Why Mahanu, and not something you already use

Mahanu guide · FAQ · For builders & learners · Vision · Safety for parents

The tools below are genuinely good at what they set out to do. This is an honest note on why — for a small circle that wants to own its work — none of them was quite the home, and where each is still the better choice. Short version: keep the ones you love, and let Mahanu be the part they're missing.

The things Mahanu wants at once

Most tools give you some of these. Mahanu is the bet that a small group needs all of them together:

1. Open-format files on your own disk as the real thing — delete Mahanu and keep every note and image, readable in any app.
2. Multiplayer built in — calm and async by default, live co-editing one tap away, changes that merge instead of making conflict copies.
3. History for non-geeks — the power of version control, in plain words.
4. A network of projects — public cards, explore, ask-to-join, clone with credit.
5. One scope — every project is about its members getting better at a shared pursuit; no feeds, no engagement mechanics.
6. Open source, including the server — self-hosting is the whole product, not a lite version.

No single tool we tried does all six, because each is rightly optimizing for something else.

The honest short list

• Obsidian — the markdown vault we admire, with a decade of polish. But the app is proprietary, real multiplayer only comes from third-party plugins, and there's no project network. Great if you want a powerful single-player notebook.
• Notion / Google Docs — the most refined collaboration on earth, zero setup, free tiers everyone has. But your data lives in their cloud in their format, nothing is self-hostable, and the vendor owns the roadmap. Great if polish today matters more than ownership tomorrow.
• Discord + a shared drive — what most groups actually use: free, familiar, already open. But chat evaporates knowledge, there's no clean way out, nobody in the group owns the room, and your talk and your files live in two disconnected places. Keep it for chat — Mahanu is the owned, versioned artifact layer beside it.
• Anytype, AFFiNE, and other local-first workspaces — close in spirit and worth respect. But their ground truth is a database or binary store with markdown as an export, and they're generalist tools, not a network of member projects. Great if you want an encrypted or open workspace now.
• Trello / Asana and the boards — good at their job, but a task there is a row in someone else's database about work that lives elsewhere. In Mahanu the plan (checklists, calendars, tables) is a view over the same owned files as the work.
• GitHub — the proof that project-centric collaboration works — for code, in geek vocabulary. Mahanu is that social model for everything else people build and learn. When the project is code, keep GitHub; start the idea, the crew, and the plan here.

The empty corner where all six properties meet is the only reason Mahanu needs to exist — and it's why, if someone builds this better, the honest move is to help them.