR
-Built epic team
-Pivot from PKM, creating new category CKM
-New vision: a Collective Brain, sort of a social network for learning, collaboration, innovation
-Start w/ moonshot research teams
.
@filipematossilv
, Roam's first engineer, joins Athens as second engineer ๐ฏ
Prior to Roam, Filipe worked on Google's Angular Core team for 4 years -- an open-source monster !
Join our community call today in 2 hours to welcome Filipe !
Weekly Update 12 ๐
Mostly Engineering ๐
๐ Toolbar
๐ Dark Mode (no toggle, deal with it ๐)
๐ดโโ๏ธ Way faster first load
๐ [[in-line]] ((search)) (WIP)
๐ฆฏ slash commands (WIP)
๐ First commits by
#BuildInPublic
squad
@adrien
@itsrainingmani
@nthd3gr33
๐Weekly Update 10๐
๐ฏ 1000 followers today !!! ๐๐ฅณ๐
๐ช Right Sidebar
๐ Link Filters
๐ง DataScript DevTools cc
@nikitonsky
๐ Automated deploys for contributors
โน Block editing: undo/redo, indent/unindent, drag n drop
๐ฅ hot hot hotkeys
1/3
Goodbye 2020 ๐ , Hello 2021 ๐ฅณ
Just emailed Athens to the first 100 people on the Waitlist
v1.0.0-beta.24 and .25 released this week
BIG announcement next week
BIG things in store for the next year!!!
๐ I'm sponsoring
@borkdude
becauseโฆ
Athens Research uses clj-kondo and carve to keep our codebase sparkly clean
And because sci will increase the number of Clojure use cases by 1000x
Today, we had our first ever "LAN Party" to test Athens 2.0-beta ๐
We had 12+ concurrent editors in a single graph, and it worked seamlessly! Also, these early testers got a limited edition gift (a
@poapxyz
NFT)
Stay tuned for more updates, releases, events, & gifts โฅ๏ธ
Yesterday we launched 2.0.0-beta.1 and we broke our ALL TIME HIGH for the number of users in a shared graph
We had 30+ concurrent users without a bump ๐คฏ
Some links, highlights, and FAQs below ๐
1/7
Athens got a redesign ๐
Oh yeah, and our web build works again. But you need to connect to a server to collaborate ๐ช
We are selecting a handful of (deep tech & research) teams to join our closed beta for managed servers
Tag a team who needs a collaborative knowledge graph โ๏ธ
Join us tomorrow at 11am Eastern!
We're hosting a 2.0.0-beta launch party in our Discord to celebrate RTC, our first milestone for Shared, Collaborative Graphs!
Those in attendance will get a limited edition
@poapxyz
NFT ๐
RSVP โก๏ธ
1/8
.
@cljtogether
just announced 7 sponsored projects. All but one are used at Athens!
clj-kondo
@borkdude
, datascript
@nikitonsky
, reitit
@metosin
, cljc.java-time
@henryw374
We have devs using vim-iced and Calva too ~
Imagine a world without open-source..
Here's the selections for the first Summer of Bugs program: clj-kondo vim-iced, DataScript, Calva, reitit, Keycloak-Clojure, cljc.java-time. Thanks to our members for making this possible, especially new members
@latacora
,
@clubhouse
, and
@Solita_Insights
Weekly Update ๐๏ธ
โ๏ธ Desktop App: save to filesystem + auto-update. Linux build available; Mac needs Apple approvals; no build yet for Windows.
๐จโ๐ซFirst Office Hours + REPL-driven development demo. We build a feature for Athens, live!
๐Weekly Update 7๐
โจ Core Team announced
๐คฏ MVP date โก๏ธ August 1st
๐ข shipped Athena (WIP), left sidebar, all pages
๐ Copyable Design System
๐ฅ Datascript Explorer
Full Update โก๏ธ
One strength of self-hosting and desktop apps: You can use any version for the rest of time.
We are now hosting Athens builds on GitHub instead of S3 for easy rollbacks.
Please re-download Athens from GitHub if you want your app to find new updates!
1/5
Beta.82 includes our biggest performance update yet!
Kudos to
@juniusfree
, our resident
#learninpublic
and
#buildinpublic
expert and long-time Clojure learner!
Kudos to
@denik
for tips on datascript indexing and ~transducers~
PRโก๏ธ
Knowledge mgmt apps want to be open and standards-compatible so they're available to the largest number of people
So they have no moat and fail to build sustainable businesses
Which means they go out of business and are available to no one
We need cutthroat capitalist PKM
First ship of the New Year :)
Notably, we added aliases for Page Links & Block Refs. The syntax is:
- [Render][[Page Link]]
- [Render]((uid123))
Roam's syntax is
- [Render]([[Page Link]])
- [Render](((uid123)))
Obsidian's is [[Page Link|Render]].
Which syntax do you prefer?
โก๏ธ Some performance updates in 2.0.0-beta.16โก๏ธ
- Reconnecting: up to 28x faster (remote graphs)
- Creating new block on large page: 10x faster
- Initial app start-up: 3-4x faster
- Big pastes: up to 4x faster
Download our latest desktop app at
โฃ๏ธ๐โโ๏ธ๐
Weekly Update 14 ๐
๐ New Post: MVP Update, Funding, and Why I Started Athens
Takeaways:
1. Not launching an MVP August 1st
2. Rolling out our v1 Beta to Contributors (financial or sweat) over the course of the next few months
3. We are accepting $16/mo or $501/5yr sponsors
Thanks for all the follows!
๐๐ฝ Would appreciate signal boosting ๐๐ฝ
We have an important mission ahead of us!
๐๏ธ๐ท๐ฝโโ๏ธ๐งฑ๐ง๐ท๐ฝโโ๏ธ
And we could use the help
(Devs, designers, organizers, and more!)
Update ๐๏ธ
The beta has been delivered to all OpenCollective Sponsors โจ๐๐ Next Up: Waitlist?!?
v1.0.0-beta.20
- New keybindings: alt-left, alt-right, alt-d
- UI improvements
- Filesystem picker updates
More seriously, this is the unimaginative take that people have said about OSS (and many early software platform revolutions!) since the beginning.
@fortelabs
just wants us to prove him wrong ๐ค
Athens v1.0.0-beta.26 ๐๏ธ
๐ New feature just dropped: "Link" and "Link All" for Unlinked References
๐ค User research is the focus right now. DM us about what don't you love about the current solutions!
6/ CKM is more than Real-Time Collaboration (RTC) or ppl editing the same doc at the same time.
How do we do cross-graph references? Branching, forking, merging? Time-travel, versioning, etc.
Huge problems around history, permissions, and provenance.
Global graph viz:
- way prettier
- can choose # of links to highlight
- can hide orphan nodes
- can hide Daily Notes
- attraction and distance config
Shoutout to Abhinav for the awesome graph work!
2/2
5/ Trial 2: build something 10 ppl would be "very disappointed" if they couldn't use
We didn't get there. PKM space crowded. What if we created a new category, CKM?
PKM = 2nd Brain
CKM = Collective Brain
CKM = ways for groups of people to create, connect, & compound knowledge.
For PKM/CKM, sometimes, less is more.
@josephmwood
argues a "full" mobile experience might be worse than an experience optimized for Quick Capture and Quick Search.
We like this design direction.
Here are my thoughts on what a minimal mobile PKM app could look like. I'm not sure you need a full desktop experience for mobile. I think you could get away with a few solid features.
#pkms
@mymind
@RoamResearch
@AthensResearch
Whatโs the noun for a person participating in the emerging knowledge movement? Tool-agnostic ๐
Metacognician
Zettlkaster
Thoughtonot
Second brainist
Digital Gardener
Linkanistas
Hypertexter
Is there a word used to describe people who are deep into using emerging tools for thought such as
@AthensResearch
?
I feel like this developing community needs such a word.
For example psychonaut describes a person who explores altered states of consciousness.
Goodbye 2020 ๐ , Hello 2021 ๐ฅณ
Just emailed Athens to the first 100 people on the Waitlist
v1.0.0-beta.24 and .25 released this week
BIG announcement next week
BIG things in store for the next year!!!
Notion API, but it's a Clojure wrapper
Written by one of our learners ๐ค ๐๐ฅ
More improvements coming soon to our curriculum and learning program
#learninpublic
๐Weekly Update 9๐
๐ Changes to the core team and contributors
โน Blocks looking pretty. Beginning write features ๐
๐ฅ Breadcrumbs, part of our new nav
๐ loading widget
๐ localStorage for faster loads
Full Update โก๏ธ
8/ Right now, we want to collab with researchers...
* doing moonshot R&D, maybe PhDs
* in AI, biotech, hard-tech, financial services, crypto
* at private orgs (not academia): e.g.
@OpenAI
@DeepMind
@GoogleAI
@SpaceX
* in teams of 2-10
@ who you think would be a good fit.
This thing is really taking off fast ๐ง
Nevertheless, looking forward to maybe even collaborating so data exchange is a breeze and people can use both
@AthensResearch
and
@Zettlr
(maybe first for notes, second for larger texts and projects)
9/ New RTC alpha release every 2 weeks, starting today (not usable). Beta-1 in 8 weeks hopefully.
Free to use. Self-hosted will always be open-source.
Contact us if you want to use commercially.
Watch the progress at
#buildinpublic
๐ ATTENTION ๐
Tune in this Saturday to our Discord at 11am EDT for the very first live stream of "This Week in Athens."
Find out:
๐ง Should Athens by a business, a non-profit, or a DAO?
๐ How will decisions be made? (governance)
๐ What are Athens's key values? 1/2
1/ Today we got a demo from
@FlureePBC
, an OSS, Web3 semantic graph db, written in Clojure(Script)!
Demoโก๏ธ
Highlights:
- supports SQL, GraphQL, SPARQL, and FlureeQL (like Datalog)
- blockchain w/ embedded permissions. share data to anyone w/o a server!
Athens is budgeting $10,000 over the next 3 weeks to
@gitcoin
bounties for product development.
Chatting about this on our Discord + Clubhouse in 30 minutes. Join us!
7/ Short-term vision of CKM: Help moonshot researchers solve the hardest problems.
@michael_nielsen
calls this Networked Science
Long-term vision: Athens is a sort of social network for learning, collaboration, and innovation, *for everyone*.
Update ๐๏ธ
๐ค Stay tuned for another announcement this week regarding the beta rollout
v1.0.0-beta.18
- Add backward/forward page shortcuts with alt-left and alt-right
- Fix paste order for large amounts of text
- Make several UI changes based on
@ariaminaei
's feedback
In Ancient Athens ๐ฟ
A philosopher was also:
an inventor ๐
an artist ๐จโ๐จ
a biologist ๐ฉโ๐ฌ
Want a job today? Choose only one
In Athens, we will merge fields.
We will restore the proper order.
2. Opt-out analytics. Any user can opt-out of analytics now. Opting out does make it harder to build better products.
Athens has never and will never look at the contents of your database. Athens has never and will never ever sell your data.
3/ We met the "Mentor"
@mwseibel
Big Yoda/Mr. Miyagi/Shifu energy. Teaches us how to do startups. Helps us raise at $1.9M at Demo Day 3 months ago.
But what's next? Cliffhanger. Great expectations from investors, community, and ourselves.
4/ We're now in Season 2: Startup Wilderness. Trial 1 was building the team
-
@neotyk
- 10+ years of Clojure(Script) experience
-
@filipematossilv
- previously led backend at Roam
-Stuart - did 99% of our UI/UX
-Matei - Chief of Staff, ops + BD
-
@tangjeff0
- founder, does things
This was a massive undertaking. What we've built has never been done before:
A shared graph that is database-agnostic and frontend-agnostic โจ
Shoutout to our engineers
@neotyk
,
@filipematossilv
, & Sid for this incredible feat ๐ช
2/8
Towards Open Source Roam!
Bi-directional links in note taking apps are surprisingly useful if done right. Kudos to
@RoamResearch
for a brilliant tool that I'm enjoying since a few months. It is great to see the open source community follow (see also org-roam). Go
#roamcult
!
Sponsor Shoutout Thread ๐๐ฅบ๐
1/N. Founder of ,
@ariaminaei
is working on a collaborative Tool For Thought that would make
@worrydream
proud:
- Art + Code
- Real-time collaboration
- Dynamic Computing Environment
Big things coming soon ๐
At last! My JS animation lib is finally ready ๐๐
It comes with a GUI for editing the timeline. Animates DOM/WebGL/all JS values. Good for designing detailed motion / creative coding / UI animation.
DMs are open and I'd love to send you a free copy, so don't be shy ๐