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I love Obsidian - its approach, the ecosystem, and the implementation. But... I can't help but feel it will become the latest application to either pivot to so

I love Obsidian - its approach, the ecosystem, and the implementation. But... I can't help but feel it will become the latest application to either pivot to something unpalatable (probably after being acquired) or become abandonware, leaving me to move to Yet Another Tool. And so it prevents me from really investing in any of it - I just use a no-frills text editor.

wgerard 3y ago
For me, the nice part about Obsidian is that they're just markdown files. So even if something happens to Obsidian, the notes still exist and are still easily transferrable to something else.
- blowski 3y ago
  Yeah, having a non-proprietary data format is a huge plus. I wish the Obsidian code itself was open source.
  - rubymamis 3y ago
    It’s hard to make a living with open source (saying from experience).
    - blowski 3y ago
      Sadly, that's true, and my frustration with the constant churn of software is no reflection on the good people making Obsidian.
    - PurpleRamen 3y ago
      Obsidian is free to use, and they make their money from offering additional sync-service and good will of the users. I don't think open source would impact it much. Though, it would bear the risk of a hostile fork, maybe to include a free to sync or something. I mean the obsidian-devs have some bad history on that front. But at least they should give some guarantee to Open Source it if there were no significant update in a while, similar to how Qt and KDE have their agreement. Or at least they should make the source available, so people can contribute or move away easier in case of problems.
- greggsy 3y ago
  Markdown isn’t immune to deprecation in the Obsidian ecosystem - I have files with random junk in the headers leftover from failed attempts to integrate some data management plugin or regime.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    So? Does it matter much for some reason? That doesn’t seem like a compatibility issue.
    - BowBun 3y ago
      If you've invested time into adding metadata and app-specific markdown to your setup, you lose that when you move to another tool. Has happened to me before. It's about vendor lock-in when you go too deep into their ecosystem.
      - Terretta 3y ago
        And instead of open text files with plaintext properties in the YAML frontmatter standard, you want to do.... what, exactly? And the plugins are all OSS, on GitHub. What do you imagine is more open with less lock-in?
  - beardedwizard 3y ago
    Its called front matter and its supported in markdown
    - cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
      How does that change the point being made? Front matter is supported essentially as a bucket of metadata. Front matter has varying degrees of usefulness without supporting tooling.
      - haswell 3y ago
        Front matter is still a simple text based format that can easily be parsed by other programs, and there is already quite a bit of tooling to process it. Even without tooling, it’s human readable. The degree of usefulness just increases the more sophisticated the tool is that you’re using to read it. Compare this with the painful migration away from Evernote, which left me with a folder full of giant .enex files that I can technically use elsewhere, but at this point are realistically just an archive I’ll never touch unless I really need something.
- SamBam 3y ago
  Fairly easily transferrable to something else. I assume that many of the plugins that power users use involve added non-standard stuff to the files. Like if you're adding a bunch of metadata to be consumed by the Dataview plugin, all that metadata might be worthless on a new app unless someone creates an equivalent plugin elsewhere. It's open source, so they can. But people who want forward-compatibility should probably think about what their raw markdown files look like, and how useful they'd be in another program.
  - wlesieutre 3y ago
    It’s not open source, just free as in beer. Personally I do avoid add-ons that create special syntax in the md files so that if Obsidian ever goes shitty I’ll have an easier time migrating to whatever alternative.
    - SamBam 3y ago
      Sorry, the plugins are generally open source, that's what I was referring to.
      - wlesieutre 3y ago
        Gotcha, yeah. If it ever comes to needing an Obsidian replacement I'd hope it can aim for compatibility with the plug-in ecosystem, at least initially. No idea how difficult a target that would be. Either way, I certainly worry about my data in Obsidian less than I worry about Evernote, OneNote, or Apple Notes, even with a couple of non-standard markdown additions. Since it's not VC backed I'm hopeful about Obsidian building a long-term sustainable business without having to turn shitty, but who knows. I should sign up for Sync and give them some money.
  - Terretta 3y ago
    > I assume that many of the plugins that power users use involve added non-standard stuff to the files. Like if you're adding a bunch of metadata to be consumed by the Dataview plugin, all that metadata might be worthless on a new app ... The metadata is YAML frontmatter. Works with any frontmatter aware tools, which includes, for example, most static site generators. It's all just markdown, the plugins layer on top of Markdown. Your site basically works if you shove it in GitHub pages. With a touch of config matching, you can open an Obsidian "vault" in the VSCode plugin called Foam (like Roam but for a local folder structure of Markdown files). Most add ons, like, say, Excalidraw for charting, are themselves tools with plugins in GitHub Pages, Hugo, MkDocs, etc., so are portable for static site gen (SSG). The only thing it seems to be "missing" is the CRDT style multiplayer live editing of tools like Notion or Craft.
- PurpleRamen 3y ago
  That's the theory, but it's not like they use strict markdown. Markdown in the first place is a very simple and limited format, so everyone has their own syntax-extensions and tweaks, and obsidian is no exception. So even if you lose the data themselves, you could lose a significant amount of ability to work with them, if somehow obsidian becomes unusable. And if you build on plugins, this sometimes happens even now here and there. Plugins becoming unusable because of an update is still not uncommon. Their developing stopping for whatever reason is also a bit of a problem.
p1nkpineapple 3y ago
FWIW, their CEO seems quite set on long-term growth instead of a quick sell, as evidenced by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39336308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39336308
- duxup 3y ago
  That may be the CEOs intent, but if they have share holders and someone shows up with money it isn’t entirely the CEOs call. They have a responsibility to produce returns and if an offer is better than what they can do without selling their obligation is pretty clear. I’ve known some folks who I believe really wanted to grow a company but when faced with an offer to buy it they didn’t feel they could survive a legal challenge arguing that they should sell.
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
    It’s 2024. By this point we all know how this ride goes. So if a founder states that they’re targeting sustainable long-term growth, and that intent isn’t reflected in how they’ve taken on investments, they’re flat-out lying. There’s simply no excuse to be that utterly naive. The Obsidian mob seem very switched on, and their public headcount isn’t remotely indicative of VC-funded hyper-growth. It looks like they’re doing everything right.
    - duxup 3y ago
      My point being that even if the CEO intends long term growth, it may not matter. People’s perception regarding the CEO is telling the truth or not is largely irrelevant at that point. If the offer is big enough their hands are often tied due to their obligation to the rest of the owners.
  - rubymamis 3y ago
    They are bootstrapped and committed not to take VC money[1]. [1] https://stephango.com/vcware https://stephango.com/vcware
  - pseudo_meta 3y ago
fuzzy_biscuit 3y ago
To me, Obsidian just isn't sticky, so I already have pivoted to Amplenote. It's been the tool that I consistently use for note taking and personal task tracking.
haswell 3y ago
I used Evernote for well over a decade and I don’t regret that I did, despite the changes that eventually forced me to get rid of it and change my habits. There is already a growing ecosystem of tools that are Obsidian-like, and if Obsidian ever went down an unpalatable path, those tools are ready and waiting. If a no frills editor works for you, great. But at the same time, I don’t think a future problem with Obsidian is a good reason to avoid it. In a worst case, that no frills editor will open your vault just fine. But I’d personally switch to something like Logseq, which is also coming along really nicely. In the meantime, the value that Obsidian brings to my daily life is immense. And that’s worth the risk of eventually needing to find something new, especially when I know that the underlying data is completely portable.
- bosie 3y ago
  > There is already a growing ecosystem of tools that are Obsidian-like, and if Obsidian ever went down an unpalatable path, those tools are ready and waiting. can you name a few? i have currently installed and enabled 65 plugins. Granted, that is mostly because the obsidian team does not know how to build a good product, leading me to use plugins. but even then, the functionality is not that bad (templater, book search, dataview, loom, custom file explorer/command palette etc)
  - criddell 3y ago
    The fact that the product is so extensible is a sign to me that they know how to build an excellent product. I'm currently using 1 community plugin and have only enabled a handful of the core plugins. I personally wish they would stop adding features to Obsidian. It feels complete to me.
    - bosie 3y ago
      i disagree. extensible is super duper but even that isn't great with Obsidian from a dev perspective. so the product "Obsidan Plugin API for devs" is also lacking. and core features should be in core (dataview for example). what is most shocking though is that sync and publish are horrendous implementation of said features. i would kind of get it for other stuff but together they are 20 bucks plus tax per month. just now sync has 'merged' a note on my iphone (no changes on iphone though) and completely scrambled the note. same with another 3 notes. if i did not check the note by chance now, i would have missed it. the entire UI around a sync feature is bad.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dhc02 3y ago
I started getting the same feeling and so switched to Logseq and have been very happy.
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
>...leaving me to move to Yet Another Tool. That's actually integral to the notetaking/productivity app market. Either the app soon dies out or you get bored with it and you move on to the next one. Just like with self-help products. Targets of the self-help market are never intended to just read one or two books and get on with their lives. They're vulnerable to seemingly unending consumption of one self-help product after another. They're endlessly sold on regurgitated feel-good crap that keeps them coming back for more. These productivity tools, like self-help books, become the ends in themselves, rather than the means. I used to do the same thing with productivity & learning apps and systems. Kept procrastinating looking for that One Good Tool. I had this misconception that if I didn't have that one perfect notetaking tool or productivity app, then I'd be held back. I ultimately realized that what was really holding me back was myself. I eliminated my dependency on The One Perfect Tool, I replaced that dependency with more practical action, lightly supported by simple pen & paper and plain text files, and now I'm more productive and more learned than ever.

wgerard 3y ago

For me, the nice part about Obsidian is that they're just markdown files. So even if something happens to Obsidian, the notes still exist and are still easily transferrable to something else.

blowski 3y ago
Yeah, having a non-proprietary data format is a huge plus. I wish the Obsidian code itself was open source.
- rubymamis 3y ago
  It’s hard to make a living with open source (saying from experience).
  - blowski 3y ago
    Sadly, that's true, and my frustration with the constant churn of software is no reflection on the good people making Obsidian.
  - PurpleRamen 3y ago
    Obsidian is free to use, and they make their money from offering additional sync-service and good will of the users. I don't think open source would impact it much. Though, it would bear the risk of a hostile fork, maybe to include a free to sync or something. I mean the obsidian-devs have some bad history on that front. But at least they should give some guarantee to Open Source it if there were no significant update in a while, similar to how Qt and KDE have their agreement. Or at least they should make the source available, so people can contribute or move away easier in case of problems.
greggsy 3y ago
Markdown isn’t immune to deprecation in the Obsidian ecosystem - I have files with random junk in the headers leftover from failed attempts to integrate some data management plugin or regime.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  So? Does it matter much for some reason? That doesn’t seem like a compatibility issue.
  - BowBun 3y ago
    If you've invested time into adding metadata and app-specific markdown to your setup, you lose that when you move to another tool. Has happened to me before. It's about vendor lock-in when you go too deep into their ecosystem.
    - Terretta 3y ago
      And instead of open text files with plaintext properties in the YAML frontmatter standard, you want to do.... what, exactly? And the plugins are all OSS, on GitHub. What do you imagine is more open with less lock-in?
- beardedwizard 3y ago
  Its called front matter and its supported in markdown
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
    How does that change the point being made? Front matter is supported essentially as a bucket of metadata. Front matter has varying degrees of usefulness without supporting tooling.
    - haswell 3y ago
      Front matter is still a simple text based format that can easily be parsed by other programs, and there is already quite a bit of tooling to process it. Even without tooling, it’s human readable. The degree of usefulness just increases the more sophisticated the tool is that you’re using to read it. Compare this with the painful migration away from Evernote, which left me with a folder full of giant .enex files that I can technically use elsewhere, but at this point are realistically just an archive I’ll never touch unless I really need something.
SamBam 3y ago
Fairly easily transferrable to something else. I assume that many of the plugins that power users use involve added non-standard stuff to the files. Like if you're adding a bunch of metadata to be consumed by the Dataview plugin, all that metadata might be worthless on a new app unless someone creates an equivalent plugin elsewhere. It's open source, so they can. But people who want forward-compatibility should probably think about what their raw markdown files look like, and how useful they'd be in another program.
- wlesieutre 3y ago
  It’s not open source, just free as in beer. Personally I do avoid add-ons that create special syntax in the md files so that if Obsidian ever goes shitty I’ll have an easier time migrating to whatever alternative.
  - SamBam 3y ago
    Sorry, the plugins are generally open source, that's what I was referring to.
    - wlesieutre 3y ago
      Gotcha, yeah. If it ever comes to needing an Obsidian replacement I'd hope it can aim for compatibility with the plug-in ecosystem, at least initially. No idea how difficult a target that would be. Either way, I certainly worry about my data in Obsidian less than I worry about Evernote, OneNote, or Apple Notes, even with a couple of non-standard markdown additions. Since it's not VC backed I'm hopeful about Obsidian building a long-term sustainable business without having to turn shitty, but who knows. I should sign up for Sync and give them some money.
- Terretta 3y ago
  > I assume that many of the plugins that power users use involve added non-standard stuff to the files. Like if you're adding a bunch of metadata to be consumed by the Dataview plugin, all that metadata might be worthless on a new app ... The metadata is YAML frontmatter. Works with any frontmatter aware tools, which includes, for example, most static site generators. It's all just markdown, the plugins layer on top of Markdown. Your site basically works if you shove it in GitHub pages. With a touch of config matching, you can open an Obsidian "vault" in the VSCode plugin called Foam (like Roam but for a local folder structure of Markdown files). Most add ons, like, say, Excalidraw for charting, are themselves tools with plugins in GitHub Pages, Hugo, MkDocs, etc., so are portable for static site gen (SSG). The only thing it seems to be "missing" is the CRDT style multiplayer live editing of tools like Notion or Craft.
PurpleRamen 3y ago
That's the theory, but it's not like they use strict markdown. Markdown in the first place is a very simple and limited format, so everyone has their own syntax-extensions and tweaks, and obsidian is no exception. So even if you lose the data themselves, you could lose a significant amount of ability to work with them, if somehow obsidian becomes unusable. And if you build on plugins, this sometimes happens even now here and there. Plugins becoming unusable because of an update is still not uncommon. Their developing stopping for whatever reason is also a bit of a problem.

p1nkpineapple 3y ago

FWIW, their CEO seems quite set on long-term growth instead of a quick sell, as evidenced by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39336308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39336308

duxup 3y ago
That may be the CEOs intent, but if they have share holders and someone shows up with money it isn’t entirely the CEOs call. They have a responsibility to produce returns and if an offer is better than what they can do without selling their obligation is pretty clear. I’ve known some folks who I believe really wanted to grow a company but when faced with an offer to buy it they didn’t feel they could survive a legal challenge arguing that they should sell.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
  It’s 2024. By this point we all know how this ride goes. So if a founder states that they’re targeting sustainable long-term growth, and that intent isn’t reflected in how they’ve taken on investments, they’re flat-out lying. There’s simply no excuse to be that utterly naive. The Obsidian mob seem very switched on, and their public headcount isn’t remotely indicative of VC-funded hyper-growth. It looks like they’re doing everything right.
  - duxup 3y ago
    My point being that even if the CEO intends long term growth, it may not matter. People’s perception regarding the CEO is telling the truth or not is largely irrelevant at that point. If the offer is big enough their hands are often tied due to their obligation to the rest of the owners.
- rubymamis 3y ago
  They are bootstrapped and committed not to take VC money[1]. [1] https://stephango.com/vcware https://stephango.com/vcware
- pseudo_meta 3y ago

fuzzy_biscuit 3y ago

To me, Obsidian just isn't sticky, so I already have pivoted to Amplenote. It's been the tool that I consistently use for note taking and personal task tracking.

haswell 3y ago

I used Evernote for well over a decade and I don’t regret that I did, despite the changes that eventually forced me to get rid of it and change my habits. There is already a growing ecosystem of tools that are Obsidian-like, and if Obsidian ever went down an unpalatable path, those tools are ready and waiting. If a no frills editor works for you, great. But at the same time, I don’t think a future problem with Obsidian is a good reason to avoid it. In a worst case, that no frills editor will open your vault just fine. But I’d personally switch to something like Logseq, which is also coming along really nicely. In the meantime, the value that Obsidian brings to my daily life is immense. And that’s worth the risk of eventually needing to find something new, especially when I know that the underlying data is completely portable.

bosie 3y ago
> There is already a growing ecosystem of tools that are Obsidian-like, and if Obsidian ever went down an unpalatable path, those tools are ready and waiting. can you name a few? i have currently installed and enabled 65 plugins. Granted, that is mostly because the obsidian team does not know how to build a good product, leading me to use plugins. but even then, the functionality is not that bad (templater, book search, dataview, loom, custom file explorer/command palette etc)
- criddell 3y ago
  The fact that the product is so extensible is a sign to me that they know how to build an excellent product. I'm currently using 1 community plugin and have only enabled a handful of the core plugins. I personally wish they would stop adding features to Obsidian. It feels complete to me.
  - bosie 3y ago
    i disagree. extensible is super duper but even that isn't great with Obsidian from a dev perspective. so the product "Obsidan Plugin API for devs" is also lacking. and core features should be in core (dataview for example). what is most shocking though is that sync and publish are horrendous implementation of said features. i would kind of get it for other stuff but together they are 20 bucks plus tax per month. just now sync has 'merged' a note on my iphone (no changes on iphone though) and completely scrambled the note. same with another 3 notes. if i did not check the note by chance now, i would have missed it. the entire UI around a sync feature is bad.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dhc02 3y ago

I started getting the same feeling and so switched to Logseq and have been very happy.

VoodooJuJu 3y ago

>...leaving me to move to Yet Another Tool. That's actually integral to the notetaking/productivity app market. Either the app soon dies out or you get bored with it and you move on to the next one. Just like with self-help products. Targets of the self-help market are never intended to just read one or two books and get on with their lives. They're vulnerable to seemingly unending consumption of one self-help product after another. They're endlessly sold on regurgitated feel-good crap that keeps them coming back for more. These productivity tools, like self-help books, become the ends in themselves, rather than the means. I used to do the same thing with productivity & learning apps and systems. Kept procrastinating looking for that One Good Tool. I had this misconception that if I didn't have that one perfect notetaking tool or productivity app, then I'd be held back. I ultimately realized that what was really holding me back was myself. I eliminated my dependency on The One Perfect Tool, I replaced that dependency with more practical action, lightly supported by simple pen & paper and plain text files, and now I'm more productive and more learned than ever.