Onboarding feedback

[dandv]

What happened?

Hi! I've just tried AFFiNE for the first time. Thank you for the project, and please fee free to use as much of my feedback as you'd like.

So I've just launched the 0.19.6 appImage on Linux, waited a bit more than I hoped for Electron to start and the canvas to paint, then zoomed into the "What is AFFiNE" pink text box, and saw this:

I'm confused by several terms here:

We love the idea proposed by Ink & Switch in the famous article about you owning your data [...]

Now pardon me for being a total n00b who's only worked in Silicon Valley for 15 years and used PKMs for only a couple decades, but I've never read the "famous" Ink & Switch article (adding a link to it would help), I don't know what "the idea" is (might help to actually describe it) and I've never seen the "CRDTs" acronym in my life. :)

AFFiNE is a local-first application upon CRDTs with real-time collaboration support. Your data is always stored locally while multiple nodes remain synced in real-time.

Then, my data is stored locally while... "multiple nodes remain synced in real-time"? Where are these nodes? How are they set up? Is this an automatic cloud backup? The typical verbiage for this would be "your data is stored locally and backed up safely in the cloud".

Along with a number of oddities in the README, this makes me even more confused about AFFiNE.

Moving on to my first impression:

What URLs is the block above mentioning?

Next:

The triangles graphic covers the text. Is this intended, to make the user interact with it by deleting it or moving it away?

Several typos, and gratuitous duplicate column.

Next:

Confused about the choice of words here.

Anyway, next I moved onto the Settings. One weird setting there, "Noise background for the sidebar". Barely visible. Is this an important setting to have?

Next, I clicked Journals. Seems like a feature similar to LogSeq's automatic journal. Would be nice to have mentioned LogSeq in the "Learned from" table with duplicate columns.

Next, I checked Spell Check (which IMO should be enabled by default, because it's enabled in browsers), and had to restart the appImage.

On the next start, I was greeted with an AI toast in the bottom right, chose to "Host AFFiNE locally", then AFFiNE has been stuck in this pulsing skeleton loop for the past minute or so:

Anyway, I killed it and restarted it.

Then, I noticed the automatically created journal entry in the All docs tab. Ok:

Then I clicked the + New tab button and the new tab no longer shows the journal entry. Why is that?

Distribution version

Linux

What browsers are you seeing the problem on if you're using web version?

No response

Are you self-hosting?

• Yes

Relevant log output

Anything else?

A bit too many bugs after literally only a few minutes of trying to use the app