Comment by bad_username

5 days ago

> notes sync seamlessly across devices

Droobox and similar services have never been seamless for me with Obsidian. There will inevitably be some conflict when the same file gets edited on two machines, and an ugly conflict file will appear, with no easy way to resolve it without a specialized diff tool. Sometimes this conflict file will get unnoticed and a change will fall theough the cracks. Not a deal breaker - but not "seamless" either.

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bad_username

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dtkav  5 days ago

You might be interested in our real-time collaboration plugin for Obsidian called Relay [0].

Relay attaches a CRDT to the Obsidian editor. It makes collaboration really smooth and removes conflicts.

Markdown collaboration is free, but we do charge for attachment/media storage. If you dm me (@dtkav) on our discord [1] or email me (in my profile) I'm happy to give out free storage to HN folks.

One other benefit of using Relay is that you can use the new "App Storage" feature on Android to keep your files isolated and private on your device [2]. Using dropbox/gdrive forces you to store your notes in your documents folder and that means that they can be read by other apps.

[0] https://relay.md

[1] https://discord.system3.md

[2] https://obsidian.md/changelog/2025-04-22-mobile-v1.8.10/

  • sureglymop  5 days ago

    Very interesting! A while ago I worked on a toy project that would allow for realtime collaboration for obsidian vaults located on a nextcloud instance.

    Basically, I saw that nextcloud built their own realtime text editor based on TipTap so I created an obsidian extension to connect to it.

    Unfortunately work and uni got in the way but it was a very interesting idea/learning experience.

dathinab  5 days ago

that should only happen if either

- you haven't setup auto save/auto sync

- multiple people editing the documents

- you frequently have no Internet and the application closed when you re-gain Internet or similar

if only a single person edits the same document at a time and you always sync changes when they happen that should be a non issue

  • bad_username  5 days ago

    You guessed one of the reasons correctly - I work offline (deliberately or accidentally) fairly regularly.