Good article but as a heavy user of Obsidian (and previously Evernote), I would offer some counterpoints:
> After some mental gymnastics weighing if I should continue with Obsidian, I found solace when asking myself "Can I see myself using this in 20 years?". I couldn't. The thought of cyclically migrating notes from one PKMS to another every 5 years, as I had done from Evernote to Notion to Obsidian, made me feel tired.
In point of fact this is actually an argument IN FAVOR of Obsidian. While the editor might be proprietary - the notes themselves are just standard markdown. If somehow all the copies of Obsidian magically disappeared off the earth tomorrow, I could easily switch over to Emacs org mode, VS Code, or literally anything else.
> Obsidian was a great tool for me personally for a long time. But I felt frustrated when I wanted to access my notes on my phone while on-the-go and saw that I had to pay for this feature.
Again, a little bit odd considering that the author is technically savvy enough to write an entire PKMS but didn't seem to consider that you can just check your markdown notes into a git repository and sync with the native android/iOS Obsidian app on a mobile device. All my notes sync up to Gitea hosted on my VPS and it works relatively seamlessly.
I'm glad the author had fun. Personally, I'm very happy with Obsidian and the plugin architecture has made it easy for me to extend it where necessary.
Again, a little bit odd considering that the author is technically savvy enough to write an entire PKMS but didn't seem to consider that you can just check your markdown notes into a git repository and sync with the native android/iOS Obsidian app on a mobile device.
Also, Obsidian supports free iCloud sync if you are a Mac and iOS user. I know that's only a subset of users, but a nice option to get Obsidian to sync on the phone if you are in the Apple ecosystem.
Also, they have a cheaper Sync plan now that is $4 per month.
I can't really be bothered that Sync would cost up to 1000 in ten years. If you use Obsidian daily, it had an immensive value and it's cheaper than most services out there.
To add to your last point - 10 years is a very long time frame. Any recurring cost grows to eye-watering levels if the time interval is huge enough. In 10 years, a lot can happen in the space and you are not locked in with obsidian - if the next better thing comes along in 3 years, you can easily migrate.
> In point of fact this is actually an argument IN FAVOR of Obsidian. While the editor might be proprietary - the notes themselves are just standard markdown. If somehow all the copies of Obsidian magically disappeared off the earth tomorrow, I could easily switch over to Emacs org mode, VS Code, or literally anything else.
100% this. The reason I started using Obsidian in the first place is that it's built on the exact directory structure and file formats that I was already using to manage my writing and notes, and if Obsidian goes away for some reason, that won't change.
> Again, a little bit odd considering that the author is technically savvy enough to write an entire PKMS but didn't seem to consider that you can just check your markdown notes into a git repository and sync with the native android/iOS Obsidian app on a mobile device.
Even simpler, I have mine in a Dropbox folder. Felt very strange for _this_ to be the straw that broke the camel's back for the author.
Nonetheless, very glad for them that they enjoyed and learned from the experience of building a replacement!
Yeah, I have my obsidian vault in Dropbox and synced to my phone and back with Dropsync on android. The obsidian mobile app Just Works™ with this. It was a one time setup. Of course there's no fancy conflict resolution going on, but it's unlikely I'm editing in two places at once so it's not needed.
Yeah, syncing text files across devices is a problem that has little to do with obsidian or whichever editor/renderer one uses. As long as one keeps things relatively simple with plugin-related syntax flavours, editors are interchangeable.
Big obsidian fan, but I will say: notes being “just markdown” is not entirely true depending on how you use obsidian. If you are a plug-in heavy user, and those plugins introduce new syntax and lots of JavaScript functionality, you are accumulating a bespoke custom syntax that only works on your copy of obsidian with your set of plugins. Obsidian and those plugins are still free and are a huge benefit, but just something to keep in mind regarding data hygiene and longevity.
True, but the format is still text. In a "catastrophe", you can always just a) ignore these, or b) write custom code to process them (e.g. port the plugin to VSCode or whatever).
Very much this. I cannot even fully agree with "plug-in heavy" remark: I mean, how heavy must it be, to be considered "plug-in heavy"? I consciously tried to limit plugin usage. But it really gets pretty wild soon. I was relatively lean for maybe the first 6 months, but when some patterns of how I use it become clear enough, it becomes pretty evident how inefficient many super-common situations are and how I can fix them just by installing a plugin.
Fast-forward a year, and all your vault structure implicitly relies on the quirks of Obsidian search behavior, the markdown you write is extremely obsidian-flavored markdown, and you don't even remember how to write LaTeX without LaTeX-Suite shortcuts.
I'm migrating what's in Evernote to Gmail because the "upgrade to premium" popups are too tricky and the value of Evernote just isn't worth the subscription unless you're relying heavily on it, which I can't because of the popups.
Thanks for the feedback! Agreed Git can be used to sync your notes. Its a great solution for those comfortable putting their notes into a Git repo like Github. I wasn't comfortable with that however.
Currently vetting a way to sync my database files with my markdown files on my laptop, so it functions similar to Obsidian. I enjoy Vim too much to work constrained to Directus' markdown editor!
It's not just git. You have the plugins available for S3, couchdb, FTP, MongoDB, cloud drives, rsync, syncthing, and probably every other storage/protocol in the world. And they're all available for free in obsidian.
I saw that you didn’t want to use a 3rd party provider, but why not stick a git repo on your VPS (which you are trusting with your data today) and use that to coordinate syncs between your client devices?
Concerning, maybe. Definitely not surprising. One’s technical ability to do something has, if anything, a negative correlation with their ability to value and manage their own time. The author’s justification is absolutely ridiculous, hands down. I simply pray that they’re never in charge of deploying another human’s time effectively.
> The thought of cyclically migrating notes from one PKMS to another every 5 years, as I had done from Evernote to Notion to Obsidian, made me feel tired.
I had a very similar thought process about 15 years ago, and went on a quest to write my own notes system - after trying out a lot of ideas and giving up, I washed up in emacs and gave org-mode a try. It's actually good enough, and I can grep through my notes easiy, and sync them with git.
> Since my PKMS is hosted online to manage notes across devices, I have multiple layers of security to ensure my notes are kept private. {Screenshot of a login form}
The biggest life hack I can recommend for a self hoster is to set up a VPN on your local network and then just never expose your services on the public internet unless you're specifically trying to serve people outside your own household.
Before I did this I was constantly worried about the security implications of each app I thought about installing or creating. Now it's not even worth setting up auth on a lot of simple services I build because if someone is able to hit their endpoints I'm already in deep trouble for many other reasons.
It's far easier to set up, is much more reliable (e.g. when devices are behind firewalls), and uses direct (encrypted) connections when possible.
You can get it to do what you want with just a few clicks. Things like exposing a IoT VLAN on your Tailnet or setting up an exit node to tunnel all internet traffic through your home are super easy. You can even share specific devices with friends, which is super useful. If you have anything particularly sensitive (e.g. a notes app that you wouldn't want your children / partner to have access to), you can limit access to specific users / devices on the TS side, without bothering with implementing auth.
I think there's even a way to look up the user and device based on their IP, which is one way to add painless authentication to your apps. There are reverse proxies that do it and inject the info as HTTP headers.
If you aren't comfortable with trusting them with control over your network, you can always host your own Headscale server.
What makes Tailscale more secure, or more reliable, than just a direct Wireguard tunnel?
Tailscale's complexity and features make sense when you have 200 nodes, or maybe 20 nodes at least. When you have 3-5 nodes, I think it's overkill, and a bunch of extra dependencies which may fail, and lock you out of your private nodes when you need it most.
> If you aren't comfortable with trusting them with control over your network
Wrt the possibility of Tailscale being compromised, there's the in-beta tailnet lock feature:
> Tailnet lock lets you verify that no node is added to your tailnet without being signed by trusted nodes in your tailnet. When tailnet lock is enabled, even if Tailscale infrastructure is malicious or hacked, attackers can't send or receive traffic in your tailnet. [1]
Or, for those who are paranoid about relying on a company, setting up headscake is relatively quick and painless too - currently using it to sync between devices across multiple cities.
Unraid added native Tailscale support in 7.0, now you can just add an "app" (a docker container) and tick a checkbox and it'll appear in your tailnet directly.
+1. I have Wireguard set up on all my mobile devices and configured to automatically start when connecting to any wifi that isn't mine, so I can take my devices anywhere and I'm still on my home LAN. It works seamlessly and flawlessly.
I self-host a lot of services, and without Wireguard (or equivalent), remote access just wouldn't be realistic.
You can also set up DNS records pointing to your home server's VPN IP, which, with Tailscale, I've found to be pretty static and then a reverse proxy on your home server. So I have my home network apps running on app1.my-domiain.com app2.my-domain.com, app3.my-domain.com etc, which only work when I'm connected to the VPN.
The downsides are that I need to be connected to the VPN at home to use the domain and I currently don't have SSL set up on the domains, so browsers complain when I connect to them. The second problem I could fix, but I'm not sure if there's a solution for the first.
You can fix them both in one. In your local network you host a local DNS, in my case I’m using pihole. It has records which point to the local IP of a reverse proxy. With this setup you can have SSL for your domain names on your local network.
To make it then work outside your local network, in tailscale settings you use “split dns” to set your DNS to be the IP of your pihole in the tailnet for your domain. Now when you try hit your local domains you should receive the same local IPs that you do at home. Then in the tailscale route settings of your machine hosting the reverse proxy you make it advertise the subnet of those local IPs. Now when you receive the local IPs your devices using the tailscale VPN should go to your home server with SSL and no external DNS.
There is a solution for the first. I have setup my home server torun Tailscale _and_ be a router to 192.168.2.x network (you can set this up in the Tailscale UI). I have server.mydomain.com to resolve to 192.168.2.x address and this way I can access it from the outside via Tailscale and from inside without the need to turn on Tailscale. I have https setup via DNS-01 challenge as well and updated automatically.
The downside is that if you’re on a two-week vacation and your home network/server goes down on day two, there’s probably nothing you can do until you get home. If it’s hosted online, you can count on that 99.99…% uptime and SSH access no matter what.
I think what they meant is that if it's hosted online / home-network, only allow access to all services through a VPN. Wireguard is relatively easy to setup, and you can configure all your services to only be available through wireguard.
Ever since ssh almost got backdoor-ed, the only thing "exposed" on my servers is Wireguard, which is UDP based and therefore harder to know if it's running. SSH also goes over wireguard.
Although not perfect, I added a couple features to help ensure uptime:
* LAN components are on a UPS, helps keep continuity between power blips and breaker flips
* Dynamic DNS, cron runs a script 4x per day to ensure a DNS name points to my IP, even if issued a new one by the ISP
* Rebooting everything occasionally to ensure the network and services come back up on their own and I didn't make a mistake with some config that loads at boot, etc.
The internet is not a friendly place, so a VPN is a great idea.
With modern tools like Wireguard, you can even set it up relatively easy, either as Wireguard alone or as Tailscale (or ZeroTier, though that's not Wireguard).
Wireguard (and Tailscale) allows you to setup the tunnel so that only local (RFC1918 ie) traffic is routed over it, meaning it won't eat up your battery like when just routing all traffic over it.
I have Wireguard setup like that. It enables on any Wi-Fi network that isn't mine, as well as cellular, and the battery impact is less than 2% over a day.
I do this too yes. It's a great extra level of security though probably not too smart to rely on as the only one.
It's true you're already screwed if they get past the VPN and I also don't set up Auth for stuff that doesn't have any private details. But don't count on just the VPN for sensitive stuff. Like password manager.
Yeah, definitely don't do turn off auth for things that matter, if only because I'm not perfectly disciplined at keeping my guests off my main network. I'm talking about tiny services that do one thing—ollama, tts/stt, and similar. Stuff where the worst case scenario is someone using up some processor cycles, not data leaks.
Any idea on how to segment a VPN between friends? I have a few critical servers on my VPN I only want one or two devices to access, but no other devices. Mostly so that in case a rogue device enters or a friend gets hacked, there's no access to my sensitive services.
In my case I simply create two wireguard tunnels (one called "vpn", the other called "guest") and use firewall rules to block all traffic from the "guest" tunnel to all service except the one that should be "public" (in my case a minecraft server).
I think you could technically do it with a single tunnel by using firewall rules that refer to the IP address of the single peer but it's less convenient.
NOTE: I also added a dedicated dnsmasq instance only for the "guest" tunnel so that they have DNS working and can use hostnames instead of IP address.
This setup is trivial with both OpenWrt and OpnSense, but it should be doable also with manual setup
I built a home server project that manages many of the rough edges around deployment of self-hosted apps. It includes DDNS, router+firewall, headscale, automatic setup of apps, and automatic deployment of subdomains and TLS certs for each app.
Apps are blocked to the public by default but accessible using a Tailscale client.
It's built on top of NixOS and completely configurable through a single module.
Still in heavy development but I've replaced an entire rack in my closet with an Intel NUC.
welcome to the world when not TailScale, not a private WireGuard, not aL2TP, OpenVPN works. No, SSTP doesn't too. HTTPS works. Even on the devices you don't or can't control.
I'm not running a business, I'm running a home. The threat models are totally different and I adjust my security posture accordingly.
Besides, I don't bother with auth for simple services, not stuff that actually hosts data. If someone unauthorized is inside my network they're not going to be interested in using my TTS/STT service or in finding out the last barcode I scanned or in using my tiny consumer GPU to generate tokens on an LLM—there are way worse things they could be doing at that point than fiddling with the many tiny services I have set up.
Also: I couldn't set up so many silly, inconsequential services if I didn't have a VPN. With my setup, every new idea I have can be a quick service on my network accessible by me anywhere in the world. If I had to expose each of these things to the internet I wouldn't bother running them at all lest they have an exploit that ends up being an entrypoint into my network.
You need to understand your own risk tolerance and, more importantly, effort/resource threshold. Zero-trust is great if you have the resources to put to it, and companies should do it. But individuals trying to manage multiple companies worth of services, alone, on their own network? There's going to be corners cut.
I'm being serious - please educate us, how do you think that we can do better in a homelab setting? How do you apply zero-trust principles in homelab environment with reasonable effort and without relying on 3rd party services?
Your "life hack" is not a good advice. There's plenty of well-written explanations for why perimeter based security doesn't work. What is strange is that you've started in the right place: by being "constantly worried about security implications of each app". Unfortunately it's annoying and time consuming, but that's the right way to keep your data private. And if that's too much hassle, it means it's worth it to pay others to do it.
When I'm thinking about a hypothetical situation when I need to save the world by hacking into a hypothetical villain, my best hope will be him using your approach to security.
Any serious approach to security begins with a reasonable and clearly defined threat model, and my threat model for my home network doesn't currently include a team of superheros targeting my file backups in an effort to save the world. But I'll definitely keep your advice in mind when I do decide to start executing on my evil plots.
For now my threat model consists of script kiddies and abusive corporations. Self-hosting gets me away from the corporations and keeping my stuff off of the public internet keeps me away from script kiddies.
It seems to really be an ad for Directus (https://directus.io/) (?)
That he used to replace Obsidian.
One of the first image to hit me when I got there is a button
"Start For Free".
And if I want to run it on my own server in "production" it costs
money? or at least you have to fill out a form and "Lets chat".
When I go to a page, I click on pricing, and what I get is a
form to fill out and "Lets Chat", I am out of there.
If they cant show how pricing is structured, No thanks.
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> Obsidian was a great tool for me personally for a long time. But I felt frustrated when I wanted to access my notes on my phone while on-the-go and saw that I had to pay for this feature.
I'm using Syncthing [0] to sync my vault between devices. On my main PC, Syncthing runs constantly in the background. Say, if I made a change, and want to send those changes to my phone, I open the application on my phone and let it fetch the changes. It's not perfectly smooth, like Obsidian's own integration, but I prefer this instead of setting a Git repository. Also, the files don't stay in a remote server.
I do this but additionally with an always-on Raspberry Pi, so syncing works perfectly even if the laptop and phone aren’t able to sync directly to each other. The SyncTrain iOS app arrived just in time for me: https://t-shaped.nl/posts/synctrain-a-rethought-ios-client-f...
This was news to me, so this must have changed recently, as I have been billed more than that ever since I signed up.
I looked at my account, and I am charged $10 but it seems they automatically moved me to a "Plus" plan that has more storage. So no complaints from me really. Either that or the $4 plan is new. [1]
The $4 only comes with 1GB of storage. I would recommend the $10 for 50GB if you use images in your notes.
I think your comment is very disingenuous. And not just because it's another subscription. That plan does not work if you got more than one vault, and if you use Obsidian you will probably have more than one vault.
Yep. I use iCloud for my Obsidian vault, set to always be downloaded. I haven’t had an issue, and doesn’t cost me anything (beyond what I’m already paying for iCloud due to Photo Library).
I've been meaning to switch over to syncthing. I currently use insync for google drive syncing on Linux and it's basically instant and constant. I can make an edit on one machine and in the time it takes me to grab my laptop, it's been synced. That said, using google drive which I don't want to do anymore.
I did this and hooo does Apple make it difficult to sync files without iCloud. I felt like it was too janky for my liking, and paid for obsidian sync, but I felt like it was really silly how an official app could do it no problem, but you can’t get generic functionality to work with iOS.
I also tried to build my own Obsidian[^1] a few months ago.
However, I stopped using it after some time, since maintaining it would realistically be a full-time job. What I also found super annoying was the feeling that I'm never done with it. Whenever I encountered a rough edge or missing feature, I had to (obviously) implement it myself.
All in all, I find Obsidian as good as it gets. Also, Obsidian is probably one of the best options in terms of longevity, as all notes are just Markdown files, no proprietary DBs or other BS that could lock you in.
Wait. Sync is “free” if you want to use some other service other than Obsidian’s. I pay for Obsidian sync partially for slightly more convenience (fewer non-integrated points of failure) and also to support the app itself.
I’d gladly pay $1000 over a decade for a crucial tool. If the concern is open source and true longevity, I get it, you don’t get that here. But cost for value? Holy shit. $1000 over a decade is absolutely worth it for something you depend on.
If you’re a regular at a bar or restaurant, you pay an order of magnitude over $1000 a year for THAT service. This one is probably worth more.
I can, however, relate to the “every five years my system changes” problem. It’s not fun. At the same time, this is a reasonable cadence to re-evaluate things. If you found something perfect for you that works >5 years, holy crap. You are blessed. That honestly should not be the standard for tools these days—ESPECIALLY in a today’s world.
All that said: I don’t knock the author for trying to build software that can work for someone for 20 years or more. I salute that attempt—and I hope they can do it!—even if I think the specific details of how they got there are flawed.
I can easily grab a few imperial stouts for the weekend for 20€ but will balk at paying for a search engine.
Until I did the math of use per euro and Kagi turned out to be well worth it. I just drink one beer less a month and it's paid for and I'm healthier too =)
There's a lot of tools that are very useful but I'm not going to spend that much on. My water bottle is one.
And I don't think food is a good comparison. Or renting a physical space, depending on what you get out of being a regular.
Still, the basic price of $50 a year for sync is something I wouldn't be very upset with... except my main goal is a collaborative setup with other people and I'm not paying 5x or more to make that work.
It comes down to how much is your time worth.
If you're a developer making $100K+ a year, a $1,000 over a decade is nothing if it increases your productivity 2-3X compared to your collegues, which considering the fact that some of my colleagues store their notes in Windows Notepad is a complete underestimation.
> Obsidian charges $8 a month to access the same notes across multiple devices. While not a huge amount for such a useful app, it adds up to an eye-watering amount - almost $1,000 if I planned to use Obsidian for a decade.
This highlights one of my personal bugbears. People have a mental barrier when it comes to recurring, low-cost payments; even though the net sum is small in comparison to other things that they wouldn't think twice to pay for.
A $5 latte every workday comes to (260 * 5) $1300 annually. Obsidian sync is $96. Why would you not pay this amount for a tool you use everyday?
> People have a mental barrier when it comes to recurring, low-cost payments;
It's because they add up.
In this specific case, considering OP job and it's heavy use of obsidian, it makes no sense to not pay for the synchro, if only to support the company[1], but if I was paying 8€/month for all software and service I'm using I would be bankrupted immediately.
Ironically this hurt open source and companies proposing generous free tiers the most because the amount of money people have for software will go to the one they cannot get for free.
[1] actually it makes no sense to develop your own tool when alternatives already exists
I went deep into to the PKMS rabbit hole a year and a half ago, benchmarked Obsidian and many many others, and settled with Trilium¹ which I can only highly recommend. It addresses all the hosting/deployment requirements of OP² without the quirky workarounds mentioned here (syncthing & al), and makes the kind of "lifestyle scripting" this article about very simple and straightforward.
In my mind and experience, Trilium has a very unique and extensible model that lends itself to "growing with your PKMS": notes is the atom of information, attributes can be used to manage notes as structured and relational data, templates and inheritance provide structure and consistency at scale.
Trilium may not look like much on the surface, but it is incredibly capable while being approachable. Give it a serious try.
²: you can use Trilium local-first/only, or cloud-only, or hybrid. It has its own sync protocol, you just point your instance to a server to sync with, and now you have a master-master replication. All my notes are available offline so I can keep working in-flight, notes shared with others are available via web whether I'm online or not, and I can edit my notes on the web where I don't need offline persistence. All of that is built-in/native to Trilium.
Also, Trilium don't have mobile app which is very important for having notes available 24/7. Browser version don't allow offline access and not as convenient as an app
I think trillium is stashing the notes in a database. Certainly it thinks there is a migration step needed to move files around.
The everything markdown feature of obsidian is the dominant one. I can edit the files in emacs when I want to and the sync sorts it out just fine. They're stashed in a fossil repo by one of the machines as a backup because I'm paranoid and that also works fine because it's all ascii files.
Trillium looks great! I'm curious if it has an outliner mode or something similar? I currently use logseq and the two features I love are how each bullet/block is its own thing that can be cross-referenced and embedded in other blocks and pages, and that my workflow is essentially to have daily journal pages I dump everything into and tag and references/crossreferences are automatically handled and linked to build out a network of things.
I've noticed that trillium has hierarchical notes; is there a view to look at an item higher on the tree and have it also have the contents of all its children?
> I've noticed that trillium has hierarchical notes; is there a view to look at an item higher on the tree and have it also have the contents of all its children?
You are right that the "atom" of content is the block in an outliner and the Note in Trilium. If you can tolerate⁰ the coarser-granularity, you can make Trilium behave pretty closely to an outliner: notes can be embedded within notes, either manually, or via the "Book" note-type¹ (that essentially renders a tree as embedded notes), hoisting² should be a familiar concept then.
⁰: when researching the topic, I immediately fell in love with outliners, thinking I would never go back to a note-based approach like Joplin which I was using then, but here I am, promoting a note-based solution. Metadata/tags at block level is not something I could get the hang of (I know how to manage collections of notes at scale, but not collections of blocks).
¹: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/book-note.html
²: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/note-hoisting.html
Thank God I got over my tendency for gravitating to such bike-shedding [1] projects! While I appreciate that such pet peeves may result in a net benefit to the world, right now, I am in a place where I would cringe at even taking the risk of upgrading a piece of software that is working fine (like how often has upgrading Pylance or vscode resulted in something breaking? Every single time). The real, actual work is so so so difficult. Sitting down and starting (after attending to family obligations, eating, showering, changing clothes, commuting, et al). Getting into a productive flow state. Not getting interrupted. Not getting distracted. Just choose one thing, anything (OneNote, Evernote, whatever) and get to the real work, I beg you. Productivity + don't mess with success.
Thanks for sharing this is an understated point from the article as I was fiddling with Evernote, Notion then Obsidian more than I would like to admit. With this I certainly fiddle but I create what I need and get in and out of my notes.
If people find that rhythm and flow with their own PKMS - don't switch for the next shiny thing!
I really don't want to critisize OP since building stuff for yourself is always a good mentality. But lets be realistic, 1000$ over 10 years is nothing.
It will always cost more if you consider your own time for maintenance long term. Obsidian is one of the most consumer friendly business for note taking out of there, they are not VC so the Evernote comparison is unwarranted IMO.
> But lets be realistic, 1000$ over 10 years is nothing
Where is the limit ?
While $100/year maybe doesn't sound like much, it's hardly the only subscription service you have, and they all add up, from your mail provider, office suite, cloud storage, streaming services, phone bills, internet service, etc.
Personally I find $100/year to edit notes on my phone to be a bit much, but then again, I just use iOS Notes.
I am so fed up with everything turning into subscriptions, that I've just completely stopped buying things that are subscription based.
I understand developers need to make a living, but simply throwing a subscription on top of it won't convince me to buy your product. You convince me by making a compelling product, and by continuously updating it, adding new features, which will convince me to buy another version.
Yeah I just wanted to chime in here on what i see as a world view problem that might need to be updated with the times. I see your point about everything being subscription based.
There are definitely software out there that do not deserve to be subscription based. But there are some developers that I think should be supported on a regular basis. Especially obsidian because they develop one product and continually work on it to make it better. IMHO they deserve the money.
On side note I wish there was a way for it to be open source, and the team's reasons for not supporting open source seems a little iffy. They could still make money of of Obsidain Sync or other features that does not need to be part of a Open Source Release. Commercialism of a project this important worries me because people that depend on it can be easy side-lined if the team decides to sell out. Look what happened to the Atom editor. Microsoft brought it then killed it. I know with Obsidian you can walk away from it and thats good, but I always worry about commercial domination of a market causing limited choice.
I know your point was about subscriptions, and I guess I am saying im more supportive of that model, based on the times we are in, for developers that have genuine passion for a project that they want to continue developing.
Heck I know am realizing I need to support open source projects with regular donations because I want them to thrive long term
Personally, I just set myself a budget of $100/month for subscriptions. I was going to drive myself crazy judging every one all the time, so I decided as long as I’m under this threshold I’m not going to stress.
I track the ones I have so I can compare the cost, looking at either daily, monthly, or yearly cost. Sorting by price, I can look them over to judge if one of them seems unusually expensive for what it is, and regularly review to see if there are and I’m not using and need to be cancelled.
My most expensive is the could backup for my NAS. $8/month is about what I pay for Proton, which offers a lot more than just note syncing. So $8 for notes does seem like a lot. Looking at Obsidian’s pricing page[0], the $8/month is for publishing… hosting a website with your Obsidian data. Just syncing is only $4, and there are many free ways to do it. That part of the article felt like the author was trying to justify writing their own tool due to cost. That doesn’t feel justified, and they were stretching… but the good thing is there doesn’t need to be any financial justification at all. Just make your own tool for the sake of making your own tool. That’s good enough.
I think that no matter that they do you will always find people complaining. That is humanity's favorite sport. Even when it's free and open source people still complain.
Making software for individual consumers is freaking hard. My own perspective as a founder shifted from "this is a viable method to build a sustainable business" to "let's use it as the base for B2B sales, but it is not viable".
It's a non-trivial amount of money to a lot of people (myself included). I spend way more than that on Free Software, but I'm not throwing money to a proprietary program if I can choose.
FWIW, I’d be more concerned about the implications of the company having my notes in lieu of the pure cost perspective. But the thing is, you can avoid that entirely too by implementing your own sync
FWIW unless they are outright lying this is a choice, one of the choices when setting up a vault is E2E that you have to enter whenever setting up a new sync, but they are really clear that if you lose this password you are at the whims of your own backups.
They do also publish the “verify the encryption steps” for this.
Of course, depending on your threat model this could be insufficient, but then you probably wouldn’t trust obsidian in the first place.
Why not? It’s got a huge user base, a massive open source plug-in ecosystem and a sensible revenue model. It’s probably one of the note apps that has the largest community around it outside of Notion, which is heavily VC influenced and is more of a do everything app
For quick notes on the go, I also did go my own way and eventually built the app I wished I had. Journelly: kinda like tweeting but for your eyes only (in plain text)
While you don't need to know anything about its serialized format, it happens to be powered by Org plain text. For Markdown fans, I am recording Markdown interest. Do reach out: journelly + markdown at xenodium.com.
> It helped me reclaim control over my privacy, and significantly cut down on recurring costs.
Obsidian has end to end encryption and is $4 a month. I totally relate to it being fun to build your own tools but acting like it's a practical use of time... idk
Obsidian's syncing was pretty spotty for me. I was a big fan and was paying by the year, but kept getting frustrated when notes weren't syncing across devices.
$4/month is a lot for something that only sometimes syncs.
I'm aware there are some naming constraints due to the underlying mobile filesystems not liking certain characters. This might be why it's not syncing fully for you? I haven't had any other major issues yet.
I find it just a bit crazy that this is still an issue. I too jumped from Evernote when they did their rug pull in 2016, landed on Emacs+org-mode, and never looked back. Since then I've adopted Orgzly for org-mode on my phone, and syncthing to keep it all synced. The only real issue I ever had was the occasional conflict, which I resolved by splitting one of the files further into things that got modified on the laptop (primarily write-ups and my cheatsheet collection) vs things that got modified on mobile (primarily repetitive tasks).
I haven't found use for plugins yet since I'm really just searching, updating tasks and archiving. But if I do need extra functionality, Emacs is the most versatile editor out there, and org-mode is native to it.
I did see that a while back, but I haven't had any issues so didn't look into it. A quick search just now though shows Syncthing-Fork on F-Droid, so it should be an easy migration if there does come a need. I did the same with Orgzly a few months ago as it too was forked due to the original dev going MIA, and there were a few annoyances I wanted resolved.
I switched to syncthing-fork, have had zero issues.
(At some point I'm sure new Android versions will do something that will require changes, but that can happen to any app and we will adapt. I think I've used syncthing for nearly a decade with next to no issues so I'm not very worried.)
Is there a reason that Obsidian, Notion and OP all decided to use a dedicated sync service, as opposed to just using generic file storage, which may or may not be in the cloud ?
It would seem to me that it would leave out a whole lot of complexity to just use Google Drive / OneDrive / iCloud Drive to handle the synchronization across devices, and if need be you could then just add encryption on the cloud storage (if desired), which you would need to do anyway for the dedicated sync service. It would also reduce the infrastructure cost a lot, and utilize resources already available.
You can self-host obsidian syncing which is exactly what I'm doing. You can also share your notebooks with something like Syncthing, but you may get merge errors that way - just self host the database (CouchDB) and you're good to go:
I ditched for [silverbullet](https://silverbullet.md). MIT licensed, markdown editor with embedded lua scripting. It's a PWA app that works offline and syncs well.
Silverbullet is aptly named but I'd actually wait a month or two because it's going through the transition to V2 which shuffles a few things around.
Other than that it's exactly what it says on the tin, a hacker's digital notebook. While it would take a bit of rolling up your sleeves to make it look as nice as Logseq or Obsidian it's actually closer in form and function to something like org-mode for Emacs (though not quite hitting the mark regarding linking sadly).
It's got some rough edges. I want to sit down and build it so I can add an id to the TOC so I can CSS style it to be floating and submit it upstream.
I'm also having issues with integrating it with Authentik's header proxy auth, keeps directing me to a note with the outpost path as the name. The only guide is for authelia.
Most note-taking apps share the same fate: they either become obsolete over time (due to unsupported operating systems, security issues, or discontinued drivers) or end up locking you into a proprietary ecosystem.
My solution was to move to a file-based system — using plain folders, files, symlinks, and relative links. The filesystem is one of the most fundamental and enduring parts of computing infrastructure, which means I can rely on accessing my notes the same way 20+ years from now. It also allows me to plug in containerized tools for viewing or editing notes, without being tied to a specific app. Filesystem APIs are incredibly stable — basic commands like mkdir won’t suddenly be locked behind a subscription.
Plus, there are plenty of options for syncing and real-time collaboration, many of which are self-hostable and vendor-neutral.
Are there any private note solutions that can encrypt all markdown files against your own Yubikey-generated privkey?
You can do this with SOPS and age encryption and it's amazing, but can't view/edit notes outside a terminal or on mobile very easily that I've found.
Looking for a new solution like this, or maybe obscure configuration for an existing notes app that can support this workflow.
All of the "end-to-end" solutions seems like they just store your encrypted keys somewhere with the application files, sync them around to different machines, etc, and decrypt key with a password. But web frontends can be compromised and the master password intercepted, so I'd like to require a Yubikey touch for each document decrypt, which would make exfiltrating multiple documents more difficult.
this is the inevitable PKMS pipeline, and the one that almost certainly led to Obsidian and Notion to begin with.
Need PKMS > Use existing product > Notice shortcomings > Switch to main alternative > Notice shortcomings > Begin creating bespoke PKMS with the specific functionality you wanted.
There are community plugins to self-host the sync-server though.
Anyway, I hate the fact I'm using closed-source editor, because it kinda is a sensitive thing, but the more I'm using Obsidian, the more unlikely the switch seems. I was kinda stingy with installing new plugins too, but, well, you cannot just ignore the productivity benefits. It doesn't seem feasible to build something like than on my own (for multiple platforms too!), and nobody brave enough seems to have made it so far.
Even if you try to replicate it, you need the community support and enthusiasm and interest in hacking and sharing their work to compete. Joplin is a great alternative, but the community plugins pale in comparison to Obsidian if you're a power user
I long for the days of a note taking / personal "data store" system that isnt a pain in the arse to use. I really couldn't give a damn about apps i need to tweak like craxy or constantly maintain to work how I want. Obsidian is good but its just massive overkill for someone who just wants to wright stuff down and have it securely stored, and accessible anywhere anytime its needed.
The second someone says "oh just set up X server and add Y plugin and tweak Z settings" you've lost the whole point of the thing.
Obsidian is so useful to me, I don't mind paying for the sync to support Obsidian dev.
The notes being markdown is also very useful, I spend most of my time in a text editor, so I installed a Neovim plugin that works a bit like Obsidian [1]. So, for simple note-taking, I don't have to open Obsidian at all. It comes in useful when I need to use the massive collection of plugins, especially Excalidraw.
> Obsidian charges $8 a month to access the same notes across multiple devices. While not a huge amount for such a useful app, it adds up to an eye-watering amount - almost $1,000 if I planned to use Obsidian for a decade. I was surprised at this fee because I thought Obsidian was open-source.
Before going out and building my own software I’d have looked into self hosting the files. To save those couple bucks.
My solution: a bunch of Markdown files in a git repo. I move between files with Vim's `gf`. I sync manually. If I really need to, I can edit through GitHub's web UI. Not ideal in amy way, but wicked simple.
I’ve done this! I wound up writing a small 500 sub LOC solution (very bare bones) that I copy/paste when I work in places where I don’t get to use my fav note taking software.
That said, I just converged on Apple Notes in the end.
There's a lot of ways to sync your notes for free with those said community open-source plugins, including through standard free cloud options if you really want to pay zero and have no server in the middle.
Very curious to hear from avid note takers: is it a habit? (maybe addiction?) is it just a tool to do you work better? Is it for fun? Why the elaborate setups (Git + Wireguard etc.)
Sincerely, not-trolling, from a bare minimum note taker.
I had the bright idea of symlinking $HOME/.local to an iCloud directory once. About a week later it got completely deleted. No way to restore, or any indication of what happened. Luckily I had a backup with another provider, but I will never trust iCloud again for anything that’s not on the golden path (e.g. photos)
> But I felt frustrated when I wanted to access my notes on my phone while on-the-go and saw that I had to pay for this feature. Obsidian charges $8 a month to access the same notes across multiple devices.
Errm, no? Obsidian sync is optional. I pay for it to support them, but my main vaults are all synced by iCloud, which was auto set-up by Obisidan during initial setup on my iPhone.
On the Android side, any service which can sync files can work, I assume.
Note: Yes, I use Obsidian on my phone without sync, all the time, and it syncs.
Obsidian answers one of the key questions I asked these days of tools that I use, “Can I walk out of this easily and seamlessly?”
The best tools are the ones that get things done and get out of the way. When the time comes, you can walk out of Obsidian easily without being a hostage in any format.
The few plugins that I use are the ones I can walk out too and live without it. I love the idea of spending extra time to learn the details, shortcuts, and be able to use a tool natively without the help of plugins or extreme configurations that it takes hours/days to deviate too far away from the original configurations.
I wrote my own CLI tool for notes a few months ago (https://github.com/ollien/quicknotes). A web interface with proper rendering is something I thought about, but didn't pursue because I just know my UI skills aren't up to the task. Directus is a really interesting compromise!
Maybe I’m just not a very insightful person, but I can’t imagine ever having so many original and valuable thoughts that I’d need a place to store them. In fact, many of the things I think end up being wrong, so I’d rather use the Internet as my “PKMS” since it is more likely to refine what I think I know.
It’s more like.. project ideas you actually want to pick up, projects in progress, notes while learning something, journals, writing. It can definitely get heavy, but like a personal knowledge base can really be helpful. I store my measurements, health stuff.
Granted, I am neurodivergent and have memory issues, so it’s hard for me to say what use it’d be to anyone else. But like, if you’re doing research into something deep, experiments, etc , and you have to put it down sometimes, it’s nice to be able to pick up right after you left off.
Obviously no right answer, but personally I think worrying too much finding the perfect tool instead of just integrating more knowledge to your PKMS is a distraction.
Rolling your own solution is especially limiting in the context of the sheer amount of integrations the popular ones (like Notion for example) support.
You're basically saying you will quickly build something better than the X hundred engineers at PKMS company Y quickly and it will continue to be better than what X hundred engineers will iterate upon.
I think that time is just better spent learning and picking the subset of features that, for example, Notion offers that really improves your learning rate.
If you reframe it slightly, it can make sense. Those x hundred engineers are working on y hundred features / integrations. Do you need all of those? Do you want all of those? I bet a handful of those engineers are currently working on a brand new UI redesign that will move all the buttons you're used to. One of the engineers is adding a new cookie popup & enforcing SMS 2FA as we speak.
One of the things I dislike about moden software is the constant bloat and churn, because there are so many customers and so many different incentives for software companies to keep pushing features ad infinitum. In contrast, home-grown software like this has one customer and they know exactly what they want. It doesn't matter that a theoretical home-grown app doesn't integrate with the 10 social networks the user doesn't use, because it integrates perfectly with the one they do use.
This person isn't rebuilding the entirety of Obsidian, they're rebuilding the subset of parts they actually use and get value from, which is a much smaller project. By intelligently narrowing your scope like this, making stuff yourself is totally viable. Reframe "limiting" as "targeted".
I agree Notion is great. I prefer it if I need a shared PKMS such as a company wide document system.
That said I've played around with its API a few years ago and with page elements being block elements you need to loop through n amount of requests to get the content, it didn't make sense for my use case.
At the meta level, my life is already too short to allow closed-source tools for anything on which I may need to depend in the long term. Commercial entities come and go, for reasons important for them but not necessarily for me. Old, ancient code can be made to run, as long as it's available and legal to distribute and run. If it's useful enough, I will be not the only user by far, and there'll be enough collective effort to keep it afloat, or replace adequately.
Locally runnable freeware is the next best thing, but a distant second.
So, no Obsidian for me, no Directus for me, etc, no SaaS; Org mode is good enough so far, and when it becomes inadequate, if ever, I'll start looking.
On the inverse, even as a FOSS advocate, my life is too short to only use open source software all the time and to reinvent the wheel and tools that have been put together into one fantastic product by the combined effort of hundreds of people.
I used Joplin for years, I even self hosted the Joplin Sync server, but Obsidian + Community addons runs literal miles around it from a performance and user cusomizability standpoint. Yes, I could stick to being a die hard FOSS user and spend twice as long doing the same tasks, or not even be able to due to lack of community extensions that do the same thing on Joplin's side. I could spend a 100 hours learning how to write a Joplin extension to do what I want and that would be a waste because that's 100 hours less that I've spent focusing on growing the skills that I get paid for. Life is too short to reinvent the wheel every single time.
The product may be fantastic, and thus a force multiplier. But it can see an abrupt end, thus incurring a loss. Whether you win more than you lose, on average, depends on the use case, and the particular advantages. As everything in life, this us a trade-off.
My point is that for long-term, high-investment stuff, in my particular view, the possibility of interruption and loss outweighs any possible upside, and any migration would be costly. Similarly, a move from a house where you lived for 20-30 years by its disruptiveness may tantamount to surviving a flood or a fire.
For "short-term" tools this is not so, very obviously, but they do not need my investment, hence they would incur no loss were I to migrate off them if a replacement exists. I could not replace Google with anything, but then DDG and then Kagi appeared, and largely replaced Google web search for me, quite seamlessly. When a better LLM appears, I will start using it instead of Claude. Etc.
I still mostly think like you, but I'm now more open to closed source tools.
The question I ask myself: is the advantage here so significant that it's worth the hypothetical switching cost at some point (and is export even possible?). If the answer is yes to both, I go for it.
Reads like a mix of valid concerns and a plug for Directus, which is sort of fishy.
Either way, like many others, I use SyncThing to sync my vault, and routinely edit it with vim, so Obsidian is just one comfortable shell that can (relatively easily) be replaced.
I don't understand the negative concerns mentioned by the author.
It's quite easy to sync notes to your mobile device using a free method, or using a cloud service you might already be paying for [4].
The great thing about Obsidian is that the notes itself are just markdown files, so you can use them in any other program. This protects you as a user in case Obsidian enters a enshittification phase. A good alternative is haptic [0], it is very similar to Obsidian but can also be used in the browser. Or LogSeq [1], SilverBullet[2] and just Visual Studio Code also work well. For just editing a single file MarkText[3] is also good.
I'm at the other side of the note system trade-off thingy. I use Apple Notes.
It's not perfect, but if I really want better search functionality, I'll just use the SQLite database that stores the notes. I've never needed to roll up my sleeves for that. I get around the limitations.
It's not perfect, but crafting one's own Personal Knowledge Management System sounds like a 5 year journey for 10 to 20 hours per week at least.
Exactly - I have tinkered with all sorts of systems (including Obsidian), and ultimately prefer the simplicity of Apple Notes. I have a system of nested folders and tags that handles my organization needs pretty well, and I find added complexity just ends up adding more friction to the note-taking process. Apple Notes search could certainly use improvement though.
I created Hot Notes to fuzzy search my Apple Notes folders and titles, it is working quite well for me. I think it could work well for your nested folders.
As a longtime Logseq user who was sick of their app focus (it used to be a webapp!) and skeptical of their revenue model, I switched to Silverbullet a while back. It gets the basics right, and I can throw together some Lua and make it do whatever else I want. Plus there's a small but enthusiastic community developing for it. I have it set up in a VPS and it has brought back most of the magic of early days Logseq.
I inadvertently converted a longtime Logseq user to Trilium. In case you find yourself hacking too much around Silverbullet, or want to try something else, you should give it a try :-)
Trillium is great for some folks (and I would have no qualms recommending it), but I cannot stand hierarchical notes. That's a personal preference. I just want a big mishmash of notes all linking to each other. I don't want to manage a taxonomy.
I used git to sync a work related repo, but now use remotely-save with WebDAV (nextcloud, with base set to /Notes). No cost for sync and still access to the ecosystem of Obsidian.
What do people's success stories with fancy PKMS looks like? I get writing stuff down, but I've never quite gotten the deep linking stuff. I tend to just be able to get away with some basic folders.
Agreed. Particularly with running your notes through a text embedded model you can use semantic similarity and no longer need to manually link notes! This is something I'm excited to add in to my PKMS at some point.
Same here. I get a massive amount of value out of writing things down at home and at work. I get comparably little value out of linking things together — beyond direct references at least. I think this may be a difference in how different people think and recall information.
I'm a lot more concerned about some random app on my phone accessing my Obsidian notes, which is why I haven't synced them to my phone yet, rather than Obsidian somehow knee-capping at some point in the future (which is not possible since it's all just md files in the end) .
KDE Plasma has a vaults feature which allows you to encrypt and decrypt contents of a directory. Combine that (or some other encryption software, eg syncthing encryption instead) with syncthing and markdown editor is virtually the same thing no?
I just don’t have any of these worries with Obsidian. I pay for it because it’s great software and needs support. The sync is amazing, totally solid. The data is wherever you want that data to be. It’s just MD files. You can adapt the tool to be whatever you want from a PKM system - massively complex, with some kind of dataview hell, or just some files in a hierarchy. You can use plugins or not use plugins. You can build your own. There’s no lock in. “Migration” isn’t really a thing - it’s some files in a folder system. It’s as future proof as it can be.
I mean go nuts and roll your own if you want, but really, what’s not to like?
> Obsidian was a great tool for me personally for a long time. But I felt frustrated when I wanted to access my notes on my phone while on-the-go and saw that I had to pay for this feature
On Android, I solved this problem quite simply by pointing Obsidian's mobile app at a syncthing folder, which cheerfully communicates with my workstation (and about a dozen other devices I own) and keeps things up to date. Works way better than I expected it to. Honestly the most infuriating part is that Google seems to have decided that apps like syncthing aren't welcome on the Play Store anymore, leaving the maintenance of that particular app up in the air. But the point here is that Obsidian can point to any folder, and the syncing task is totally separate. It's nice to have the convenience of their hosted option, but it's by no means the only solution to that problem.
The Maya Angelou quote is a very poor choice. I don't know if the author realizes the absurdity of putting the civil rights movement in parallel with her "PKM journey"
I could be wrong, but I’ve always been under the impression that Obsidian charges a lot for sync because the app is amazing and free. Sync helps pay for that. But they’re also very helpful about providing other ways to sync your files to your phone. I use iCloud Drive (which I have anyway for other reasons).
At least for me personally, the paid syncing was pretty spotty. I was a hug fan of the app, paid for yearly billing, but never got notes to sync consistently across devices.
Interesting that storing images is not something solved yet.
If you watch the animated gif, he is still using a third party service to store that graph.
I also think people to tend to like Markdown mostly because it’s plain text. The added benefits of that preview view is minimal. Like my gut feeling Markdown is popular 90% because of it’s in an accepted way to do plaintext and only 10% for the added formatting.
> "The added benefits of that preview view is minimal."
In relative terms you may be right... but subjectively, having grown accustomed to Obsidian's live view in editor mode, I'd have a hard time giving it up.
Obsidian can automatically ingest files and store them on disk while giving links to it. My personal vault contains many kinds of files living in the "Attachments" folder.
> Markdown is popular 90% because of it’s in an accepted way to do plaintext and only 10% for the added formatting.
For me Markdown allows me to write and format text at the speed of thought. Added bonus is that it's readable with "less xyz.md" or anything which can render text.
Yep. Obsidian strikes a good compromise of automatically copying attachments into a relative subfolder for the note and then linking them in the MD file:
With plaintext, it's very trivial to add a script that put images in some location and build the link to that.
Markdown is great because you can easily add structure while typing compared to other format which have a more extensive markup format. I prefer org-mode because what Markdown can do, but also more extensive capabilities if you need so, but there's not a lot of editors for it especially on mobile.
TiddlyWiki is great until you want to add a structure to your Wiki. I was using it like mad, then I found out that linking pages took more time then writing notes, and I pulled the trigger and moved to Obsidian.
If you run the node.js server version it can handle images properly, as separate files. That also gives you the practical ability to use many large images and videos.
I've built a couple for myself so far; the most recent is in zig (sqlite extension that treats markdown files / frontmatter as virtual tables) and it's lasted me. I plan to rewrite it soon to adapt to how I've been using it :)
Anytype. Local-first, p2p sync with e2ee. It uses the notion model (everything is an object, you can create "databases" with queries of objects). It doesn't store markdown directly I believe, but it can export into markdown perfectly.
I recently moved to anytype from logseq as it hit for me all the right notes for personal stuff, shared family stuff and work stuff.
I wanted something like notion but faster and most importantly, private.
Younger folk and beginners keep ignoring Emacs (and Lisp in general), without the slightest attempt to even understand what kind of philosophy makes it appealing.
The profound difference lies in ontological fungibility – Emacs isn’t software you use, but cognitive clay that becomes an extension of your mind’s operating system. Where any specialized app is inevitably doomed to constrain you to some kind of constructed imagination of what note-taking/knowledge work should be, Emacs+Org erases the distinction between a tool and thought through radical philosophical pillars.
1. The Medium is the Message Paradox
Emacs rejects the app paradigm's fundamental axiom. Instead of being a "notes app" or "writing app", it's a meta-medium where:
- Your notes can spontaneously become a calendar event → spreadsheet formula → email draft → code compiler
- The act of writing is programming your environment (Org markup becomes executable functions)
- Tools aren't discrete entities but fluid expressions of your current mental state (e.g., I can run a shell command piping it to grep and then pipe the results into a text buffer)
1. Agency Through Textual Primordial Soup
By rooting everything in plain text + programmable buffers, you're working with the substrate of computation itself. Unlike database-driven apps that entomb your ideas in rigid schemas:
- Every thought remains perpetually protean – a TODO item can morph into a API documentation generator through markup alone
- You manipulate knowledge at the level of semantics (headings, tags, properties) rather than fighting GUI metaphors
- The friction between "taking notes" and "building systems" disappears – your journal entries are the configuration files of your life (I manage all my dotfiles — for Linux, Mac, home and work machines via Org-mode)
1. Compounding Selfhood
Specialized apps optimize for atomic efficiency; Emacs thrives on continuous identity investment. Each macro you write, each Org capture template, each minor mode becomes:
- A cognitive microhabitat that evolves with your thinking patterns
- Permanent infrastructure that pays compound interest (my 2010 Org config still works, while Evernote of 2010 is abandonware)
- A mirror of your epistemology – the keybindings/hierarchies are your neural pathways externalized
This creates an irreducible satisfaction: you're not just using tools but cultivating a personal universe where every interaction leaves permanent fertile ground for future growth. The specialized app user lives in rented apartments; the Emacs devotee walks through an ever-expanding mansion whose rooms rearrange themselves to their thoughts.
People definitely sleep on emacs, which is a shame, but I do get it. I switched to emacs fulltime for coding for my work a few years ago, and really had it tailored to my preferences but drift (that took just slightly too long for me to keep up with while on the job) combined with AI features in other editors led me to land on Zed for code, which saddened me but is probably the best fit for coding.
However, Org-Mode is seriously a killer feature that is well worth it on its own. I use emacs to handle all my finances, notes with org-roam, blogging with ox-hugo, dotfiles in a massive org-tangle document, etc. I couldn't find anything remotely to compare it to, and have failed attempts at switching. There are tons of ways of interacting with Emacs that are just lightyears ahead of anything else. Literate programming and tangle are a godsend for tons of different use cases for me as well. I even keep running notes in the base of my codebase so I can hop to various files and capture locations in the relevant files as links in notes.
The only pain point for these tools for me is trying to use them as part of a commandline integration. I really wish org-mode and org-roam's functions were callable outside of emacs, e.g. for automated document generation from org-mode. One of the most painful things I've had to setup is an org-roam-server integration that updates and deploys org-roam-server when the git repo containing its files is updated. Only way to do that seemingly is to run emacs in a very strange way inside of a docker image. Intuitively it feels like org-roam-server should be able to build itself into a static website for deployment. Might seem like a nitpick, but it's really not -- that interface is a huge part of why I use it and not being able to host it without horribly hacky workarounds seems like a massive weakness.
(Long time Emacs user, abandoned since VSCode became a thing because it hurt my wrists so much.)
Do you think what you're talking about is hard to demo?
"- The act of writing is programming your environment (Org markup becomes executable functions)
- Tools aren't discrete entities but fluid expressions of your current mental state (e.g., I can run a shell command piping it to grep and then pipe the results into a text buffer)"
I haven't seen an impressive demo of this kind of stuff tbh.
Kudos to the author for scratching their own itch.
People in a similar position might be interested in Joplin, which is indeed FOSS, and has lots of sync options. I personally use SyncThing, which keeps things free, but you can also use a number of other free cloud providers. You can choose to encrypt your notes to protect your privacy.
If you need a little bit more than Joplin (which is a great notes taking app, but not so much of a PKMS), give Trilium¹ a try! (I used Joplin for a little while, and it's a good tool, and it's fine not to chase for more if you don't need it, but if you do, not much beats Trilium, IMO)
Self hosted Joplin with encryption has been more than enough for me. It was pretty easy pulling all my apple notes into joplin as md files. Building my own like this just seems excessive
> Obsidian charges $8 a month to access the same notes across multiple devices.
It's $4 actually, for the normal plan that works perfectly well for most use cases. It's also end to end encrypted, which is great. And it's not just about syncing for me, it's about a backup solution for the notes.
> I started to have concerns about the longevity of the plugins and app itself. Some of you may remember when Evernote aggressively limited free users to 50 notes, many users migrated their notes elsewhere. I was one of those users.
The great thing about Obsidian (in comparison to Evernote), is that everything is just a plain text markdown file on disk. You can open those files in any app. If Obsidian goes away someday, all your notes can continue to be edited in any plain text editor. Sometimes I open notes in VS Code, because there are certain things I just prefer writing there.
I tend to start a note with frontmatter in Obsidian, drop into vim to do the writing, then back into Obsidian to clean things up. Wish there were a cleaner way to do it, but it works for me.
I am also searching for an alternative to Obsidian, that also works well on iOS and macOS. Obsidian is currently really slow somehow although all extensions are disabled, e.g. rendering the content when switching between notes is not instant. I really really like Outline, but I don't want to access the web just to write and read notes.
If you need an option to publish your notes online, check out Retype (https://retype.com). You can use Obsidian or GitBook or any Markdown files as your GUI editor and generate a static website using Retype.
The main thing being complained about here is that you have to pay for device sync. But instead of setting ups FOSS alternative like with a-shell and git you decided to… checks notes… build a less featureful obsidian without getting all the benefits of the obsidian ecosystem?
I’m all for doing projects like this as an intellectual exercise. It’s just that the motivation behind doing so in the article is a bit more “huh?”
Yep fair point. I'm doing the project in chucks and writing about it. his written part notably unlocks the ability to use my phone. Currently vetting a way to sync my database files with my markdown files on my laptop as I enjoy using Vim.
Funny enough I had downloaded a-shell and experimented with it and going git based. But ultimately didn't want my notes stored through Github. If that way works for you, cool!
I do agree with the author and others that I also wouldn't feel comfortable storing personal notes on Github. As I mentioned in a previous comment - you can use "git" without Github by hosting an instance of the open-source Gitea service.
Doesn’t HAVE to be GitHub, git is git is git. You could host your own git server like a self hosted Gitlab if privacy is a concern (which is a totally valid concern! I share the same concern, I don’t necessarily want all of my inner brain workings available to GitHub). You could probably also figure out some clever way to encrypt the files too, I bet there’s a plugin for that. Then you could use anything you want without that worry
> The thought of cyclically migrating notes from one PKMS to another every 5 years, as I had done from Evernote to Notion to Obsidian, made me feel tired.
> The most commonly used PKMS or note-taking apps today are Notion, Obsidian, Evernote and Logseq. The problem is that PKMS come and go.
Uh oh. I wouldn't use those. Of course they come and go - they're made by companies.
> Could you see yourself using your note-taking app you use today in 30 years?
Yes of course. Otherwise I wouldn't be using it.
> Do you ever have concerns around the privacy of your notes?
Not really.
> Are you spending more time setting up your notes system rather than managing your notes?
No.
> What does an effective and timeless PKMS even look like?
I use VimWiki[0]. There's a possibility it will go away, but I doubt it. There's a possibility both vim and neovim will go away, but I doubt it.
It stores everything as Markdown files. Should Markdown ever go away, it's all still very readable plain text files. I use UTF-8. Perhaps that'll go away at some point?
I version everything with git, I doubt git will fully go away, but I'm ok migrating to a different VCS if need be.
I bet the longevity of my setup is way better than the longevity of a backend written in TypeScript, backed by a SQL database, running in Docker, based on a CMS I've never heard of (Directus).
I actually publish my wiki on the web with about fourty lines of bash to transform the Markdown into a static HTML website[0]. So I can access it through the web browser. When people ask me for recipes or whatever, I can just give them a url.
I host one of my git remotes on GitHub (an extra backup, a service which is usually up and gives me a way to sync my notes should all my other devices be offline). I understand and admire that you didn't want to do that. Probably it's possible to install git on a phone and use a markdown editor? I don't particularly trust my phone tbh. Certainly not enough to put my git signing key on it!
I applaud the action, but motivation is strange. I am all for making custom software for your own needs and tailored for own use cases, but price?
How much does your VPS costs vs Obsidian subscription? I wonder. Is it like 1 5$/month micro machine and you just pray that it will survive for 10 years without data loss?
I have many thoughts, as I'm sure everyone on this forum does. I feel like mentioning PKMS on Hacker News is like mentioning, idk, shave soap or knives on reddit.
> But if it's so obvious, why aren't other developers rolling out their own PKMS? Perhaps I'm the first to discover this or perhaps developers aren't writing about their custom PKMS.
I don't mean to shit on the OP's work here, but from what I can tell, the app they built is a multi-platform markdown editor and renderer that has an auth stack. Oh, and it's self hostable.
So while I think it's fun to do personal projects, I kinda feel like, if you had time to do this, it would probably have been better both for you and just like the world in general if you instead just created a PR with whatever feature you wanted on one of these more fleshed out projects. Bonus: you get a bunch more stuff, for free, since many other people are working on the same project. Bonus bonus: You can put a project with a shitload of github stars and users on your portfolio/resume/whatever and point to your PR.
Anyway as for PKMS thoughts, I've been using org mode since 2016. I've tried Obsidian and Logseq for completedness but in both cases ended up back in org mode for various reasons.
In PKMS, everyone goes on about knowledge graphs, linking etc, but I've realized lately I've never found that useful - I do use org-roam and link notes, but when I want to find links to, say, "machine learning," I'm just as likely to simply do a full-text file search for the term, which leads to the same results. As for the visual knowledge graphs, I've never seen them useful for anything other than showing off at coworking meetups.
What I've come back to is, what I really need my PKMS to do that I haven't really configured org mode to do yet for me is, in situations that happen to me CONSTANTLY when I'm out and about, I need my PKMS very quickly to answer questions for me like, "who was that guy I read recently that said something about modern capitalism causing us all to be alienated," or, "I vaguely remember reading about how social media categorizes us into advertising groups, what was that again?", or, "What was that city in Italy we went to with that crazy good ice cream? Actually on that note what islands did we go to on that trip?" I'm frequently in conversations with people where I want to share information with them, but maybe because I have ADHD brain or just am uniquely deficient and remembering very specific bits of info, I can't recall stuff (a great example of this, and I had to google to write this part: I ALWAYS forget Quentin Tarantino's name despite really liking his movies). Anyway, I tried using an org-roam org-to-html deploy tool to create a searchable, private website of my knowledge graph, and that's... fine I guess. I need to get it automated somehow, but even then I'm sure it won't be great. Of course I'm thinking of some kind of deployed solution that queries an LLM that can search my entire note repo, but that's a project and a half I don't have time to do.
So for now my plan is to just keep plugging away at org mode and org-to-html to see if I can get a really good flow there.
I'm not saying AI is going to replace programmers, but it's been almost a century already and we still don't have a decent note taking app or even a todo list app and that's like the first app you learn to make. Maybe humanity just kind of sucks at this whole application development thing.
There are hundreds of decent note taking apps and todo apps. The issue is that almost no one has the exact same needs or workflow for either of those things. I’ve given up on suggesting those things to people and sticking with “whichever one you use is the best”. So the best you’ll ever do is a decent one //for you// but it’s possible that definition may not work for anyone else.
I think this is a great time to build personal knowledge base!
LLMs are the missing piece that everyone has been desperately need to have the knowledge base come to life, instead of as a glorified key word search engine
Good article but as a heavy user of Obsidian (and previously Evernote), I would offer some counterpoints:
> After some mental gymnastics weighing if I should continue with Obsidian, I found solace when asking myself "Can I see myself using this in 20 years?". I couldn't. The thought of cyclically migrating notes from one PKMS to another every 5 years, as I had done from Evernote to Notion to Obsidian, made me feel tired.
In point of fact this is actually an argument IN FAVOR of Obsidian. While the editor might be proprietary - the notes themselves are just standard markdown. If somehow all the copies of Obsidian magically disappeared off the earth tomorrow, I could easily switch over to Emacs org mode, VS Code, or literally anything else.
> Obsidian was a great tool for me personally for a long time. But I felt frustrated when I wanted to access my notes on my phone while on-the-go and saw that I had to pay for this feature.
Again, a little bit odd considering that the author is technically savvy enough to write an entire PKMS but didn't seem to consider that you can just check your markdown notes into a git repository and sync with the native android/iOS Obsidian app on a mobile device. All my notes sync up to Gitea hosted on my VPS and it works relatively seamlessly.
I'm glad the author had fun. Personally, I'm very happy with Obsidian and the plugin architecture has made it easy for me to extend it where necessary.
Again, a little bit odd considering that the author is technically savvy enough to write an entire PKMS but didn't seem to consider that you can just check your markdown notes into a git repository and sync with the native android/iOS Obsidian app on a mobile device.
Also, Obsidian supports free iCloud sync if you are a Mac and iOS user. I know that's only a subset of users, but a nice option to get Obsidian to sync on the phone if you are in the Apple ecosystem.
Also, they have a cheaper Sync plan now that is $4 per month.
I can't really be bothered that Sync would cost up to 1000 in ten years. If you use Obsidian daily, it had an immensive value and it's cheaper than most services out there.
To add to your last point - 10 years is a very long time frame. Any recurring cost grows to eye-watering levels if the time interval is huge enough. In 10 years, a lot can happen in the space and you are not locked in with obsidian - if the next better thing comes along in 3 years, you can easily migrate.
Syncthing... It can do it too
handles syncing my pictures too
iCloud sync is too unreliable and opaque for me.
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> In point of fact this is actually an argument IN FAVOR of Obsidian. While the editor might be proprietary - the notes themselves are just standard markdown. If somehow all the copies of Obsidian magically disappeared off the earth tomorrow, I could easily switch over to Emacs org mode, VS Code, or literally anything else.
100% this. The reason I started using Obsidian in the first place is that it's built on the exact directory structure and file formats that I was already using to manage my writing and notes, and if Obsidian goes away for some reason, that won't change.
> Again, a little bit odd considering that the *author is technically savvy enough to write an entire PKMS*
I’m pretty sure author just wanted to build PKMS. These types of “oooh, will it be there in 20 years” are standard OCD/procrastination.
> Again, a little bit odd considering that the author is technically savvy enough to write an entire PKMS but didn't seem to consider that you can just check your markdown notes into a git repository and sync with the native android/iOS Obsidian app on a mobile device.
Even simpler, I have mine in a Dropbox folder. Felt very strange for _this_ to be the straw that broke the camel's back for the author.
Nonetheless, very glad for them that they enjoyed and learned from the experience of building a replacement!
Yeah, I have my obsidian vault in Dropbox and synced to my phone and back with Dropsync on android. The obsidian mobile app Just Works™ with this. It was a one time setup. Of course there's no fancy conflict resolution going on, but it's unlikely I'm editing in two places at once so it's not needed.
Yeah, syncing text files across devices is a problem that has little to do with obsidian or whichever editor/renderer one uses. As long as one keeps things relatively simple with plugin-related syntax flavours, editors are interchangeable.
Even simpler, just pay for the feature
Fun fact: Dropbox doesn’t support emoji in file names ( or at least, didn’t last time I checked. )
Deal breaker for me - adding iconography to file and folder names can be a natural, zesty enterprise.
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Big obsidian fan, but I will say: notes being “just markdown” is not entirely true depending on how you use obsidian. If you are a plug-in heavy user, and those plugins introduce new syntax and lots of JavaScript functionality, you are accumulating a bespoke custom syntax that only works on your copy of obsidian with your set of plugins. Obsidian and those plugins are still free and are a huge benefit, but just something to keep in mind regarding data hygiene and longevity.
True, but the format is still text. In a "catastrophe", you can always just a) ignore these, or b) write custom code to process them (e.g. port the plugin to VSCode or whatever).
Still far better than a proprietary format.
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Very much this. I cannot even fully agree with "plug-in heavy" remark: I mean, how heavy must it be, to be considered "plug-in heavy"? I consciously tried to limit plugin usage. But it really gets pretty wild soon. I was relatively lean for maybe the first 6 months, but when some patterns of how I use it become clear enough, it becomes pretty evident how inefficient many super-common situations are and how I can fix them just by installing a plugin.
Fast-forward a year, and all your vault structure implicitly relies on the quirks of Obsidian search behavior, the markdown you write is extremely obsidian-flavored markdown, and you don't even remember how to write LaTeX without LaTeX-Suite shortcuts.
I've thought about this and I think Templater and Dataview are the two plugins I'd miss if Obsidian was sold to a VC tomorrow and enshittified.
And I'm pretty sure both will be forked and modified to run independently of Obsidian within a week of the theoretical enshittification.
Totally agree, I personally have obsidian set up on multiple devices, and they all automatically sync to my local Synology NAS.
I'm migrating what's in Evernote to Gmail because the "upgrade to premium" popups are too tricky and the value of Evernote just isn't worth the subscription unless you're relying heavily on it, which I can't because of the popups.
Thanks for the feedback! Agreed Git can be used to sync your notes. Its a great solution for those comfortable putting their notes into a Git repo like Github. I wasn't comfortable with that however.
Currently vetting a way to sync my database files with my markdown files on my laptop, so it functions similar to Obsidian. I enjoy Vim too much to work constrained to Directus' markdown editor!
It's not just git. You have the plugins available for S3, couchdb, FTP, MongoDB, cloud drives, rsync, syncthing, and probably every other storage/protocol in the world. And they're all available for free in obsidian.
Common ways to sync Obsidian are through cloud tools (Google Drive, OneDrive, etc.), SyncThing Fork or Git.
I'd recommend you to look into SyncThing Fork or a similar tool if you never want your notes to leave your own server.
I wrote about ways to sync Obsidian here: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/how-to-sync-obsidian
Git is decentralised. You can sync between laptop and phone directly, no third party server required.
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No one said anything about GitHub… git is perfectly fine for this use case and 100% private.
What about git makes you uncomfortable?
I saw that you didn’t want to use a 3rd party provider, but why not stick a git repo on your VPS (which you are trusting with your data today) and use that to coordinate syncs between your client devices?
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The odd part here is why take it to 100%+ when you can just build a plugin on Obsidian rather than re-building the whole thing? Seems a bit extreme.
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Concerning, maybe. Definitely not surprising. One’s technical ability to do something has, if anything, a negative correlation with their ability to value and manage their own time. The author’s justification is absolutely ridiculous, hands down. I simply pray that they’re never in charge of deploying another human’s time effectively.
> The thought of cyclically migrating notes from one PKMS to another every 5 years, as I had done from Evernote to Notion to Obsidian, made me feel tired.
I had a very similar thought process about 15 years ago, and went on a quest to write my own notes system - after trying out a lot of ideas and giving up, I washed up in emacs and gave org-mode a try. It's actually good enough, and I can grep through my notes easiy, and sync them with git.
> Since my PKMS is hosted online to manage notes across devices, I have multiple layers of security to ensure my notes are kept private. {Screenshot of a login form}
The biggest life hack I can recommend for a self hoster is to set up a VPN on your local network and then just never expose your services on the public internet unless you're specifically trying to serve people outside your own household.
Before I did this I was constantly worried about the security implications of each app I thought about installing or creating. Now it's not even worth setting up auth on a lot of simple services I build because if someone is able to hit their endpoints I'm already in deep trouble for many other reasons.
Even better, set up Tailscale.
It's far easier to set up, is much more reliable (e.g. when devices are behind firewalls), and uses direct (encrypted) connections when possible.
You can get it to do what you want with just a few clicks. Things like exposing a IoT VLAN on your Tailnet or setting up an exit node to tunnel all internet traffic through your home are super easy. You can even share specific devices with friends, which is super useful. If you have anything particularly sensitive (e.g. a notes app that you wouldn't want your children / partner to have access to), you can limit access to specific users / devices on the TS side, without bothering with implementing auth.
I think there's even a way to look up the user and device based on their IP, which is one way to add painless authentication to your apps. There are reverse proxies that do it and inject the info as HTTP headers.
If you aren't comfortable with trusting them with control over your network, you can always host your own Headscale server.
What makes Tailscale more secure, or more reliable, than just a direct Wireguard tunnel?
Tailscale's complexity and features make sense when you have 200 nodes, or maybe 20 nodes at least. When you have 3-5 nodes, I think it's overkill, and a bunch of extra dependencies which may fail, and lock you out of your private nodes when you need it most.
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> If you aren't comfortable with trusting them with control over your network
Wrt the possibility of Tailscale being compromised, there's the in-beta tailnet lock feature:
> Tailnet lock lets you verify that no node is added to your tailnet without being signed by trusted nodes in your tailnet. When tailnet lock is enabled, even if Tailscale infrastructure is malicious or hacked, attackers can't send or receive traffic in your tailnet. [1]
[1] https://tailscale.com/kb/1226/tailnet-lock
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Or, for those who are paranoid about relying on a company, setting up headscake is relatively quick and painless too - currently using it to sync between devices across multiple cities.
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Unraid added native Tailscale support in 7.0, now you can just add an "app" (a docker container) and tick a checkbox and it'll appear in your tailnet directly.
Tailscale is a VPN, how is it "better" than using a VPN?
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For the most part I like Tailscale, but there's weirdness on Android with their app + Private DNS.
or zerotier
+1. I have Wireguard set up on all my mobile devices and configured to automatically start when connecting to any wifi that isn't mine, so I can take my devices anywhere and I'm still on my home LAN. It works seamlessly and flawlessly.
I self-host a lot of services, and without Wireguard (or equivalent), remote access just wouldn't be realistic.
How did you automate it to start on networks which are not yours?
This is like the only piece of the puzzle for me.
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I have wg into home and wg into an aws instance. All my mobile and laptops can reach them.
On Android devices? If so: how? :)
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Tailscale is actually great for this if you configure an exit node on a device in your home.
For single page web apps I use pagecrypt [0] and just publish the html file (with inline scripts and styles) as public files.
[0] https://pagecrypt.maxlaumeister.com
You can also set up DNS records pointing to your home server's VPN IP, which, with Tailscale, I've found to be pretty static and then a reverse proxy on your home server. So I have my home network apps running on app1.my-domiain.com app2.my-domain.com, app3.my-domain.com etc, which only work when I'm connected to the VPN.
The downsides are that I need to be connected to the VPN at home to use the domain and I currently don't have SSL set up on the domains, so browsers complain when I connect to them. The second problem I could fix, but I'm not sure if there's a solution for the first.
You can fix them both in one. In your local network you host a local DNS, in my case I’m using pihole. It has records which point to the local IP of a reverse proxy. With this setup you can have SSL for your domain names on your local network.
To make it then work outside your local network, in tailscale settings you use “split dns” to set your DNS to be the IP of your pihole in the tailnet for your domain. Now when you try hit your local domains you should receive the same local IPs that you do at home. Then in the tailscale route settings of your machine hosting the reverse proxy you make it advertise the subnet of those local IPs. Now when you receive the local IPs your devices using the tailscale VPN should go to your home server with SSL and no external DNS.
Hope that’s somewhat clear enough
There is a solution for the first. I have setup my home server torun Tailscale _and_ be a router to 192.168.2.x network (you can set this up in the Tailscale UI). I have server.mydomain.com to resolve to 192.168.2.x address and this way I can access it from the outside via Tailscale and from inside without the need to turn on Tailscale. I have https setup via DNS-01 challenge as well and updated automatically.
The downside is that if you’re on a two-week vacation and your home network/server goes down on day two, there’s probably nothing you can do until you get home. If it’s hosted online, you can count on that 99.99…% uptime and SSH access no matter what.
I think what they meant is that if it's hosted online / home-network, only allow access to all services through a VPN. Wireguard is relatively easy to setup, and you can configure all your services to only be available through wireguard.
Ever since ssh almost got backdoor-ed, the only thing "exposed" on my servers is Wireguard, which is UDP based and therefore harder to know if it's running. SSH also goes over wireguard.
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Although not perfect, I added a couple features to help ensure uptime:
* LAN components are on a UPS, helps keep continuity between power blips and breaker flips
* Dynamic DNS, cron runs a script 4x per day to ensure a DNS name points to my IP, even if issued a new one by the ISP
* Rebooting everything occasionally to ensure the network and services come back up on their own and I didn't make a mistake with some config that loads at boot, etc.
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Ssh exposed on a non-standard port, with root disabled, using key-based auth should be pretty non-controversial.
The security through obscurity (non-standard port, no root) are both kinda silly but why not.
That said, with awesome services like TailScale, it's pretty hard to get locked out of your network. TailScale is so so good at "just working".
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These solutions are composable. Just run it on a VPS over a VPN.
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You can also enjoy your vacation instead :)
The internet is not a friendly place, so a VPN is a great idea.
With modern tools like Wireguard, you can even set it up relatively easy, either as Wireguard alone or as Tailscale (or ZeroTier, though that's not Wireguard).
Wireguard (and Tailscale) allows you to setup the tunnel so that only local (RFC1918 ie) traffic is routed over it, meaning it won't eat up your battery like when just routing all traffic over it.
I have Wireguard setup like that. It enables on any Wi-Fi network that isn't mine, as well as cellular, and the battery impact is less than 2% over a day.
I do this too yes. It's a great extra level of security though probably not too smart to rely on as the only one.
It's true you're already screwed if they get past the VPN and I also don't set up Auth for stuff that doesn't have any private details. But don't count on just the VPN for sensitive stuff. Like password manager.
Yeah, definitely don't do turn off auth for things that matter, if only because I'm not perfectly disciplined at keeping my guests off my main network. I'm talking about tiny services that do one thing—ollama, tts/stt, and similar. Stuff where the worst case scenario is someone using up some processor cycles, not data leaks.
Any idea on how to segment a VPN between friends? I have a few critical servers on my VPN I only want one or two devices to access, but no other devices. Mostly so that in case a rogue device enters or a friend gets hacked, there's no access to my sensitive services.
In my case I simply create two wireguard tunnels (one called "vpn", the other called "guest") and use firewall rules to block all traffic from the "guest" tunnel to all service except the one that should be "public" (in my case a minecraft server).
I think you could technically do it with a single tunnel by using firewall rules that refer to the IP address of the single peer but it's less convenient.
NOTE: I also added a dedicated dnsmasq instance only for the "guest" tunnel so that they have DNS working and can use hostnames instead of IP address.
This setup is trivial with both OpenWrt and OpnSense, but it should be doable also with manual setup
You can do this on tailscale with their ACL. It is super flexible for nailing down exactly which users/devices can talk to what on your network.
Good point. I also use my PKMS as a CMS for my blog. Might just split out the services and go this route.
This is what Tailscale is great at.
I built a home server project that manages many of the rough edges around deployment of self-hosted apps. It includes DDNS, router+firewall, headscale, automatic setup of apps, and automatic deployment of subdomains and TLS certs for each app.
Apps are blocked to the public by default but accessible using a Tailscale client.
It's built on top of NixOS and completely configurable through a single module.
Still in heavy development but I've replaced an entire rack in my closet with an Intel NUC.
https://homefree.host
welcome to the world when not TailScale, not a private WireGuard, not aL2TP, OpenVPN works. No, SSTP doesn't too. HTTPS works. Even on the devices you don't or can't control.
So you've managed to unlearn the last decade of security learnings in regards to zero-trust and similar concepts?
I'm not running a business, I'm running a home. The threat models are totally different and I adjust my security posture accordingly.
Besides, I don't bother with auth for simple services, not stuff that actually hosts data. If someone unauthorized is inside my network they're not going to be interested in using my TTS/STT service or in finding out the last barcode I scanned or in using my tiny consumer GPU to generate tokens on an LLM—there are way worse things they could be doing at that point than fiddling with the many tiny services I have set up.
Also: I couldn't set up so many silly, inconsequential services if I didn't have a VPN. With my setup, every new idea I have can be a quick service on my network accessible by me anywhere in the world. If I had to expose each of these things to the internet I wouldn't bother running them at all lest they have an exploit that ends up being an entrypoint into my network.
You need to understand your own risk tolerance and, more importantly, effort/resource threshold. Zero-trust is great if you have the resources to put to it, and companies should do it. But individuals trying to manage multiple companies worth of services, alone, on their own network? There's going to be corners cut.
That's a comically uncharitable extrapolation on what was said.
I'm being serious - please educate us, how do you think that we can do better in a homelab setting? How do you apply zero-trust principles in homelab environment with reasonable effort and without relying on 3rd party services?
self hosting is entirely different than enterprise security practices. You're a little out of touch with reality if you don't realize this.
Your "life hack" is not a good advice. There's plenty of well-written explanations for why perimeter based security doesn't work. What is strange is that you've started in the right place: by being "constantly worried about security implications of each app". Unfortunately it's annoying and time consuming, but that's the right way to keep your data private. And if that's too much hassle, it means it's worth it to pay others to do it.
When I'm thinking about a hypothetical situation when I need to save the world by hacking into a hypothetical villain, my best hope will be him using your approach to security.
Any serious approach to security begins with a reasonable and clearly defined threat model, and my threat model for my home network doesn't currently include a team of superheros targeting my file backups in an effort to save the world. But I'll definitely keep your advice in mind when I do decide to start executing on my evil plots.
For now my threat model consists of script kiddies and abusive corporations. Self-hosting gets me away from the corporations and keeping my stuff off of the public internet keeps me away from script kiddies.
> There's plenty of well-written explanations for why perimeter based security doesn't work
It certainly helps when your attack surface consists of numerous web apps of unknown quality.
Drive-by RCEs (e.g. log4j) then suddenly become much less of a headache when none of it is reachable by the world at large.
Exactly how you do that, whether via an authenticating reverse proxy or VPN doesn’t really matter.
Could you provide an example of one of the well written explanations?
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It seems to really be an ad for Directus (https://directus.io/) (?) That he used to replace Obsidian.
One of the first image to hit me when I got there is a button "Start For Free".
And if I want to run it on my own server in "production" it costs money? or at least you have to fill out a form and "Lets chat".
When I go to a page, I click on pricing, and what I get is a form to fill out and "Lets Chat", I am out of there. If they cant show how pricing is structured, No thanks.
""" Chat with our team about your project. We're here as a resource for you. Get clarity on your project, licensing, or enterprise needs. """
It is open sourced they say https://github.com/directus/directus
The first line of the introduction:
"""Directus is a real-time API and App dashboard for managing SQL database content."""
Yeah... that is not what I need for my personal notes system.
"""Manage Pure SQL. Works with new or existing SQL databases, no migration required."""
No
"""Choose your Database. Supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, OracleDB, CockroachDB, MariaDB, and MS-SQL."""
Still going on about that?
I dont see this a good fit for the use case he presents.
Pricing page:
Open License $0 for qualifying users
Freely download and self-host Directus for any project without the need for a license. Get Started
If you and your organization have less than $5M in total annual income (revenue and any funding), then you do not need to pay for self-hosting Directus. This applies to all projects, including production and commercial projects.
The BSL and its revenue cliffs isn't open-source but shared-source.
I think, to be fair, we need to evaluate if this will still be true in 20 years - the same standard to which Obsidian was held.
Yeah, if I wanted to store my data in a database, I'd just go back to using Joplin, a trusted and long term existing FOSS
> Obsidian was a great tool for me personally for a long time. But I felt frustrated when I wanted to access my notes on my phone while on-the-go and saw that I had to pay for this feature.
I'm using Syncthing [0] to sync my vault between devices. On my main PC, Syncthing runs constantly in the background. Say, if I made a change, and want to send those changes to my phone, I open the application on my phone and let it fetch the changes. It's not perfectly smooth, like Obsidian's own integration, but I prefer this instead of setting a Git repository. Also, the files don't stay in a remote server.
[0]: https://syncthing.net
I do this but additionally with an always-on Raspberry Pi, so syncing works perfectly even if the laptop and phone aren’t able to sync directly to each other. The SyncTrain iOS app arrived just in time for me: https://t-shaped.nl/posts/synctrain-a-rethought-ios-client-f...
I've also been using Obsidian a lot. I recommend the SyncThing Fork over SyncThing.
I myself currently use Google Drive with DriveSync on Android to sync my notes, which works great. Other cloud providers also work well.
I wrote a comparison of different tools to sync here: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/how-to-sync-obsidian
It’s $4 a month to sync Obsidian notes, for anyone wondering.
This was news to me, so this must have changed recently, as I have been billed more than that ever since I signed up.
I looked at my account, and I am charged $10 but it seems they automatically moved me to a "Plus" plan that has more storage. So no complaints from me really. Either that or the $4 plan is new. [1]
The $4 only comes with 1GB of storage. I would recommend the $10 for 50GB if you use images in your notes.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37251708
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It's a good price but still feels wasteful if you also run/pay for nextcloud or similar.
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I think your comment is very disingenuous. And not just because it's another subscription. That plan does not work if you got more than one vault, and if you use Obsidian you will probably have more than one vault.
https://obsidian.md/sync
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Apple allowing iCloud directories to be permanently downloaded fixed this for me.
Yep. I use iCloud for my Obsidian vault, set to always be downloaded. I haven’t had an issue, and doesn’t cost me anything (beyond what I’m already paying for iCloud due to Photo Library).
Does the iCloud & Windows caveat still apply? https://help.obsidian.md/sync-notes
I've been meaning to switch over to syncthing. I currently use insync for google drive syncing on Linux and it's basically instant and constant. I can make an edit on one machine and in the time it takes me to grab my laptop, it's been synced. That said, using google drive which I don't want to do anymore.
I did this and hooo does Apple make it difficult to sync files without iCloud. I felt like it was too janky for my liking, and paid for obsidian sync, but I felt like it was really silly how an official app could do it no problem, but you can’t get generic functionality to work with iOS.
Same. I admit I've running into a few syncing headaches over the years, but given the cost of $0 and the fact it's open source, I recommend it too.
I previously rolled my own notes system and I find Obsidian plus Syncthing is better. Plugins are a big deal.
Syncthing is a lifesaver, it's such a useful tool!
There are also several Obsidian community plugins for sync, I use Remotely Save via WebDAV.
too bad Syncthing is no longer officially maintaining andoird app https://forum.syncthing.net/t/discontinuing-syncthing-androi...
But the syncthing fork (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.github.cat...) has been going for years now, and should have been the first choice anyways.
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Or you setup a Couchdb and the self hosted live sync plugin. Although the data will reside on a remote server in this case.
I also tried to build my own Obsidian[^1] a few months ago. However, I stopped using it after some time, since maintaining it would realistically be a full-time job. What I also found super annoying was the feeling that I'm never done with it. Whenever I encountered a rough edge or missing feature, I had to (obviously) implement it myself.
All in all, I find Obsidian as good as it gets. Also, Obsidian is probably one of the best options in terms of longevity, as all notes are just Markdown files, no proprietary DBs or other BS that could lock you in.
[1]: https://github.com/AlexW00/brainforge-desktop
Wait. Sync is “free” if you want to use some other service other than Obsidian’s. I pay for Obsidian sync partially for slightly more convenience (fewer non-integrated points of failure) and also to support the app itself.
I’d gladly pay $1000 over a decade for a crucial tool. If the concern is open source and true longevity, I get it, you don’t get that here. But cost for value? Holy shit. $1000 over a decade is absolutely worth it for something you depend on.
If you’re a regular at a bar or restaurant, you pay an order of magnitude over $1000 a year for THAT service. This one is probably worth more.
I can, however, relate to the “every five years my system changes” problem. It’s not fun. At the same time, this is a reasonable cadence to re-evaluate things. If you found something perfect for you that works >5 years, holy crap. You are blessed. That honestly should not be the standard for tools these days—ESPECIALLY in a today’s world.
All that said: I don’t knock the author for trying to build software that can work for someone for 20 years or more. I salute that attempt—and I hope they can do it!—even if I think the specific details of how they got there are flawed.
That’s common thought process: “tool that I use more than 10 times a day to amplify my knowledge? $10 a month? Eye watering!”.
Oh well, time to grab that Uber eats for $20 third time this week.
People are really bad with quantifying things.
I can easily grab a few imperial stouts for the weekend for 20€ but will balk at paying for a search engine.
Until I did the math of use per euro and Kagi turned out to be well worth it. I just drink one beer less a month and it's paid for and I'm healthier too =)
I don't disagree with the overall comment but this bit seems like extreme hyperbole:
> If you're a regular at a bar or restaurant, you pay an order of magnitude over $1000 a year for THAT service. This one is probably worth more.
An order of magnitude over 1k per year is almost $30 per day, every day.
Hyperbole for some but hypobole for others I am sure
There's a lot of tools that are very useful but I'm not going to spend that much on. My water bottle is one.
And I don't think food is a good comparison. Or renting a physical space, depending on what you get out of being a regular.
Still, the basic price of $50 a year for sync is something I wouldn't be very upset with... except my main goal is a collaborative setup with other people and I'm not paying 5x or more to make that work.
It comes down to how much is your time worth. If you're a developer making $100K+ a year, a $1,000 over a decade is nothing if it increases your productivity 2-3X compared to your collegues, which considering the fact that some of my colleagues store their notes in Windows Notepad is a complete underestimation.
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> Obsidian charges $8 a month to access the same notes across multiple devices. While not a huge amount for such a useful app, it adds up to an eye-watering amount - almost $1,000 if I planned to use Obsidian for a decade.
This highlights one of my personal bugbears. People have a mental barrier when it comes to recurring, low-cost payments; even though the net sum is small in comparison to other things that they wouldn't think twice to pay for.
A $5 latte every workday comes to (260 * 5) $1300 annually. Obsidian sync is $96. Why would you not pay this amount for a tool you use everyday?
> People have a mental barrier when it comes to recurring, low-cost payments;
It's because they add up. In this specific case, considering OP job and it's heavy use of obsidian, it makes no sense to not pay for the synchro, if only to support the company[1], but if I was paying 8€/month for all software and service I'm using I would be bankrupted immediately.
Ironically this hurt open source and companies proposing generous free tiers the most because the amount of money people have for software will go to the one they cannot get for free.
[1] actually it makes no sense to develop your own tool when alternatives already exists
Also it is competing with a free editor and USB stick that has been around since 2000. That's the anchor.
Then now you have Google docs, Dropbox, O365, Notion, Confluence, etc.
Also Obsidian asks for permissions to read files in all of the device on Android. They don't explain clearly why that is necessary.
I don't see it being discussed that widely.
Also another aspect is that many people seems to think Obsidian is open source, while it is not so.
I went deep into to the PKMS rabbit hole a year and a half ago, benchmarked Obsidian and many many others, and settled with Trilium¹ which I can only highly recommend. It addresses all the hosting/deployment requirements of OP² without the quirky workarounds mentioned here (syncthing & al), and makes the kind of "lifestyle scripting" this article about very simple and straightforward.
In my mind and experience, Trilium has a very unique and extensible model that lends itself to "growing with your PKMS": notes is the atom of information, attributes can be used to manage notes as structured and relational data, templates and inheritance provide structure and consistency at scale.
Trilium may not look like much on the surface, but it is incredibly capable while being approachable. Give it a serious try.
¹: https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes/
²: you can use Trilium local-first/only, or cloud-only, or hybrid. It has its own sync protocol, you just point your instance to a server to sync with, and now you have a master-master replication. All my notes are available offline so I can keep working in-flight, notes shared with others are available via web whether I'm online or not, and I can edit my notes on the web where I don't need offline persistence. All of that is built-in/native to Trilium.
Also, Trilium don't have mobile app which is very important for having notes available 24/7. Browser version don't allow offline access and not as convenient as an app
I think trillium is stashing the notes in a database. Certainly it thinks there is a migration step needed to move files around.
The everything markdown feature of obsidian is the dominant one. I can edit the files in emacs when I want to and the sync sorts it out just fine. They're stashed in a fossil repo by one of the machines as a backup because I'm paranoid and that also works fine because it's all ascii files.
Trillium looks great! I'm curious if it has an outliner mode or something similar? I currently use logseq and the two features I love are how each bullet/block is its own thing that can be cross-referenced and embedded in other blocks and pages, and that my workflow is essentially to have daily journal pages I dump everything into and tag and references/crossreferences are automatically handled and linked to build out a network of things.
I've noticed that trillium has hierarchical notes; is there a view to look at an item higher on the tree and have it also have the contents of all its children?
> I've noticed that trillium has hierarchical notes; is there a view to look at an item higher on the tree and have it also have the contents of all its children?
You are right that the "atom" of content is the block in an outliner and the Note in Trilium. If you can tolerate⁰ the coarser-granularity, you can make Trilium behave pretty closely to an outliner: notes can be embedded within notes, either manually, or via the "Book" note-type¹ (that essentially renders a tree as embedded notes), hoisting² should be a familiar concept then.
⁰: when researching the topic, I immediately fell in love with outliners, thinking I would never go back to a note-based approach like Joplin which I was using then, but here I am, promoting a note-based solution. Metadata/tags at block level is not something I could get the hang of (I know how to manage collections of notes at scale, but not collections of blocks). ¹: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/book-note.html ²: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/note-hoisting.html
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But it doesn't seem to store the notes in text-files on your file system.
Another person in the thread recommended it. I'll have to check it out this week thanks!
Thank God I got over my tendency for gravitating to such bike-shedding [1] projects! While I appreciate that such pet peeves may result in a net benefit to the world, right now, I am in a place where I would cringe at even taking the risk of upgrading a piece of software that is working fine (like how often has upgrading Pylance or vscode resulted in something breaking? Every single time). The real, actual work is so so so difficult. Sitting down and starting (after attending to family obligations, eating, showering, changing clothes, commuting, et al). Getting into a productive flow state. Not getting interrupted. Not getting distracted. Just choose one thing, anything (OneNote, Evernote, whatever) and get to the real work, I beg you. Productivity + don't mess with success.
https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/bikeshedding
Thanks for sharing this is an understated point from the article as I was fiddling with Evernote, Notion then Obsidian more than I would like to admit. With this I certainly fiddle but I create what I need and get in and out of my notes.
If people find that rhythm and flow with their own PKMS - don't switch for the next shiny thing!
I really don't want to critisize OP since building stuff for yourself is always a good mentality. But lets be realistic, 1000$ over 10 years is nothing.
It will always cost more if you consider your own time for maintenance long term. Obsidian is one of the most consumer friendly business for note taking out of there, they are not VC so the Evernote comparison is unwarranted IMO.
> But lets be realistic, 1000$ over 10 years is nothing
Where is the limit ?
While $100/year maybe doesn't sound like much, it's hardly the only subscription service you have, and they all add up, from your mail provider, office suite, cloud storage, streaming services, phone bills, internet service, etc.
Personally I find $100/year to edit notes on my phone to be a bit much, but then again, I just use iOS Notes.
I am so fed up with everything turning into subscriptions, that I've just completely stopped buying things that are subscription based.
I understand developers need to make a living, but simply throwing a subscription on top of it won't convince me to buy your product. You convince me by making a compelling product, and by continuously updating it, adding new features, which will convince me to buy another version.
Yeah I just wanted to chime in here on what i see as a world view problem that might need to be updated with the times. I see your point about everything being subscription based.
There are definitely software out there that do not deserve to be subscription based. But there are some developers that I think should be supported on a regular basis. Especially obsidian because they develop one product and continually work on it to make it better. IMHO they deserve the money.
On side note I wish there was a way for it to be open source, and the team's reasons for not supporting open source seems a little iffy. They could still make money of of Obsidain Sync or other features that does not need to be part of a Open Source Release. Commercialism of a project this important worries me because people that depend on it can be easy side-lined if the team decides to sell out. Look what happened to the Atom editor. Microsoft brought it then killed it. I know with Obsidian you can walk away from it and thats good, but I always worry about commercial domination of a market causing limited choice.
I know your point was about subscriptions, and I guess I am saying im more supportive of that model, based on the times we are in, for developers that have genuine passion for a project that they want to continue developing.
Heck I know am realizing I need to support open source projects with regular donations because I want them to thrive long term
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Personally, I just set myself a budget of $100/month for subscriptions. I was going to drive myself crazy judging every one all the time, so I decided as long as I’m under this threshold I’m not going to stress.
I track the ones I have so I can compare the cost, looking at either daily, monthly, or yearly cost. Sorting by price, I can look them over to judge if one of them seems unusually expensive for what it is, and regularly review to see if there are and I’m not using and need to be cancelled.
My most expensive is the could backup for my NAS. $8/month is about what I pay for Proton, which offers a lot more than just note syncing. So $8 for notes does seem like a lot. Looking at Obsidian’s pricing page[0], the $8/month is for publishing… hosting a website with your Obsidian data. Just syncing is only $4, and there are many free ways to do it. That part of the article felt like the author was trying to justify writing their own tool due to cost. That doesn’t feel justified, and they were stretching… but the good thing is there doesn’t need to be any financial justification at all. Just make your own tool for the sake of making your own tool. That’s good enough.
[0] https://obsidian.md/pricing
I think that no matter that they do you will always find people complaining. That is humanity's favorite sport. Even when it's free and open source people still complain.
Making software for individual consumers is freaking hard. My own perspective as a founder shifted from "this is a viable method to build a sustainable business" to "let's use it as the base for B2B sales, but it is not viable".
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> 1000$ over 10 years is nothing
It's a non-trivial amount of money to a lot of people (myself included). I spend way more than that on Free Software, but I'm not throwing money to a proprietary program if I can choose.
FWIW, I’d be more concerned about the implications of the company having my notes in lieu of the pure cost perspective. But the thing is, you can avoid that entirely too by implementing your own sync
FWIW unless they are outright lying this is a choice, one of the choices when setting up a vault is E2E that you have to enter whenever setting up a new sync, but they are really clear that if you lose this password you are at the whims of your own backups.
They do also publish the “verify the encryption steps” for this.
Of course, depending on your threat model this could be insufficient, but then you probably wouldn’t trust obsidian in the first place.
And implementing local sync for obsidian is just running on docker container
even better: Obsidian is only $480 over 10 years!
I think the author point still stands though: Obsidian won’t probably be here in 20 years.
But Op's program have even less probability to be here in 20 years
I’m a time traveler from 2046 and I hate to break it to you but it’s still running strong.
Couldn’t avoid the computation panic of 2038 but it got by
For me that's one of the great points about obsidian's choice of all notes being Markdown.
Even if Obsidian vanished tomorrow and the application became unmaintainable, I'd still have all my notes in a text based format.
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Why not? It’s got a huge user base, a massive open source plug-in ecosystem and a sensible revenue model. It’s probably one of the note apps that has the largest community around it outside of Notion, which is heavily VC influenced and is more of a do everything app
We'll see. I think there is a chance that it will.
Neither solution is guaranteed to stick around for 20 years.
As we’ve seen before, it takes one VC investment to change a source available license into something not so friendly and forks are never guaranteed.
Can I have those 1000$ if you think that is nothing?
Sure, but only in installments over the next 10 years and in exchange I need you to provide a sync service for my notes.
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OP's main arguments to build their own PKMS are: - cost (feature or maintenance) - migration because it won't exist in the future
But their solution is to depend on directus, which can lead to the exact same issues. To my eyes, they just added an extra step...
The guy just created some bullshit excuses in order to advertise his new product.
For quick notes on the go, I also did go my own way and eventually built the app I wished I had. Journelly: kinda like tweeting but for your eyes only (in plain text)
https://xenodium.com/journelly-like-tweeting-but-for-your-ey...
While you don't need to know anything about its serialized format, it happens to be powered by Org plain text. For Markdown fans, I am recording Markdown interest. Do reach out: journelly + markdown at xenodium.com.
edit: A user's blog post from today (also a Markdown fan) https://ellanew.com/ptpl/157-2025-05-19-journelly-is-org-for...
> It helped me reclaim control over my privacy, and significantly cut down on recurring costs.
Obsidian has end to end encryption and is $4 a month. I totally relate to it being fun to build your own tools but acting like it's a practical use of time... idk
Obsidian's syncing was pretty spotty for me. I was a big fan and was paying by the year, but kept getting frustrated when notes weren't syncing across devices.
$4/month is a lot for something that only sometimes syncs.
I'm aware there are some naming constraints due to the underlying mobile filesystems not liking certain characters. This might be why it's not syncing fully for you? I haven't had any other major issues yet.
Ah, I've never had an issue there
Directius (the foundation on what this was built) is Source Available [1] and not Opensource.
[1] https://github.com/directus/directus/blob/main/license
Thanks I'll revise the article
I find it just a bit crazy that this is still an issue. I too jumped from Evernote when they did their rug pull in 2016, landed on Emacs+org-mode, and never looked back. Since then I've adopted Orgzly for org-mode on my phone, and syncthing to keep it all synced. The only real issue I ever had was the occasional conflict, which I resolved by splitting one of the files further into things that got modified on the laptop (primarily write-ups and my cheatsheet collection) vs things that got modified on mobile (primarily repetitive tasks).
I haven't found use for plugins yet since I'm really just searching, updating tasks and archiving. But if I do need extra functionality, Emacs is the most versatile editor out there, and org-mode is native to it.
The discontinuation of Syncthing for Android bothers me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41895718
I did see that a while back, but I haven't had any issues so didn't look into it. A quick search just now though shows Syncthing-Fork on F-Droid, so it should be an easy migration if there does come a need. I did the same with Orgzly a few months ago as it too was forked due to the original dev going MIA, and there were a few annoyances I wanted resolved.
I switched to syncthing-fork, have had zero issues.
(At some point I'm sure new Android versions will do something that will require changes, but that can happen to any app and we will adapt. I think I've used syncthing for nearly a decade with next to no issues so I'm not very worried.)
Is there a reason that Obsidian, Notion and OP all decided to use a dedicated sync service, as opposed to just using generic file storage, which may or may not be in the cloud ?
It would seem to me that it would leave out a whole lot of complexity to just use Google Drive / OneDrive / iCloud Drive to handle the synchronization across devices, and if need be you could then just add encryption on the cloud storage (if desired), which you would need to do anyway for the dedicated sync service. It would also reduce the infrastructure cost a lot, and utilize resources already available.
You can sync an Obsidian vault with whatever you wish, the online option is mostly convenience.
You can self-host obsidian syncing which is exactly what I'm doing. You can also share your notebooks with something like Syncthing, but you may get merge errors that way - just self host the database (CouchDB) and you're good to go:
https://leduccc.medium.com/setup-self-hosted-synchronization...
I ditched for [silverbullet](https://silverbullet.md). MIT licensed, markdown editor with embedded lua scripting. It's a PWA app that works offline and syncs well.
Silverbullet is aptly named but I'd actually wait a month or two because it's going through the transition to V2 which shuffles a few things around.
Other than that it's exactly what it says on the tin, a hacker's digital notebook. While it would take a bit of rolling up your sleeves to make it look as nice as Logseq or Obsidian it's actually closer in form and function to something like org-mode for Emacs (though not quite hitting the mark regarding linking sadly).
It's got some rough edges. I want to sit down and build it so I can add an id to the TOC so I can CSS style it to be floating and submit it upstream.
I'm also having issues with integrating it with Authentik's header proxy auth, keeps directing me to a note with the outpost path as the name. The only guide is for authelia.
Very impressive!
Thanks for mentioning this, it looks exactly what I want; a markdown web app that stores the files using the filesystem on the backend!
Holy shit this is awesome
Most note-taking apps share the same fate: they either become obsolete over time (due to unsupported operating systems, security issues, or discontinued drivers) or end up locking you into a proprietary ecosystem.
My solution was to move to a file-based system — using plain folders, files, symlinks, and relative links. The filesystem is one of the most fundamental and enduring parts of computing infrastructure, which means I can rely on accessing my notes the same way 20+ years from now. It also allows me to plug in containerized tools for viewing or editing notes, without being tied to a specific app. Filesystem APIs are incredibly stable — basic commands like mkdir won’t suddenly be locked behind a subscription.
Plus, there are plenty of options for syncing and real-time collaboration, many of which are self-hostable and vendor-neutral.
Are there any private note solutions that can encrypt all markdown files against your own Yubikey-generated privkey?
You can do this with SOPS and age encryption and it's amazing, but can't view/edit notes outside a terminal or on mobile very easily that I've found.
Looking for a new solution like this, or maybe obscure configuration for an existing notes app that can support this workflow.
All of the "end-to-end" solutions seems like they just store your encrypted keys somewhere with the application files, sync them around to different machines, etc, and decrypt key with a password. But web frontends can be compromised and the master password intercepted, so I'd like to require a Yubikey touch for each document decrypt, which would make exfiltrating multiple documents more difficult.
Encryption is a rabbit hole I want to jump down soon. Other users recommended Triliumnext looks like they do file encryption like that worth checking out https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/protected-notes
this is the inevitable PKMS pipeline, and the one that almost certainly led to Obsidian and Notion to begin with.
Need PKMS > Use existing product > Notice shortcomings > Switch to main alternative > Notice shortcomings > Begin creating bespoke PKMS with the specific functionality you wanted.
Obsidian is nice...
but.. i just think that writing markdown (unless its just #headline and ### subheadline) it takes too long.
There are community plugins to self-host the sync-server though.
Anyway, I hate the fact I'm using closed-source editor, because it kinda is a sensitive thing, but the more I'm using Obsidian, the more unlikely the switch seems. I was kinda stingy with installing new plugins too, but, well, you cannot just ignore the productivity benefits. It doesn't seem feasible to build something like than on my own (for multiple platforms too!), and nobody brave enough seems to have made it so far.
Even if you try to replicate it, you need the community support and enthusiasm and interest in hacking and sharing their work to compete. Joplin is a great alternative, but the community plugins pale in comparison to Obsidian if you're a power user
I long for the days of a note taking / personal "data store" system that isnt a pain in the arse to use. I really couldn't give a damn about apps i need to tweak like craxy or constantly maintain to work how I want. Obsidian is good but its just massive overkill for someone who just wants to wright stuff down and have it securely stored, and accessible anywhere anytime its needed.
The second someone says "oh just set up X server and add Y plugin and tweak Z settings" you've lost the whole point of the thing.
Obsidian is so useful to me, I don't mind paying for the sync to support Obsidian dev.
The notes being markdown is also very useful, I spend most of my time in a text editor, so I installed a Neovim plugin that works a bit like Obsidian [1]. So, for simple note-taking, I don't have to open Obsidian at all. It comes in useful when I need to use the massive collection of plugins, especially Excalidraw.
1. https://github.com/epwalsh/obsidian.nvim
> Obsidian charges $8 a month to access the same notes across multiple devices. While not a huge amount for such a useful app, it adds up to an eye-watering amount - almost $1,000 if I planned to use Obsidian for a decade. I was surprised at this fee because I thought Obsidian was open-source.
Before going out and building my own software I’d have looked into self hosting the files. To save those couple bucks.
I just use iCloud for the sync and it works great with Obsidian
My solution: a bunch of Markdown files in a git repo. I move between files with Vim's `gf`. I sync manually. If I really need to, I can edit through GitHub's web UI. Not ideal in amy way, but wicked simple.
I’ve done this! I wound up writing a small 500 sub LOC solution (very bare bones) that I copy/paste when I work in places where I don’t get to use my fav note taking software.
That said, I just converged on Apple Notes in the end.
There's a lot of ways to sync your notes for free with those said community open-source plugins, including through standard free cloud options if you really want to pay zero and have no server in the middle.
Very curious to hear from avid note takers: is it a habit? (maybe addiction?) is it just a tool to do you work better? Is it for fun? Why the elaborate setups (Git + Wireguard etc.)
Sincerely, not-trolling, from a bare minimum note taker.
fwiw, on mac/ios you can put your obsidian vault inside icloud directory and have a “free” cross-device sync feature.
Hell, you don't even need obsidian. Just create a bash function
While we're sharing simple note taking functions, here's mine that I used for a few years. :)
* 'nod' stands for "notes of (the) day" and was quick to type.
* 'mg' is micro emacs, my first shell-based editor thanks to OpenBSD. The '+-1' syntax means "open at end of file" so I could easily append.
Works if you are in the Apple ecosystem entirely. I have read there are difficulties if you want to sync to a non Apple device under this approach
This is one of the reasons I use a git repo along with iCloud. Anyway, using iCloud across 4+ Apple devices has not been a problem in general.
I had the bright idea of symlinking $HOME/.local to an iCloud directory once. About a week later it got completely deleted. No way to restore, or any indication of what happened. Luckily I had a backup with another provider, but I will never trust iCloud again for anything that’s not on the golden path (e.g. photos)
> But I felt frustrated when I wanted to access my notes on my phone while on-the-go and saw that I had to pay for this feature. Obsidian charges $8 a month to access the same notes across multiple devices.
Errm, no? Obsidian sync is optional. I pay for it to support them, but my main vaults are all synced by iCloud, which was auto set-up by Obisidan during initial setup on my iPhone.
On the Android side, any service which can sync files can work, I assume.
Note: Yes, I use Obsidian on my phone without sync, all the time, and it syncs.
Not practical if you want to also sync with non-Apple devices.
Then use the git-sync plugin, or many of the others mentioned here.
I think any app which can sync in the background can automatically sync things? Dropbox, Moebius, PCloud, Google Drive?
My Office vault lives in a separate cloud service, and it works?
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This article is a background of why I built my own PKMS. I've also written another article with a step-by-step on how I built it here https://amberwilliams.io/blogs/the-last-note-system
Can I ask how you created the image at the top of the article? I really like it.
I noticed it too (not necessarily in a bad way) - I'd put it at 99% probability it was generated using OpenAI's gpt-image-1 model.
AI image gen
Obsidian answers one of the key questions I asked these days of tools that I use, “Can I walk out of this easily and seamlessly?”
The best tools are the ones that get things done and get out of the way. When the time comes, you can walk out of Obsidian easily without being a hostage in any format.
The few plugins that I use are the ones I can walk out too and live without it. I love the idea of spending extra time to learn the details, shortcuts, and be able to use a tool natively without the help of plugins or extreme configurations that it takes hours/days to deviate too far away from the original configurations.
I wrote an article for me to remember it in future. https://brajeshwar.com/2025/obsidian/
The whole article can be summarized by “I don’t know that iCloud sync is free”.
I wrote my own CLI tool for notes a few months ago (https://github.com/ollien/quicknotes). A web interface with proper rendering is something I thought about, but didn't pursue because I just know my UI skills aren't up to the task. Directus is a really interesting compromise!
This is just the sort of tooling there should be more community around.
A gif would help clarify what your tool does. I've used an automated flow with Github Actions and Charm's VHS (https://github.com/charmbracelet/vhs) in my repo here to demo my CLI tool I built a while back (https://github.com/Amber-Williams/yall/blob/main/demo.gif). Might be of interest : )
You can do it so easily with AI coding tools. I'm not a frontend dev, but now I can whip up something decent looking in 10 minutes.
Maybe I’m just not a very insightful person, but I can’t imagine ever having so many original and valuable thoughts that I’d need a place to store them. In fact, many of the things I think end up being wrong, so I’d rather use the Internet as my “PKMS” since it is more likely to refine what I think I know.
It’s more like.. project ideas you actually want to pick up, projects in progress, notes while learning something, journals, writing. It can definitely get heavy, but like a personal knowledge base can really be helpful. I store my measurements, health stuff.
Granted, I am neurodivergent and have memory issues, so it’s hard for me to say what use it’d be to anyone else. But like, if you’re doing research into something deep, experiments, etc , and you have to put it down sometimes, it’s nice to be able to pick up right after you left off.
Obviously no right answer, but personally I think worrying too much finding the perfect tool instead of just integrating more knowledge to your PKMS is a distraction.
Rolling your own solution is especially limiting in the context of the sheer amount of integrations the popular ones (like Notion for example) support.
You're basically saying you will quickly build something better than the X hundred engineers at PKMS company Y quickly and it will continue to be better than what X hundred engineers will iterate upon.
I think that time is just better spent learning and picking the subset of features that, for example, Notion offers that really improves your learning rate.
If you reframe it slightly, it can make sense. Those x hundred engineers are working on y hundred features / integrations. Do you need all of those? Do you want all of those? I bet a handful of those engineers are currently working on a brand new UI redesign that will move all the buttons you're used to. One of the engineers is adding a new cookie popup & enforcing SMS 2FA as we speak.
One of the things I dislike about moden software is the constant bloat and churn, because there are so many customers and so many different incentives for software companies to keep pushing features ad infinitum. In contrast, home-grown software like this has one customer and they know exactly what they want. It doesn't matter that a theoretical home-grown app doesn't integrate with the 10 social networks the user doesn't use, because it integrates perfectly with the one they do use.
This person isn't rebuilding the entirety of Obsidian, they're rebuilding the subset of parts they actually use and get value from, which is a much smaller project. By intelligently narrowing your scope like this, making stuff yourself is totally viable. Reframe "limiting" as "targeted".
I agree Notion is great. I prefer it if I need a shared PKMS such as a company wide document system.
That said I've played around with its API a few years ago and with page elements being block elements you need to loop through n amount of requests to get the content, it didn't make sense for my use case.
At the meta level, my life is already too short to allow closed-source tools for anything on which I may need to depend in the long term. Commercial entities come and go, for reasons important for them but not necessarily for me. Old, ancient code can be made to run, as long as it's available and legal to distribute and run. If it's useful enough, I will be not the only user by far, and there'll be enough collective effort to keep it afloat, or replace adequately.
Locally runnable freeware is the next best thing, but a distant second.
So, no Obsidian for me, no Directus for me, etc, no SaaS; Org mode is good enough so far, and when it becomes inadequate, if ever, I'll start looking.
On the inverse, even as a FOSS advocate, my life is too short to only use open source software all the time and to reinvent the wheel and tools that have been put together into one fantastic product by the combined effort of hundreds of people.
I used Joplin for years, I even self hosted the Joplin Sync server, but Obsidian + Community addons runs literal miles around it from a performance and user cusomizability standpoint. Yes, I could stick to being a die hard FOSS user and spend twice as long doing the same tasks, or not even be able to due to lack of community extensions that do the same thing on Joplin's side. I could spend a 100 hours learning how to write a Joplin extension to do what I want and that would be a waste because that's 100 hours less that I've spent focusing on growing the skills that I get paid for. Life is too short to reinvent the wheel every single time.
The product may be fantastic, and thus a force multiplier. But it can see an abrupt end, thus incurring a loss. Whether you win more than you lose, on average, depends on the use case, and the particular advantages. As everything in life, this us a trade-off.
My point is that for long-term, high-investment stuff, in my particular view, the possibility of interruption and loss outweighs any possible upside, and any migration would be costly. Similarly, a move from a house where you lived for 20-30 years by its disruptiveness may tantamount to surviving a flood or a fire.
For "short-term" tools this is not so, very obviously, but they do not need my investment, hence they would incur no loss were I to migrate off them if a replacement exists. I could not replace Google with anything, but then DDG and then Kagi appeared, and largely replaced Google web search for me, quite seamlessly. When a better LLM appears, I will start using it instead of Claude. Etc.
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Out of interest what add-ons do you use that make a big difference for your needs?
I still mostly think like you, but I'm now more open to closed source tools.
The question I ask myself: is the advantage here so significant that it's worth the hypothetical switching cost at some point (and is export even possible?). If the answer is yes to both, I go for it.
Reads like a mix of valid concerns and a plug for Directus, which is sort of fishy.
Either way, like many others, I use SyncThing to sync my vault, and routinely edit it with vim, so Obsidian is just one comfortable shell that can (relatively easily) be replaced.
I don't understand the negative concerns mentioned by the author.
It's quite easy to sync notes to your mobile device using a free method, or using a cloud service you might already be paying for [4].
The great thing about Obsidian is that the notes itself are just markdown files, so you can use them in any other program. This protects you as a user in case Obsidian enters a enshittification phase. A good alternative is haptic [0], it is very similar to Obsidian but can also be used in the browser. Or LogSeq [1], SilverBullet[2] and just Visual Studio Code also work well. For just editing a single file MarkText[3] is also good.
[0]: https://github.com/chroxify/haptic
[1]: https://logseq.com/
[2]: https://silverbullet.md/
[3]: https://www.marktext.cc/
[4]: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/how-to-sync-obsidian
I'm a fan of TrilliumNext, which is open source, for this:
https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes
Thanks for sharing. Their encryption service is a nice source of inspiration on note encryption https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes/blob/56d4d7c20f775eed73...
Same, this gets my recommendation. Trilium is one of the most under-rated tool I know of.
I'm at the other side of the note system trade-off thingy. I use Apple Notes.
It's not perfect, but if I really want better search functionality, I'll just use the SQLite database that stores the notes. I've never needed to roll up my sleeves for that. I get around the limitations.
It's not perfect, but crafting one's own Personal Knowledge Management System sounds like a 5 year journey for 10 to 20 hours per week at least.
Exactly - I have tinkered with all sorts of systems (including Obsidian), and ultimately prefer the simplicity of Apple Notes. I have a system of nested folders and tags that handles my organization needs pretty well, and I find added complexity just ends up adding more friction to the note-taking process. Apple Notes search could certainly use improvement though.
I created Hot Notes to fuzzy search my Apple Notes folders and titles, it is working quite well for me. I think it could work well for your nested folders.
https://github.com/emadda/hot-notes
You might be interested in this, then: https://www.myforevernotes.com/
As a longtime Logseq user who was sick of their app focus (it used to be a webapp!) and skeptical of their revenue model, I switched to Silverbullet a while back. It gets the basics right, and I can throw together some Lua and make it do whatever else I want. Plus there's a small but enthusiastic community developing for it. I have it set up in a VPS and it has brought back most of the magic of early days Logseq.
I inadvertently converted a longtime Logseq user to Trilium. In case you find yourself hacking too much around Silverbullet, or want to try something else, you should give it a try :-)
Trillium is great for some folks (and I would have no qualms recommending it), but I cannot stand hierarchical notes. That's a personal preference. I just want a big mishmash of notes all linking to each other. I don't want to manage a taxonomy.
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I used git to sync a work related repo, but now use remotely-save with WebDAV (nextcloud, with base set to /Notes). No cost for sync and still access to the ecosystem of Obsidian.
What do people's success stories with fancy PKMS looks like? I get writing stuff down, but I've never quite gotten the deep linking stuff. I tend to just be able to get away with some basic folders.
Agreed. Particularly with running your notes through a text embedded model you can use semantic similarity and no longer need to manually link notes! This is something I'm excited to add in to my PKMS at some point.
Simon Wilson does a great job at explaining this here https://simonwillison.net/2023/Oct/23/embeddings/ see video at 6.30 min to about 10min point.
Same here. I get a massive amount of value out of writing things down at home and at work. I get comparably little value out of linking things together — beyond direct references at least. I think this may be a difference in how different people think and recall information.
I'm a lot more concerned about some random app on my phone accessing my Obsidian notes, which is why I haven't synced them to my phone yet, rather than Obsidian somehow knee-capping at some point in the future (which is not possible since it's all just md files in the end) .
As of Obsidian 1.8.10 on Android you can choose to store your notes in the sandboxed app storage which means other apps can't access those files.
KDE Plasma has a vaults feature which allows you to encrypt and decrypt contents of a directory. Combine that (or some other encryption software, eg syncthing encryption instead) with syncthing and markdown editor is virtually the same thing no?
And here's me just shoving everything into hundreds of .txt files. Easy to grep, easy to backup, and every system has an editor for them.
Username checks out & you'll probably outlast us all
Why not Anytype? long love IPFS p2p sync.
I just don’t have any of these worries with Obsidian. I pay for it because it’s great software and needs support. The sync is amazing, totally solid. The data is wherever you want that data to be. It’s just MD files. You can adapt the tool to be whatever you want from a PKM system - massively complex, with some kind of dataview hell, or just some files in a hierarchy. You can use plugins or not use plugins. You can build your own. There’s no lock in. “Migration” isn’t really a thing - it’s some files in a folder system. It’s as future proof as it can be.
I mean go nuts and roll your own if you want, but really, what’s not to like?
I use Joplin (https://joplinapp.org) on mobile and pc(windows and Linux). Joplin has a free encrypted sync via OneDrive.
> Obsidian was a great tool for me personally for a long time. But I felt frustrated when I wanted to access my notes on my phone while on-the-go and saw that I had to pay for this feature
On Android, I solved this problem quite simply by pointing Obsidian's mobile app at a syncthing folder, which cheerfully communicates with my workstation (and about a dozen other devices I own) and keeps things up to date. Works way better than I expected it to. Honestly the most infuriating part is that Google seems to have decided that apps like syncthing aren't welcome on the Play Store anymore, leaving the maintenance of that particular app up in the air. But the point here is that Obsidian can point to any folder, and the syncing task is totally separate. It's nice to have the convenience of their hosted option, but it's by no means the only solution to that problem.
The Maya Angelou quote is a very poor choice. I don't know if the author realizes the absurdity of putting the civil rights movement in parallel with her "PKM journey"
Does it really matter what context the quote was initially said in, if it generalizes to be applicable to many other things?
For context, this is the quote that is "absurd":
> You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been
I feel like that'd be fine in a lot of different contexts.
I wish there was something as lightweight and as well integrated as Apple Notes. Just support MD, sync well and have a search function.
I replaced Obsidian with VS Code and a git repo.
After using Obsidian for a couple of years I realized use a very limited set of features - editing markdown in a directory structure.
All I needed was really the directory structure view to the left and content to the right.
That’s also one of the options I considered. Right now I have a git-synced obsidian but it feels awkward.
I could be wrong, but I’ve always been under the impression that Obsidian charges a lot for sync because the app is amazing and free. Sync helps pay for that. But they’re also very helpful about providing other ways to sync your files to your phone. I use iCloud Drive (which I have anyway for other reasons).
At least for me personally, the paid syncing was pretty spotty. I was a hug fan of the app, paid for yearly billing, but never got notes to sync consistently across devices.
I have my Obsidian notes on an iCloud Drive that I already had. Works great, even on Windows.
Would probably work with other similar options too.
Interesting that storing images is not something solved yet.
If you watch the animated gif, he is still using a third party service to store that graph.
I also think people to tend to like Markdown mostly because it’s plain text. The added benefits of that preview view is minimal. Like my gut feeling Markdown is popular 90% because of it’s in an accepted way to do plaintext and only 10% for the added formatting.
> "The added benefits of that preview view is minimal."
In relative terms you may be right... but subjectively, having grown accustomed to Obsidian's live view in editor mode, I'd have a hard time giving it up.
Obsidian can automatically ingest files and store them on disk while giving links to it. My personal vault contains many kinds of files living in the "Attachments" folder.
> Markdown is popular 90% because of it’s in an accepted way to do plaintext and only 10% for the added formatting.
For me Markdown allows me to write and format text at the speed of thought. Added bonus is that it's readable with "less xyz.md" or anything which can render text.
Yep. Obsidian strikes a good compromise of automatically copying attachments into a relative subfolder for the note and then linking them in the MD file:
Also makes it trivial to run a note through a static site generator and publish online.
With plaintext, it's very trivial to add a script that put images in some location and build the link to that.
Markdown is great because you can easily add structure while typing compared to other format which have a more extensive markup format. I prefer org-mode because what Markdown can do, but also more extensive capabilities if you need so, but there's not a lot of editors for it especially on mobile.
I believe tiddlywiki stores PNGs as base64 strings, so image is always there.
Yes, the file can grow large with many images, but it's a single file containing everything... even scripting!
Yes, it embeds all attachments as base64.
TiddlyWiki is great until you want to add a structure to your Wiki. I was using it like mad, then I found out that linking pages took more time then writing notes, and I pulled the trigger and moved to Obsidian.
If you run the node.js server version it can handle images properly, as separate files. That also gives you the practical ability to use many large images and videos.
I've built a couple for myself so far; the most recent is in zig (sqlite extension that treats markdown files / frontmatter as virtual tables) and it's lasted me. I plan to rewrite it soon to adapt to how I've been using it :)
https://github.com/kunalb/termdex
Sounds like something I would use. A demo gif in the readme would help understand what it does faster
Yeah, it's very far from usable by other people at the moment =/.
The readme at https://github.com/kunalb/termdex/tree/main/markdown_files is probably the best bit.
Does anyone know of a tool that can e2e + collaboration (or in other words: notion but e2e)?
We're building https://thymer.com/ to do this. Real-time collaboration, local-first + end-to-end-encrypted (and optionally self-hosted).
Anytype. Local-first, p2p sync with e2ee. It uses the notion model (everything is an object, you can create "databases" with queries of objects). It doesn't store markdown directly I believe, but it can export into markdown perfectly.
I recently moved to anytype from logseq as it hit for me all the right notes for personal stuff, shared family stuff and work stuff.
I wanted something like notion but faster and most importantly, private.
Maybe Anytype, or self hosted appflowy
Emacs chads just keep winning.
Younger folk and beginners keep ignoring Emacs (and Lisp in general), without the slightest attempt to even understand what kind of philosophy makes it appealing.
The profound difference lies in ontological fungibility – Emacs isn’t software you use, but cognitive clay that becomes an extension of your mind’s operating system. Where any specialized app is inevitably doomed to constrain you to some kind of constructed imagination of what note-taking/knowledge work should be, Emacs+Org erases the distinction between a tool and thought through radical philosophical pillars.
1. The Medium is the Message Paradox
Emacs rejects the app paradigm's fundamental axiom. Instead of being a "notes app" or "writing app", it's a meta-medium where:
- Your notes can spontaneously become a calendar event → spreadsheet formula → email draft → code compiler
- The act of writing is programming your environment (Org markup becomes executable functions)
- Tools aren't discrete entities but fluid expressions of your current mental state (e.g., I can run a shell command piping it to grep and then pipe the results into a text buffer)
1. Agency Through Textual Primordial Soup
By rooting everything in plain text + programmable buffers, you're working with the substrate of computation itself. Unlike database-driven apps that entomb your ideas in rigid schemas:
- Every thought remains perpetually protean – a TODO item can morph into a API documentation generator through markup alone
- You manipulate knowledge at the level of semantics (headings, tags, properties) rather than fighting GUI metaphors
- The friction between "taking notes" and "building systems" disappears – your journal entries are the configuration files of your life (I manage all my dotfiles — for Linux, Mac, home and work machines via Org-mode)
1. Compounding Selfhood
Specialized apps optimize for atomic efficiency; Emacs thrives on continuous identity investment. Each macro you write, each Org capture template, each minor mode becomes:
- A cognitive microhabitat that evolves with your thinking patterns
- Permanent infrastructure that pays compound interest (my 2010 Org config still works, while Evernote of 2010 is abandonware)
- A mirror of your epistemology – the keybindings/hierarchies are your neural pathways externalized
This creates an irreducible satisfaction: you're not just using tools but cultivating a personal universe where every interaction leaves permanent fertile ground for future growth. The specialized app user lives in rented apartments; the Emacs devotee walks through an ever-expanding mansion whose rooms rearrange themselves to their thoughts.
People definitely sleep on emacs, which is a shame, but I do get it. I switched to emacs fulltime for coding for my work a few years ago, and really had it tailored to my preferences but drift (that took just slightly too long for me to keep up with while on the job) combined with AI features in other editors led me to land on Zed for code, which saddened me but is probably the best fit for coding.
However, Org-Mode is seriously a killer feature that is well worth it on its own. I use emacs to handle all my finances, notes with org-roam, blogging with ox-hugo, dotfiles in a massive org-tangle document, etc. I couldn't find anything remotely to compare it to, and have failed attempts at switching. There are tons of ways of interacting with Emacs that are just lightyears ahead of anything else. Literate programming and tangle are a godsend for tons of different use cases for me as well. I even keep running notes in the base of my codebase so I can hop to various files and capture locations in the relevant files as links in notes.
The only pain point for these tools for me is trying to use them as part of a commandline integration. I really wish org-mode and org-roam's functions were callable outside of emacs, e.g. for automated document generation from org-mode. One of the most painful things I've had to setup is an org-roam-server integration that updates and deploys org-roam-server when the git repo containing its files is updated. Only way to do that seemingly is to run emacs in a very strange way inside of a docker image. Intuitively it feels like org-roam-server should be able to build itself into a static website for deployment. Might seem like a nitpick, but it's really not -- that interface is a huge part of why I use it and not being able to host it without horribly hacky workarounds seems like a massive weakness.
(Long time Emacs user, abandoned since VSCode became a thing because it hurt my wrists so much.)
Do you think what you're talking about is hard to demo?
"- The act of writing is programming your environment (Org markup becomes executable functions)
- Tools aren't discrete entities but fluid expressions of your current mental state (e.g., I can run a shell command piping it to grep and then pipe the results into a text buffer)"
I haven't seen an impressive demo of this kind of stuff tbh.
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I tried obsidian but VSCode and Dropbox or Github is hard to beat. Stays out of your way.
This too is a solid choice particularly with Github actions for free cron jobs for instance
Just a reminder that if Obsidian or Logseq is not sufficient note taking solution for you, nothing will be. The problem is on your side
Kudos to the author for scratching their own itch.
People in a similar position might be interested in Joplin, which is indeed FOSS, and has lots of sync options. I personally use SyncThing, which keeps things free, but you can also use a number of other free cloud providers. You can choose to encrypt your notes to protect your privacy.
If you need a little bit more than Joplin (which is a great notes taking app, but not so much of a PKMS), give Trilium¹ a try! (I used Joplin for a little while, and it's a good tool, and it's fine not to chase for more if you don't need it, but if you do, not much beats Trilium, IMO)
¹: https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes/
Self hosted Joplin with encryption has been more than enough for me. It was pretty easy pulling all my apple notes into joplin as md files. Building my own like this just seems excessive
> Obsidian charges $8 a month to access the same notes across multiple devices.
It's $4 actually, for the normal plan that works perfectly well for most use cases. It's also end to end encrypted, which is great. And it's not just about syncing for me, it's about a backup solution for the notes.
> I started to have concerns about the longevity of the plugins and app itself. Some of you may remember when Evernote aggressively limited free users to 50 notes, many users migrated their notes elsewhere. I was one of those users.
The great thing about Obsidian (in comparison to Evernote), is that everything is just a plain text markdown file on disk. You can open those files in any app. If Obsidian goes away someday, all your notes can continue to be edited in any plain text editor. Sometimes I open notes in VS Code, because there are certain things I just prefer writing there.
Glad to see they have improved their pricing. It was 8/mo paid for a full year or 10/mo paid monthly last year when I decided to build this.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240104200401/https://obsidian....
I tend to start a note with frontmatter in Obsidian, drop into vim to do the writing, then back into Obsidian to clean things up. Wish there were a cleaner way to do it, but it works for me.
I am also searching for an alternative to Obsidian, that also works well on iOS and macOS. Obsidian is currently really slow somehow although all extensions are disabled, e.g. rendering the content when switching between notes is not instant. I really really like Outline, but I don't want to access the web just to write and read notes.
If you need an option to publish your notes online, check out Retype (https://retype.com). You can use Obsidian or GitBook or any Markdown files as your GUI editor and generate a static website using Retype.
just use txt / html / numbers/excel / files. All will lasted next 20 years.
A solid lasting PKMS solution
Plain text in git. Eternal, searchable, compact.
This is orthogonal. You can do this _and_ still use Obsidian since a vault is just a directory and notes are markdown.
The main thing being complained about here is that you have to pay for device sync. But instead of setting ups FOSS alternative like with a-shell and git you decided to… checks notes… build a less featureful obsidian without getting all the benefits of the obsidian ecosystem?
I’m all for doing projects like this as an intellectual exercise. It’s just that the motivation behind doing so in the article is a bit more “huh?”
Yep fair point. I'm doing the project in chucks and writing about it. his written part notably unlocks the ability to use my phone. Currently vetting a way to sync my database files with my markdown files on my laptop as I enjoy using Vim.
Funny enough I had downloaded a-shell and experimented with it and going git based. But ultimately didn't want my notes stored through Github. If that way works for you, cool!
I do agree with the author and others that I also wouldn't feel comfortable storing personal notes on Github. As I mentioned in a previous comment - you can use "git" without Github by hosting an instance of the open-source Gitea service.
https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea
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Doesn’t HAVE to be GitHub, git is git is git. You could host your own git server like a self hosted Gitlab if privacy is a concern (which is a totally valid concern! I share the same concern, I don’t necessarily want all of my inner brain workings available to GitHub). You could probably also figure out some clever way to encrypt the files too, I bet there’s a plugin for that. Then you could use anything you want without that worry
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I appreciate that you are taking the time not only to do the work but to document your experience and share it.
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> The thought of cyclically migrating notes from one PKMS to another every 5 years, as I had done from Evernote to Notion to Obsidian, made me feel tired.
git or syncthing
For anyone who wants an analog version of this: https://youtu.be/UV7vaqElPHk?si=_c-rxqV4RGhluTJS
> The most commonly used PKMS or note-taking apps today are Notion, Obsidian, Evernote and Logseq. The problem is that PKMS come and go.
Uh oh. I wouldn't use those. Of course they come and go - they're made by companies.
> Could you see yourself using your note-taking app you use today in 30 years?
Yes of course. Otherwise I wouldn't be using it.
> Do you ever have concerns around the privacy of your notes?
Not really.
> Are you spending more time setting up your notes system rather than managing your notes?
No.
> What does an effective and timeless PKMS even look like?
I use VimWiki[0]. There's a possibility it will go away, but I doubt it. There's a possibility both vim and neovim will go away, but I doubt it.
It stores everything as Markdown files. Should Markdown ever go away, it's all still very readable plain text files. I use UTF-8. Perhaps that'll go away at some point?
I version everything with git, I doubt git will fully go away, but I'm ok migrating to a different VCS if need be.
I bet the longevity of my setup is way better than the longevity of a backend written in TypeScript, backed by a SQL database, running in Docker, based on a CMS I've never heard of (Directus).
[0]: https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki
As a fan of Vim, I'm a fan of this solution. Are you able to access them on your phone?
> Are you able to access them on your phone?
Yes, with caveats.
I actually publish my wiki on the web with about fourty lines of bash to transform the Markdown into a static HTML website[0]. So I can access it through the web browser. When people ask me for recipes or whatever, I can just give them a url.
I host one of my git remotes on GitHub (an extra backup, a service which is usually up and gives me a way to sync my notes should all my other devices be offline). I understand and admire that you didn't want to do that. Probably it's possible to install git on a phone and use a markdown editor? I don't particularly trust my phone tbh. Certainly not enough to put my git signing key on it!
[0]: https://github.com/tasuki/vitwiki/blob/master/build.sh
I applaud the action, but motivation is strange. I am all for making custom software for your own needs and tailored for own use cases, but price?
How much does your VPS costs vs Obsidian subscription? I wonder. Is it like 1 5$/month micro machine and you just pray that it will survive for 10 years without data loss?
Syncthing + wireguard solves this. What a waste of time.
just use txt.
I have many thoughts, as I'm sure everyone on this forum does. I feel like mentioning PKMS on Hacker News is like mentioning, idk, shave soap or knives on reddit.
> But if it's so obvious, why aren't other developers rolling out their own PKMS? Perhaps I'm the first to discover this or perhaps developers aren't writing about their custom PKMS.
Well, because of Standards, of course: https://xkcd.com/927/
I don't mean to shit on the OP's work here, but from what I can tell, the app they built is a multi-platform markdown editor and renderer that has an auth stack. Oh, and it's self hostable.
If I hop on https://awesome-selfhosted.net/ , head down to the note taking section: https://awesome-selfhosted.net/tags/note-taking--editors.htm... , I can see at least 7 that support this feature. Oh, also this category: https://awesome-selfhosted.net/tags/knowledge-management-too... has many more.
So while I think it's fun to do personal projects, I kinda feel like, if you had time to do this, it would probably have been better both for you and just like the world in general if you instead just created a PR with whatever feature you wanted on one of these more fleshed out projects. Bonus: you get a bunch more stuff, for free, since many other people are working on the same project. Bonus bonus: You can put a project with a shitload of github stars and users on your portfolio/resume/whatever and point to your PR.
Anyway as for PKMS thoughts, I've been using org mode since 2016. I've tried Obsidian and Logseq for completedness but in both cases ended up back in org mode for various reasons.
In PKMS, everyone goes on about knowledge graphs, linking etc, but I've realized lately I've never found that useful - I do use org-roam and link notes, but when I want to find links to, say, "machine learning," I'm just as likely to simply do a full-text file search for the term, which leads to the same results. As for the visual knowledge graphs, I've never seen them useful for anything other than showing off at coworking meetups.
What I've come back to is, what I really need my PKMS to do that I haven't really configured org mode to do yet for me is, in situations that happen to me CONSTANTLY when I'm out and about, I need my PKMS very quickly to answer questions for me like, "who was that guy I read recently that said something about modern capitalism causing us all to be alienated," or, "I vaguely remember reading about how social media categorizes us into advertising groups, what was that again?", or, "What was that city in Italy we went to with that crazy good ice cream? Actually on that note what islands did we go to on that trip?" I'm frequently in conversations with people where I want to share information with them, but maybe because I have ADHD brain or just am uniquely deficient and remembering very specific bits of info, I can't recall stuff (a great example of this, and I had to google to write this part: I ALWAYS forget Quentin Tarantino's name despite really liking his movies). Anyway, I tried using an org-roam org-to-html deploy tool to create a searchable, private website of my knowledge graph, and that's... fine I guess. I need to get it automated somehow, but even then I'm sure it won't be great. Of course I'm thinking of some kind of deployed solution that queries an LLM that can search my entire note repo, but that's a project and a half I don't have time to do.
So for now my plan is to just keep plugging away at org mode and org-to-html to see if I can get a really good flow there.
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Gotta respect anyone who just builds their own stuff instead of waiting around for the 'perfect' app to show up.
I'm not saying AI is going to replace programmers, but it's been almost a century already and we still don't have a decent note taking app or even a todo list app and that's like the first app you learn to make. Maybe humanity just kind of sucks at this whole application development thing.
I use cherrytree currently, by the way.
There are hundreds of decent note taking apps and todo apps. The issue is that almost no one has the exact same needs or workflow for either of those things. I’ve given up on suggesting those things to people and sticking with “whichever one you use is the best”. So the best you’ll ever do is a decent one //for you// but it’s possible that definition may not work for anyone else.
I think this is a great time to build personal knowledge base!
LLMs are the missing piece that everyone has been desperately need to have the knowledge base come to life, instead of as a glorified key word search engine