Athens 2.0.0-beta is available for beta testers as a Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and Collaborative Knowledge Management (CKM) application.
2.0.0-beta should be a drop-in replacement for 1.0.0. You shouldn't have to do anything to migrate besides downloading 2.0.0-beta. Improvements to PKM will continue being made from 2.0.0-beta, not 1.0.0.
New CKM features
- Block-level presence
- Page-level presence
- Can see if users are on the same page as you or on another page
- Can jump to where a user is by clicking on their avatar
- DB Picker
- Can create local DBs
- Can connect to remote DBs
- Can see a list of local and remote DBs
- Avatar names and colors
- By default, have a Greek god or goddess name
- Can edit name
- Can edit color
- Password protection of your server
What isn't supported yet in CKM Athens yet
- Undo/redo
- Image and file support
- Persistent users across sessions
- The "locking" of blocks that other users are already on. You could overwrite someone else's text if you both write to the same block at the same time. You can avoid this by not being in the same block that someone else is on
- Comments
- @-mentions
- Notifications
- Publishing/Sharing a page
- Screen jumpiness - if someone opens and closes a block above you, what you are looking at might get disrupted
How to Self-Host
Full instructions for self-hosting are on our docs. You can host Athens locally or through Docker. So far, we have instructions locally and on Digital Ocean.
No Data Loss
Our number one design principle is to never have data loss.
All accounts of data loss will be documented publicly on our GitHub Discussions.
Our last (and only) account of data loss was in February 2021 on our local-only version of Athens, before we made a public release, posted by a developer contributor.
When the self-hosted backend was in alpha, we had known issues of data loss, crashing, and freezing because the distributed events system being incomplete. We discovered and solved these issues internally as a team. We did not invite others to use this build during this period.
Now we are in beta, meaning we are ready to open up Athens for beta testers. We don't have known issues with data loss, crashing, and freezing anymore, and the first implementation of the distributed events system is complete. That said, we need to open this up to beta at this point because we need more real-world testing in a variety of contexts beyond our own team of six to go from beta to stable.
We invite feedback on anything and everything, don't be shy! We've created two new Discord channels, 2.0.0-beta and data loss at 2.0.0-beta-feedback and #data-loss, respectively. Join us on Discord!