Unlike other flexible tools (Notion, Coda or Airtable), Fibery focuses on work management.
I still can’t understand Fibery. 
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Indeed. This is a very important observation. And many less-technical users follow the same pathway to reach their own plateaus of competence with Coda.
Same here. There are magical qualities about Coda that create this compelling desire to use it more all the time.
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Okay, you’re gonna think I’m a total geek when I tell you; whatever - I’m a geek so that secret is already out I guess.
When a topic passes in front of me that I want to now more about, I add a section to a special type of [Coda] document. In that section, I add a table with a specific format and fields that describe the topic with keywords (i.e., Fibery) and a few others I pulled from their site. Within a few minutes an automated process that I created for a specific client who must remain anonymous – notices this new section and begins to gather intel about the topic, pushing all sorts of references into a briefing table in that section. (Coda API)
One of my favorite things I like to know about any topic is the contra sentiment it may harbor - the idea that if anything seems to hold great promise, it probably has a bad side as well. This is really about the hidden side of everything - the data that almost always tells the true(r) story. My interest in contra-sentiment is no accident - I’m a freak in the deepest sense of the Freakonomics movement.
Anyway, the service I built takes a topic and creates thousands of web queries surrounded by contra (negative) terms creating a broad collection of searches that invariably uncover opposite sentiments. Fibery Anxiety popped up and that seemed like something interesting to inspect.
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You’re total geek-ness is what I (and probably the rest of the “Power Makers”) love about you!
So what you’re saying is that you have a Coda doc where you can put a name or string in, and it automatically searches it with a base of terms (including these negatives) and then pushes all that into a table for reference??
@William_Porter This is an extremely insightful comment. The main problem to solve is how we can move from concrete to abstract. Imagine we are starting with basic table with some fields, then want to connect two tables, then want to add some different views on top and maybe move from dynamic tables to typed tables. I believe in theory it is possible to create the path where a person starts with very concrete things and then climb abstraction ladder, learning more abstract concepts like Type, Entity, Relation and build his vocabulary of tools to decompose his information management problem.
The closest solution we have right now is Airtable/Notion/Coda, but I don’t think all these are nailed it completely. They maybe nailed concrete part, but not higher abstraction levels. In Fibery abstraction level is already there, but there is a problem with concrete → abstract movement.
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Yes.
But, while I developed this tool, I do not own it and I am prevented under NDA and contract from showing it to anyone. This is not to say that I couldn’t build another similar solution - I just can’t use the basis of my client’s solution for any other engagement; I have to start over. And frankly, there are new features and functionality in Coda itself, and ML offerings that I would leverage anyway.
I do have the latitude to use it for my own tests and continued support of the tool for the client, so I use it for stuff like this. It’s a great competitive intelligence approach that happens to generate reports in Coda, which is ideal (as you know).
Further…
… searches it with a base of terms (including these negatives) …
It’s a little more involved than this because it’s creating the “base” of terms using NLP and other machine-learning technologies. Your summation is accurate though.
And…
… pushes all that into a table for reference??
It’s an oversimplification, but yes - you get the concept. As I’ve intimated many times in this community, Coda is ideal for blending data with narratives. This tool’s process also - with the help of AI - authors three key narratives about the findings including aggregate metrics such as how many instances of negative sentiment vs positive sentiment. These are expressed in an easy-reading format instead of only a bunch of records and data points.
Coda can do it; the only question is what does “it” mean and do you have enough money to make “it” happen? 
Yes, this was what I noticed right away about Fibery; it likely has a graph database under the hood which is a huge departure from almost every other platform.
It always makes me puke in my mouth a little when I see a team select a graph database and then work their asses off to make it work like a flat table or a relational database. It appears the Fibery guys understand the value of graph architectures and their efforts may be unwavering in this regard, thus ensuring an underlying capacity to abstract information like no other tools in this segment can.
I might point out that this was the topic of a recommendation I made concerning Packs - ergo, there should be an ability to utilize ANY type of data architecture to integrate data seamlessly in Coda. But this will not likely happen until we can build our own Packs.
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I’m glad to see the discussion of Fibery and that you guys have given it a look! @MichaelDubakov greetings, welcome to this forum!
@William_Porter. I don’t contribute much to the forum aside from chatter, unlike most of you Power Makers in here. But perhaps I’ll let myself take credit for the heads-up on Fibery. I can tell you that I found Fibery when I found @MichaelDubakov’s article about Notion/Zenkit/AirTable/Coda here. I agree with just about all of it, in particular my difficulties in Making with Coda. Having just mentioned that again, I feel like I should point out that I’ve been thinking, as I get more involved here in the community, that I don’t there are many non-technical participants like myself in here! So the article may not speak to many of you guys!
Michael and team, I believe, are trying to solve some of the challenges in making that both Notion and Coda pose, and I believe they have done that in the beta. In particular, I am after the simplest way to build relationships across my tool. Which is one of the reasons I concur with those of us interested in Coda adopting a lot of what’s present in RoamResearch.com. None of Airtable/Notion/Zenkit/Coda offer an easy way to set up reciprocal relations. Lookups are not easy for the average user to build.
Case in Point: An example that some of you may be able to solve for me? I’ve been chatting with Coda support for two days on it with no solution. This is a typical type of thing that trips up my building in Coda:
I am trying to follow these instructions to quickly add a lookup into a referenced table, which I intend to use to add new items into the source table:
At the end of the article, there is discussion of the newer feature that suggests which column already is looking up a table, and you can add that reference in a few clicks guided by the “blue dot.”
I have two simple tables in this doc that are using lookups that way:
- I created a lookup first from Source of Lookup to Destination of Lookup
- Then in Destination of Lookup I formatted the column Relation from Source of Lookup with the suggested “blue dot” lookup to Source of Lookup.
My expectation is that in the Destination of Lookup table, I will be able to add in a new row in the “Relation from Source of Lookup” column to the table “Source of Lookup”. But this is blocked by the formula. So when I use this feature, I wind up not getting a true “two-way” functionality.
There is a post in the community by @BenDavis suggesting this is a quick solution to getting a reciprocal reference in the destination table:
But in the end, since I can’t add into the destination table, this doesn’t really do the trick.
When I say “easy,” I’m talking about something where, like in Confluence, you make a reference to an item, and the referenced item gets that automatically. Easy. This app we are talking in, Discourse, does a great job, too. Fibery does this extremely simply, and that is a big plus for me in using it.
I also have a lot of faith in Michael and his team, as they created TargetProcess. I’m curious how many of you are familiar with it. I have spent a lot of time in TargetProcess, and it is extremely well thought-out for managing larger dev process. They also have in fact one of the few mind map/live diagram implementations, a big topic around here, that I’ve even seen in such an app:
https://www.targetprocess.com/guide/reports/predefined-reports/relations-network-diagram/
I have been using Fibery since November, and I believe has solved a lot of the issues Coda users such as myself will have trouble with. Again, I’m not so sure how many Coda users of my skills are actually in this community! You all are so technically adept, perhaps you don’t need things simplified and are creating your own “Fibery’s” for your teams with Coda as the platform!
And @Bill_French and @Johg_Ananda, I too thought the spoof site was a hoot. I know Michael got some good coverage of it on HackerNews and elsewhere. But joking aside, I like their approach. And, like Roam, I feel it’s an interesting alternative for some less-elite types out there who find Coda overly challenging, until Coda builds out more tools for the “less-advanced.”
Cheers guys!
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Fibery has relational database Postgres. We researched graph databases and they did not fit our needs.
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FYI we shipped / to insert about a month ago.
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