Comment by wannabebarista

For years, I used Trello for taking notes and tracking my reading/research. The feature I cared most about was being able to reference notes in other notes and have lists of notes. It turns out that Trello is an awful tool for this because their database doesn't scale well to large boards.

I built a bare-bones alternative where each "card", e.g. book or paper, is a JSON file. This was motivated by parsing the bloated Trello export file into individual files.

I tinkered with this until I came across Obsidian. I used a version of this tool[0] to parse my Trello export into markdown files. It's still not perfect and continually requires tinkering to do what I need, but my present setup is infinitely better than the prior. r.e. another comment: I can imagine using this setup in twenty years and am happy to pay for Sync.

[0] https://forum.obsidian.md/t/t2md-a-tool-to-migrate-trello-to...