Investing in a Premium account? (and other questions from a noob)

theasset

Hey everyone!

As someone who’s always looking to consolidate and optimize my information, I’m currently someone who uses Trello, Slack, Google Workspace, Plutio, OneNote, Nirvana GTD, Dropbox, and Drive along with analog bullet journaling. There’s a couple overlaps between these tools being applied across work and personal disciplines in my life

I’ve flirted with things like WorkFlowy in the past, and I can’t figure out how or where I came across Legend/Moo, but here we are.

I’ve been dabbling in a free account, and as someone who prefers to avoid monthly subscriptions, I am on the cusp of buying into the early adopter single cost, but have a couple questions for the community and devs.

What’s the full scope of how the sync works, especially between, Google Calendar? Is it full two way sync?
How does collaboration work? This is always my biggest issue with most platforms I use, (and why I am always forced into paying monthly fees) … When I want to collaborate with someone on most of the above platforms, it seems like unless they’re in view only mode, or have limited interactibility, I need to pay for them to have a seat to actually do any real collaboration.. Can I share a certain “level” or “tier” of information with someone? Can I share a “Heading” with someone and let them use all the various elements of information organization within that “tier”?
2a) I’d love to hear from this community and see some of you share as to how you’re currently using Legend, setups, especially in regards to collaboration.. I’d love to be able to replace using Trello to interact with clients and task/product management elements. If this feedback could also extol the value of premium features over the free tier, all the better!
How well does Legend pull from other places, and push back? This is somewhat similar to my first question, but it’s something that AkiFlow does really well: since it pulls and pushes from all sorts of tools (they advertise more than 2000 integrations).. it appeals to me as it doesn’t push me to force clients to use things they aren’t already used to… Some of this is more easily accomplished by giving them a link they can access and immediately collaborate in without needing a login (as per question #2 but being able to interact with their tools from my own is potentially one further value above and beyond. How many platforms does Legend currently sync with, are they all a 2 way sync, and do the devs have any plans on being able to sync with more tools, notably some of the more mainstream platforms like Trello, Slack, Teams, Notion, and so forth?
How is Legend being advertised and developed? I see there’s a help video on YouTube that’s embedded it into a starter guide for the tool, which is clever, but the channel only has a handful of subscribers, and Legend’s socials have under 100 followers under the new branding, and a little over 600 for the old Moo.do one(s) I’m always wary about investing in platforms and then a year later they disappear.. for a platform with over 80,000 users (as you currently advertise) it’s odd to see such low engagement, and it seems like your name/product is (still) relatively unknown under either of the brand names. I’m also happy to get involved with assisting in some of this as a potential brand ambassador, plus helping with some more video content and so forth - send me a DM, devs!
Related to #4, If Legend were to ever be on the cusp of abandonware etc, are there any plans or opinions about making it open source/self hosted in the future? Is this something that would be possible? (not sure what Legend is developed in/on.. (this is quite the outlier question, I’m just so enamored by how the whole platform is organized and I’d hate to see it vanish!)
Somewhat unrelated, but what forum software is this forum running on?

Thanks in advance for all the input!

Jay

Hey theasset, good questions!

Sync of documents uses our own cloud with Firebase Realtime Database. It’s all encrypted and decrypted client-side so it is already encrypted before it goes out on the wire, and there’s no limitations on editing. And that is all included for free. Sync with Google Calendar and Drive is a two-way sync - changes you make to Calendar are saved immediately, and it pulls in changes on a schedule (and prioritizes a check when you switch focus back to Legend). Or there’s a manual refresh button in the … menu on a Calendar pane. Contacts is currently a one-way sync, but we would like to add a full contact manager in the future and potentially add two-way sync to it.
Collaboration is currently by Document. You can share a document with anyone, and optionally encrypt it so they’ll need a password. However it is missing some of the team features like assigning tasks and notifications of changes. We are working on a new backend architecture which will allow sharing by individual item, and will add more roles like read-only: https://forum.legendapp.com/d/211-roadmap. And then after we release that we will put some more focus into those team features.
We currently have only sync with Google apps and Outlook email. We have plans to build an extensible plugin system to sync with more tools, but that’s not currently a big focus. We do also support links to some apps which can open the app directly (Evernote, OneNote, Bear) or embed (YouTube). We would like to add more of those, so please let us know which you’d like us to add and we’ll prioritize them 🙂.
The YouTube video is less than a week old and we haven’t tried to push it yet, other than putting it in the Help page. And we only recently started being more active on Twitter. We’ve been heads down in development for a while and marketing/advertising has not been a priority. But we are now working on some more videos and planning to put a lot more effort into marketing/advertising starting next month. I’ll DM you about helping with that - that would be great!
Legend costs almost nothing to run, so if we were to stop working on it for some reason there’s no reason to take it down. We might consider open sourcing it too, but we still have ambitious goals so we haven’t thought about stopping at all.
The forum is https://flarum.org and we’re using https://freeflarum.com to host it. We did a lot of research a few months ago and it seemed like the nicest forum out there. It’s gone down for short periods a few times but has generally been reliable and we’re pretty happy with it.