Comment by vunderba
1 day ago
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.
Syncthing... It can do it too
handles syncing my pictures too
Wasn't the syncthing android app deprecated relatively recently?
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I can second Syncthing. I just use a simple markdown editor with Syncthing on Windows, Android, and a Linux.
Even setting up your own couchdb + livesync should be a small task if one can consider to 'write a whole app' to replace obsidian
edit note, if you want to build something :) please expand livesync or a new plugin to allow easily sharing of self hosted obsidian notes :) All the ones I tried use some 3rd party hosting which I don't like even if its encrypted.
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.
iCloud sync is too unreliable and opaque for me.
It has been reliable for me with Obsidian. I still prefer Obsidian Sync because it has good integrated version history and shared vaults.
Also agree with the sibling poster - I like subscribing to support them on a regular basis (and of course Catalyst).
Yes I found it wasn't reliable. Perhaps it has improved, but Obsidian Sync has been excellent. I'm happy to support the developer as I'd like Obsidian to stick around.
> 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.
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.
A proprietary format with an export function allows you the same inconvenience of having to write code for processing.
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If you're willing to reimplement them in your own obsidian-like editor anyway, I don't quite see the difference
I wouldn't so I keep to markdown and minimize plugins where aplicable, if I need to run for the hills, I don't expect to lose much
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 been using Obsidian for years now and besides some experiments use zero plugins. What inefficient patterns are you running into?
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.
> 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
Yeah agreed - does anyone really care for $4/month?
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.
And here I am still coming to terms with using spaces in filenames.
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Still doesn't. I recently moved my vault to Dropbox and had to rename a bunch of filenames
I think of the sync paid tier as analogous to a patreon membership, combined with paying someone a tiny amount to manage my data for me. The fact that it's all markdown makes me confident I could take my files and go play elsewhere at any time, but I enjoy knowing my money helps keep Obsidian going.
> 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.
> 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.
Not really.. This problem runs far deeper than most are willing to see. First, Obsidian is using a personalized flavour of markdown, and seconds, for many heavy features it's leaning strongly on plugins which are prone to break or even die. Obsidian has a vibrant plugin-community, which also seems to die really fast. This becomes even more critical by plugins dying from changes in Obsidian itself. So while Obsidian is in theory a nice open app, it's longevity-aspect is really awful. I already had many features and plugins dying in the last years, and who know how much more will break in the next 20 years. Simply switching to another text-editor will not do, because they won't offer the missing features. So at best, you are just not losing your data, but you still won't have the tooling to use them.
Someone creating their own system, where they have full control over everything, even if they will have to sacrifice some benefit in the short run, just makes sense in a bigger picture.
But you do have full control, if you want it. Nothing stops you from altering plugins or making your own.
The plugins sit in a local directory. Very easy to modify.
> Nothing stops you from altering plugins or making your own.
You still have no control over obsidian itself. Any change can and will break plugins. So you either settle with one version for the next decade, or you have to maintain them. This is just the normal dependency-hell that every project has, where you have to compromise with external dependency and their whims. Just that neither plugins nor obsidian (to some degree) are the level of professional software-projects in that regard.
And let's not talk about changing Obsidian on fundamental levels. You have even less control on how it works on everything which is not accessible by plugins.
Genuinely curious, which plugins do you mean for example when you say that many heavy features are leaning on them?
I could see the dataview plugin as an example (even though I don't use that one personally) but most other plugins seem like they just add more convenient ways to do something that would be still pretty simple to do manually. (Templates for example).
> Genuinely curious, which plugins do you mean for example when you say that many heavy features are leaning on them?
Depends on what you are doing. But the whole task & project-management-corner is constantly moving. Everything which modified the editor and preview was also regular breaking in the last years. For example, there were some plugins adding banners at the top of documents, or background-images or some icons. Or plugins modifying the yaml-area. They were all breaking multiple times when Obsidian was switching to the new live-preview-editor, then on changing frontmatter to properties, and on some other occasion IIRC. Usually after some months a new plugin appears, or someone forks the old one and fixes it. But as a user, it's pretty annoying to constantly have something breaking outside your control and getting stripped of features you want/need for various reasons.
Obsidian is useful, but far from being stable long-term yet. It's still very young.
> I could see the dataview plugin as an example
Yes, dataview was also very unstable the first 2 years or so, switching code and concepts, breaking old code along the line. It seems to be stable now, as the focus is on datacore.
> but most other plugins seem like they just add more convenient ways to do something that would be still pretty simple to do manually. (Templates for example).
Does it matter what a plugin is doing? If it breaks, it's a loss, whether it's crucial or just annoying.
Don’t use plug ins
then you lose a large amount of functionality and value. That's the point they were making.
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.
Totally agree, I personally have obsidian set up on multiple devices, and they all automatically sync to my local Synology NAS.
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.
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.
To be clear, GitHub is centralized, but Git is not. You can sync between laptop and phone directly with Git -- no third party server required.
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?
Made a comment in the thread explaining this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44023090
I expect my PKMS to evolve and wouldn't rule out a self-hosted Git server if I find it's a better option long term.
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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.
In 20 years will that plugin work? I doubt it.
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Some people just enjoy the process, and you'll always learn something new
Just use Joplin, it’s open source and syncing to many cloud providers you already probably have is free.