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The cult of Obsidian: Why people are obsessed with the note-taking app
(www.fastcompany.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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Technology
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Which is relative to personal taste and needs.
I definitely agree that I wish it was fully foss, but i also think it is a far better option than notion, onenote, etc for most people (as long as it meets their needs and preferences) since with obsidian you do actually own your data and you don't need to pay unless you want their sync.
Even if, worst case, Obsidian enshitifies, all the notes are markdown or json (json for config and things that don't work in markdown, but the community and the devs work hard to keep that to a minimum) so you can still access your stuff in any text editor and it will be fairly easy to get the important data migrated into anything else. (I often use vs code to manage my notes, for instance, esp for big find and replace or re-org tasks) Even the non-standard markdown from obsidian and the most popular plugins reads well and could fairly easily be replicated with remarked or other markdown libraries. In this way, i think Obsidians approach is far superior to a tool which uses a database to store its data, since a database would require some effort to use standalone, or some work to migrate it to another tool or some sort of minimal client interface.
By its design, Obsidian could also be replaced by reverse engineering their api. If obsidian takes the dark path, we will probably see a foss community grow from the plugin dev community to replace it and be as compatible with plugins as possible, even if its just the basic text and display components. Tbh, it could totally be a vs code plugin, an emacs mode, [insert any text editor with plugins here]... thats how portable the data is. The obsidian devs know this, and they are intentional about staying this way. A shift in attitude here would be noticed by the community very quickly.
Everything about this discussion is.
OK.
Why bother when I can do it now with the better option rather than in a couple years with several thousand notes?
Also it should be noted that peculiarities about how obsidian works makes transfers non trivial. Individual notes are fine, file structures not as much, but it's minor.
Trilium has a pretty robust export system last I checked. Not rally worried about that, meanwhile I get the massive speed upgrades and stability associated with a database.
Sure it could be reverse engineered... Or just use the software that's already basically there...
You're doing that thing where someone starts going to bat and listing off this that or this other thing to rationalize their own choice or rationalize the choice for others.
I've used obsidian for years. I switched to trilium for reasons I stated above. Unless obsidian goes fully foss, and gets way way more stable, i'll be using the genuinely better choice, thanks though.
I have not explored Trillium enough, but from what I know, it seems to be an excellent choice and worthy of mention and advocacy. I did not say that Trillium was bad.
I'm glad it's a better choice for you! Replying to you doesn't mean I was saying your choice was incorrect for you or others, merely that I wanted to discuss in context of your comment. Apologies if you read that from my response. I do not think I can declare a genuinely better choice. In my opinion, the most important thing with note-taking is whether you keep returning to do it and can easily find past notes.
Ok? I don't recall saying Obsidian was THE choice, nor that your reasons were incorrect, so I don't know why you're casting me in that role. Generally I lean towards self-hosting and foss options for the reasons you describe, but this is an instance where I calculated differently, and I just want to provide context that, compared to other proprietary options, Obsidian is way less a concern. I've personally gone down rabbit holes with foss alternatives because i've been overly concerned about things and ended up not being productive. I've also chosen foss tools before that I thought would be safe or easy to migrate out of, and then ended up having a terrible time anyway when the day came that it became abandonware or a new maintainer took it in a different direction.
Perhaps you are doing that thing where you forget that not everyone can easily use a fully foss option and that not everyone can reliably install a tool from github in the event it isn't available on an app store or via an installer? (I'm certainly guilty of this sometimes myself)
Even for a tool like Trillium, while it wouldn't enshitify the same way a proprietary tool could, it could also just be abandoned, no forks could arise, and someone without a ton of self-hosting/compiling/cli-based install troubleshooting experience would be in just as bad a situation for migrating or going elsewhere. Even right now, Trillium is technically unsupported on macOS, so it's not a great option for some out the gate. (Nor does that make Obsidian automatically better)
I didn't say everyone should necessarily use trilium. I described my rationale pretty plainly. Trilium can be transformed into md files trivially, if it gets abandoned, any users will be fine.
Trilium is literally available as an installer.
Use whatever you want. I'm not really here to describe the entire feature set of trilium for people in a play by play. Go look at the features, give it a try, or don't, im not about to place massive amounts of personally produced information in software I can't fully trust though.
Linking in trillium notes is PITA.
How do you work efficiently? Trillium is much more friction I felt when testing it out.
I agree that trilium could use more worth on linking efficiently. It's no various complements. I don't really have a method I just deal with it, sorry to disappoint.
But what is your workflow then?
Just curious because I can see trillium notes as worthfully when really creating sophisticated notes, like finished documentation.
But for working with small/atomic/draft notes the workflow is just too much friction for me to use it as a tool despite documenting past stuff.
I generally finish thoughts out in sections in a note and if I feel I need a new note I can drop in a link or I can send a section into a new note. I find it actually has cut down on note bloat, my main pain point is quickly writing aliases. If I was a script writer I don't think it would be hard to improve the feel of it tbh.