34 ms·

Ditching Obsidian and building my own

• secwang 1y ago
  just use txt.
• karn97 1y ago
  Syncthing + wireguard solves this. What a waste of time.
• williamsss 1y ago
  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 https://amberwilliams.io/blogs/the-last-note-system
  • busymom0 1y ago
    Can I ask how you created the image at the top of the article? I really like it.
    • vunderba 1y ago
      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.
    • williamsss 1y ago
      AI image gen
• SOLAR_FIELDS 1y ago
  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?”
  • williamsss 1y ago
    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!
    • vunderba 1y ago
      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 https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea
      • williamsss 1y ago
        Thanks for sharing. I'll have a play with Gitea My concern with this approach would be I've read through Directus' codebase and can understand it. With a self-hosted Git server like this I'd be worried if shit hit the fan and corrupted my Git files or stopped being maintained I'd be a duck out of water
        • OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y ago
          It's also worth noting that Gitea forked a while back. The community fork is Forgejo. https://forgejo.org/ https://forgejo.org/ And if you really just want a simple hosting system, https://tangled.sh https://tangled.sh is really easy to set up. It uses atproto (network underlying bluesky) as their identity provider and for tracking issues, PRs, comments, etc. Their "knot server" is basically just a little self-hosted go node that manages git repos. The project is fairly small atm and it's pretty much all in go so it's not too hard to skim through if you want to see how it works under the hood (or if you are afraid of needing to be able to keep it maintained long term).
• vunderba 1y 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.
  • exe34 1y ago
    > 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.
  • williamsss 1y ago
    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!
• Sytten 1y ago
  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.
  • SOLAR_FIELDS 1y ago
    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
    • para_parolu 1y ago
      And implementing local sync for obsidian is just running on docker container
    • misnome 1y ago
      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.
  • hartator 1y ago
    I think the author point still stands though: Obsidian won’t probably be here in 20 years.
    • no_wizard 1y ago
      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
• lolinder 1y ago
  > 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.
  • williamsss 1y ago
    Good point. I also use my PKMS as a CMS for my blog. Might just split out the services and go this route.
  • sabellito 1y ago
    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 https://pagecrypt.maxlaumeister.com
  • rafram 1y ago
    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.
    • jauntywundrkind 1y ago
      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".
• horsellama 1y ago
  fwiw, on mac/ios you can put your obsidian vault inside icloud directory and have a “free” cross-device sync feature.
  • SOLAR_FIELDS 1y ago
    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
    • shigi42 1y ago
      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.
      • SOLAR_FIELDS 1y ago
        Any notes on how you achieve this? I use a-shell on my iOS devices but it is... sometimes flaky
  • zikduruqe 1y ago
    Hell, you don't even need obsidian. Just create a bash function notes() { if [ ! -z "$1" ]; then mkdir -m 00750 -p /Users/User/iCloud/Documents/notes Now=$(date '+%B %d %Y %H:%M') echo -en "\n$Now\t$@\n" >> /Users/User/iCloud/Documents/notes/notes.txt else echo "${Now}" cat /Users/User/iCloud/Documents/notes/notes.txt 2>/dev/null fi }
    • accrual 1y ago
      While we're sharing simple note taking functions, here's mine that I used for a few years. :) function nod { mg +-1 "/home/user/notes/$(date "+%Y-%m-%d").txt"; } * '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.
• hartator 1y ago
  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.
  • bayindirh 1y ago
    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.
    • vunderba 1y ago
      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: lotr-recipes lotr-recipes/manflesh.md lotr-recipes/media/manflesh_1.png lotr-recipes/media/manflesh_2.png Also makes it trivial to run a note through a static site generator and publish online.
  • damir 1y ago
    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!
    • bayindirh 1y ago
      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.
• bayindirh 1y ago
  > 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.
  • layer8 1y ago
    Not practical if you want to also sync with non-Apple devices.
    • bayindirh 1y ago
      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?
      • layer8 1y ago
        My understanding is that on iOS your only non-paid choice is iCloud, and iCloud doesn’t reliably sync to non-Apple systems. To clarify, the use case here is that you have an iPhone but also non-Apple systems, which is a fairly common scenario.
        • Saris 1y ago
          TBH that sounds like a better reason to get something other than Apple systems instead of changing all your apps to work around Apples bizarre limitations.
          • layer8 1y ago
            To clarify, by “on iOS your only non-paid choice is iCloud” I meant for the Obsidian app specifically. Other apps do provide the option to sync with non-Apple cloud storage, without payment. There are multitudes of pros and cons regarding choosing an iPhone. The restrictions of the Obsidian app is only a single one of those. Choosing an Android phone has drawbacks of its own.
• darkwater 1y ago
  Directius (the foundation on what this was built) is Source Available [1] and not Opensource. [1] https://github.com/directus/directus/blob/main/license https://github.com/directus/directus/blob/main/license
  • williamsss 1y ago
    Thanks I'll revise the article
• OlivOnTech 1y ago
  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...
  • KetoManx64 1y ago
    The guy just created some bullshit excuses in order to advertise his new product.
• ollien 1y ago
  I wrote my own CLI tool for notes a few months ago (https://github.com/ollien/quicknotes 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!
  • rolisz 1y ago
    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.
    • ollien 1y ago
      Always possible, just not something I really want to do :)
  • williamsss 1y ago
    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 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 https://github.com/Amber-Williams/yall/blob/main/demo.gif). Might be of interest : )
• gbraad 1y ago
  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.
• dmje 1y ago
  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?
• jszymborski 1y ago
  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.
  • ctkhn 1y ago
    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
  • ezst 1y ago
    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/ https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes/
• mutoyoru 1y ago
  > 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 https://syncthing.net
  • MSFT_Edging 1y ago
    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.
  • moelf 1y ago
    too bad Syncthing is no longer officially maintaining andoird app https://forum.syncthing.net/t/discontinuing-syncthing-android/23002 https://forum.syncthing.net/t/discontinuing-syncthing-androi...
    • atrus 1y ago
      But the syncthing fork (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.github.catfriend1.syncthingandroid&hl=en_US 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.
      • Nezteb 1y ago
        For anyone who would prefer to get the Syncthing-Fork build from F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.catfriend1.syncthingandroid/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.catfriend1.syncth...
• for_i_in_range 1y ago
  For anyone who wants an analog version of this: https://youtu.be/UV7vaqElPHk?si=_c-rxqV4RGhluTJS https://youtu.be/UV7vaqElPHk?si=_c-rxqV4RGhluTJS
• Trasmatta 1y ago
  > 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.
  • williamsss 1y ago
    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.md/sync https://web.archive.org/web/20240104200401/https://obsidian....
  • jackthetab 1y ago
    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.
• appleaday1 1y ago
  Emacs chads just keep winning.
  • iLemming 1y ago
    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.
• I_am_tiberius 1y ago
  Does anyone know of a tool that can e2e + collaboration (or in other words: notion but e2e)?
  • ezst 1y ago
    Maybe Anytype, or self hosted appflowy
  • Wilder7977 1y ago
    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.
  • wim 1y ago
    We're building https://thymer.com/ https://thymer.com/ to do this. Real-time collaboration, local-first + end-to-end-encrypted (and optionally self-hosted).
    • I_am_tiberius 1y ago
      Cool. May I ask how you implement the collaborative e2e? Do you encrypt the content multiple times - once for every user?
      • wim 1y ago
        The workspace data is encrypted with a (symmetric) workspace key. Each user gets hteir own encrypted copy of that key, using the user's public key. By wrapping the data-encryption key for each user the content is only encrypted once but each authorized user can decrypt it.
        • I_am_tiberius 1y ago
• knlb2022 1y ago
  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 https://github.com/kunalb/termdex
  • williamsss 1y ago
    Sounds like something I would use. A demo gif in the readme would help understand what it does faster
    • knlb2022 1y ago
      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 https://github.com/kunalb/termdex/tree/main/markdown_files is probably the best bit.
• rcarmo 1y ago
  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.
• AlienRobot 1y ago
  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.
  • conception 1y ago
    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.
• ericb 1y ago
  I'm a fan of TrilliumNext, which is open source, for this: https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes
  • williamsss 1y ago
    Thanks for sharing. Their encryption service is a nice source of inspiration on note encryption https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes/blob/56d4d7c20f775eed730fc10d88d35cb75390af1b/apps/server/src/services/encryption/data_encryption.ts#L4 https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes/blob/56d4d7c20f775eed73...
  • ezst 1y ago
    Same, this gets my recommendation. Trilium is one of the most under-rated tool I know of.
• zie 1y ago
  I ditched for [silverbullet](https://silverbullet.md https://silverbullet.md). MIT licensed, markdown editor with embedded lua scripting. It's a PWA app that works offline and syncs well.
  • williamsss 1y ago
    Holy shit this is awesome
  • 369548684892826 1y ago
    Thanks for mentioning this, it looks exactly what I want; a markdown web app that stores the files using the filesystem on the backend!
  • lylo 1y ago
    Very impressive!
  • aquariusDue 1y ago
    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).
    • zie 1y ago
      v2 is here already as far as I know, I mean I'm happily using it.
  • dugite-code 1y ago
    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.
• makizar 1y ago
  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"
  • diggan 1y ago
    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.
• AstroBen 1y ago
  > 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
  • MeetingsBrowser 1y ago
    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.
    • AstroBen 1y ago
      Ah, I've never had an issue there
    • trwhite 1y ago
      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.
• cypherpunks01 1y ago
  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.
  • williamsss 1y ago
    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 https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/protected-notes
• gitroom 1y ago
  Gotta respect anyone who just builds their own stuff instead of waiting around for the 'perfect' app to show up.
• geoffreymcgill 1y ago
  If you need an option to publish your notes online, check out Retype (https://retype.com https://retype.com). You can use Obsidian or GitBook or any Markdown files as your GUI editor and generate a static website using Retype.
• flkiwi 1y ago
  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.
  • ezst 1y ago
    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 :-)
    • flkiwi 1y ago
      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.
      • ezst 1y ago
        For the record, it's not forcing you in this or another way, you can just dump all your notes on a flat level and later browse a network of backlinks in Trilium like other similar systems. Where I find Trilium to shine though, is when, after linking notes to one other for a little while, you realise "Well, I have a bunch of them that relate to `People`, others to `Products`, and, oh, a bunch of `Customers` as well, wouldn't it be nice if those were sharing the same properties?" (like People:{"Lives in", "Date of birth", "Partner of"…}, Customer:{"Address", "Contracts":-Multiple-, …}). When you reach that point you can use Inheritance (from the hierarchy) and/or Composition (from Template notes) so that all your "People"-like or "Customer"-like notes share the same properties, and you can then easily manage them as data, giving the same organisational and queryable power of a RDBMS without having to commit on a data model from the get go (it evolves with you as you refine the inherited or templated attributes). I think any sufficiently large collection of notes eventually reaches a point where it self-organises around a set of "Reference notes" more often linked to, and this is where Trilium saves you a ton of time instead of giving you more house-keeping work (good luck maintaining those "Reference notes" in sync with each-other in a system like Logseq or Obsidian, been there, done that).
• charlie0 1y ago
  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) .
  • kepano 1y ago
    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.
• ezst 1y ago
  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/ 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.
  • williamsss 1y ago
    Another person in the thread recommended it. I'll have to check it out this week thanks!
  • Jarwain 1y ago
    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?
    • ezst 1y ago
      > 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 https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/book-note.html ²: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/note-hoisting.html https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/note-hoisting.html
• mettamage 1y ago
  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.
  • shreezus 1y ago
    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.
    • emadda 1y ago
      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 https://github.com/emadda/hot-notes
  • vlark 1y ago
    You might be interested in this, then: https://www.myforevernotes.com/ https://www.myforevernotes.com/
• hindsightRegret 1y ago
  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.
  • williamsss 1y ago
    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.
  • RadiozRadioz 1y ago
    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".
• txtfan 1y ago
  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.
  • williamsss 1y ago
    Username checks out & you'll probably outlast us all
• buibuibui 1y ago
  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.
  • buibuibui 1y ago
    Just solved my problem. The slowness came from using iCloud Drive. It removes my notes / unsyncs my notes when I don't use it regularly. I have to set the Obsidian folder to "Keep Downloaded" and then everything is fine!
• 404mm 1y ago
  I wish there was something as lightweight and as well integrated as Apple Notes. Just support MD, sync well and have a search function.
  • tuwtuwtuwtuw 1y ago
    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.
    • 404mm 1y ago
      That’s also one of the options I considered. Right now I have a git-synced obsidian but it feels awkward.
• tasuki 1y ago
  > 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 https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki
  • williamsss 1y ago
    As a fan of Vim, I'm a fan of this solution. Are you able to access them on your phone?
    • tasuki 1y ago
      > 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 https://github.com/tasuki/vitwiki/blob/master/build.sh
• skeledrew 1y ago
  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.
  • holmb 1y ago
    The discontinuation of Syncthing for Android bothers me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41895718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41895718
    • skeledrew 1y ago
      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.
    • internet_points 1y ago
      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.)
• komali2 1y ago
  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/ 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/ https://awesome-selfhosted.net/ , head down to the note taking section: https://awesome-selfhosted.net/tags/note-taking--editors.html 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-tools.html 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.
• righthand 1y ago
  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?
• xcircle 1y ago
  I use Joplin (https://joplinapp.org https://joplinapp.org) on mobile and pc(windows and Linux). Joplin has a free encrypted sync via OneDrive.
• nkrisc 1y ago
  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.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• bigcat12345678 1y ago
  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
• arnath 1y ago
  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).
  • MeetingsBrowser 1y ago
    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.
• eliben 1y ago
  Plain text in git. Eternal, searchable, compact.
  • elteto 1y ago
    This is orthogonal. You can do this _and_ still use Obsidian since a vault is just a directory and notes are markdown.
• bryanhogan 1y ago
  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 https://github.com/chroxify/haptic [1]: https://logseq.com/ https://logseq.com/ [2]: https://silverbullet.md/ https://silverbullet.md/ [3]: https://www.marktext.cc/ https://www.marktext.cc/ [4]: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/how-to-sync-obsidian https://bryanhogan.com/blog/how-to-sync-obsidian
• vlark 1y ago
  [dead]
• Svoka 1y ago
  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?
• zeta0134 1y ago
  > 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.
• ThinkBeat 1y ago
  It seems to really be an ad for Directus (https://directus.io/ 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 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.
  • ryanwhitney 1y ago
    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.
    • smarx007 1y ago
      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.
    • nyanpasu64 1y ago
      The BSL and its revenue cliffs isn't open-source but shared-source.
  • KetoManx64 1y ago
• billiardo 1y ago
  I like using neovim / nvim + plugins for this kind of thing
• montagg 1y ago
  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.
  • Dylan16807 1y ago
    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.
    • KetoManx64 1y ago
      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.
      • coolcase 1y ago
        So obsidian let's me get 40 hours of work had I used notepad for notes done in 13-20 hours?
• rtpg 1y ago
  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.
  • wilted-iris 1y ago
    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.
  • williamsss 1y ago
    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/ https://simonwillison.net/2023/Oct/23/embeddings/ see video at 6.30 min to about 10min point.
• secwang 1y ago
  just use txt / html / numbers/excel / files. All will lasted next 20 years.
  • williamsss 1y ago
    A solid lasting PKMS solution
• coolcase 1y ago
  I tried obsidian but VSCode and Dropbox or Github is hard to beat. Stays out of your way.
  • williamsss 1y ago
    This too is a solid choice particularly with Github actions for free cron jobs for instance
• vijucat 1y ago
  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 https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/bikeshedding
  • williamsss 1y ago
    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!
• twodave 1y ago
  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.
  • taurath 1y ago
    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.
• barbazoo 1y ago
  > 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.
  • lexoj 1y ago
    I just use iCloud for the sync and it works great with Obsidian
• krick 1y ago
  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.
  • KetoManx64 1y ago
    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
• nine_k 1y ago
  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.
  • tasn 1y ago
    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.
  • KetoManx64 1y ago
    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.
    • nine_k 1y ago
      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.
• deleted 1y ago
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• Brajeshwar 1y ago
  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/ https://brajeshwar.com/2025/obsidian/
• wiseowise 1y ago
  The whole article can be summarized by “I don’t know that iCloud sync is free”.
• surrTurr 1y ago
  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 https://github.com/AlexW00/brainforge-desktop
  • cloverich 1y ago
    As one who has spent years off and on building one, kudos for getting yourself out. I agree with your assessment. I think there's still room for more markdown based note apps and ideas, but it needs to be either a (long term) passion project or have a viable funding strategy. There's an endless slew of not only edge cases and base behaviors, but enhancements and design decisions, on top of maintenance. Obsidian w/ some customization is going to hit a sweet spot for most hackers. Also, the biggest thing I've appreciated is just how hard it is to tackle a side project while juggling life. Things that would take 2 weeks (80 hours) at work easily ballon into 3 months; things that would take a month end up taking well over a year. Suddenly an idea that is only a few weeks of full time work, is half-way done years later.
  • tsurba 1y ago
    Or use Joplin which is open source and also creates markdown files, and setting up sync to a cloud provider that you probably already have is free.
    • kepano 1y ago
      Joplin uses its own database, it can't edit Markdown files.
      • bwat49 1y ago
        While joplin's notes are stored in a database, they are still markdown files
• thenoblesunfish 1y ago
  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.
  • dax_ 1y ago
    Can't you do the same with Obsidian too? It's also just Markdown, and I believe there's even a plugin to perform Git commands within Obsidian. The main issue you can run into, is when you overly rely on markup syntax that only works in Obsidian.
• deleted 1y ago
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• moontear 1y ago
  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-for-obsidian-cba121166d5e https://leduccc.medium.com/setup-self-hosted-synchronization...
• Helmut10001 1y ago
  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.
  • williamsss 1y ago
    You should write about your solution it sounds interesting
  • deafpolygon 1y ago
    This is exactly the route I've taken. Just rely on known tools and filesystem.
• esskay 1y ago
  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.
• melodyogonna 1y ago
  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 https://github.com/epwalsh/obsidian.nvim
• tnolet 1y ago
  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.
• yathaid 1y ago
  > 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?
  • billfruit 1y ago
    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.
    • williamsss 1y ago
      > Also Obsidian asks for permissions to read files in all of the device on Android. Oh interesting where did you find that?
    • kepano 1y ago
      Not anymore. As of Obsidian 1.8.10 you can use app storage which doesn't require additional permissions. It's explained here: https://help.obsidian.md/android https://help.obsidian.md/android
      • billfruit 1y ago
        Still they are recommending people to use device storage permissions with "All files" permissions rather than the limited App Storage permissions. They prefer that the users use the less secure option.
        • kepano 1y ago
• Daedren 1y ago
  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.
• NetRunnerSu 1y ago
  Why not Anytype? long love IPFS p2p sync.
• sailorganymede 1y ago
  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.
• enbugger 1y ago
  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
• 8fingerlouie 1y ago
  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.
  • Avamander 1y ago
    You can sync an Obsidian vault with whatever you wish, the online option is mostly convenience.
    • 8fingerlouie 1y ago
      On desktop yes, but on iOS at least, i can choose between iCloud, local or Obsidian Sync. Simply "plugging in" to an iOS File Provider interface would be a better experience from a user perspective, but i realize it would sell fewer Sync licenses, which appears to be the business model after they removed the requirement for purchasing a license for commercial use. iCloud and local are less problematic, but Obsidian Sync introduces a governance / compliance hell i'm not prepared to face, and OneDrive / SharePoint is the preferred, pre approved, company file syncing platform. Getting Obsidian Sync approved requires GDPR audits and other niceties from ISAE 3000.
• xenodium 1y ago
  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-eyes-only 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-those-who-dont-do-org https://ellanew.com/ptpl/157-2025-05-19-journelly-is-org-for...
  • williamsss 1y ago
    Where are the text/pictures stored?
    • xenodium 1y ago
      On your phone (offline), unless you choose to enable iCloud Drive.
  • mootpoints 1y ago
    I love to see this! I live and breathe emacs+org mode, and any way to have it look a little more modern (especially in its image handling), and be usable on the go is a huge win for the format.
• randomcarbloke 1y ago
  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.
• ErrorNoBrain 1y ago
  Obsidian is nice... but.. i just think that writing markdown (unless its just #headline and ### subheadline) it takes too long.
• FinnLobsien 1y ago
  I'll always applaud people building things and experimenting and building momentum, so I think this is a worthwhile exercise, but practically questionable. I think this is extreme micro-optimization of something that ultimately matters little (or not at all). The hard part of PKM isn't finding the perfect tool, it's to take the time to: -read/experience something and actually take good notes on it -actually retrieve something from your notes and add to it with new knowledge Those two activities are how you get almost 100% of the benefit of note-taking, whether you're using a self-hosted sync or a folder of txt files. Of course, a few things make these easier (linking, RAG, daily docs), but most of the common tools now offer this
• dankobgd 1y ago
  I installed logseq but i guess i am either too stupid to learn it or just lazy because there are so many things
• RobertBobert 1y ago
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• RobertBobert 1y ago
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• smallpipe 1y ago
  Vibe coding a plugin to increase security, compared to trusted, open-source code? The mind boggles.
  • williamsss 1y ago
    Open-source code has been known to have back doors and versions with security vulnerabilities. I would never use AI code gen I don't understand fully and typically made amendments to get what I need the tooling to do. So yes I prefer personal simple scripts I maintain and understand 100% : )
• Daril 1y ago
  I think an PKMS is strictly related to how each of us thinks. It's similar to project management/organizer tools. I also created my own (https://brainminder.it/ https://brainminder.it/) based on how I think: I prefer to organize items by type with different fields that I can add and search. Instead of simply collecting ideas and thoughts, I'm trying to build a system that can help me evaluate leveraging what I've entered.
  • williamsss 1y ago
    Reminds me of the Zettelkasten note-taking method. I'm not confident I understand how it works from the site though. A video of how it works would be helpful.
    • Daril 1y ago
      Hi, I know I didn't have time to describe it properly. Currently, I am focusing more on adding features and making it more usable. In simple terms: 1. It is possible to create different types of items: books, ideas, projects, tasks, etc. 2. Every item can have its own custom fields, such as author for a book or priority for a task. 3. All items are stored in a single SQLite table, so you can search through all items and edit them if necessary. 4. Fourth, it is possible to establish relations between items: parent, child, or simple link. 5. There is a space called "Quickbox" where you can quickly register a link or a note to read later and transform it into an item. 6. Items can be part of one or more notebooks, such as Personal, Work, or Family. I have many ideas to make it more useful, but some basic features are still missing, such as: 1. Attach images or documents to each item and access all the attachments as a separate library. 2. Multi-user support 3. Multilingual support 4. Kanban support for tasks. The most interesting part for me is adding systems/structures that can help me analyze problems and find proper solutions. This idea is still vague, but I'd like to implement workflows that can help me become a better thinker, improve my creativity, and enhance my ability to make rational decisions. I'd like to integrate also logic programming in the process, probabily using Prolog. I don't want to lose the manual aspect of thinking, so I'm considering creating prefilled documents to help study problems and find solutions. I have used Golang and SQlite on backend and PWA and HTMX on frontend.
• olav 1y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20250518171639/https://amberwilliams.io/blogs/building-my-own-pkms https://web.archive.org/web/20250518171639/https://amberwill... as long as the original throws a 500 "Internal Server Error".
• microwavesafe 1y ago
  I tried a number of note taking apps. I use them for longer term storage of ideas, rather than daily todos. For example holiday itinerary or project ideas. Because of this I don't use them very often and I found I could never remember the basics of Obsidian. One app that is very simple to use had everything I needed and sync'd using Github is https://about.noteshub.app/ https://about.noteshub.app/. I have been using it for around 6 months and found it perfect for my needs.
• lilerjee 1y ago
  Note-taking app is very complicated, even bookmark manager is also complicated. They need much time to develop and maintain. If one person develop a himself/herself such app, the possibility is giving up at last. I think there are two ways: 1. Select an open source app which meet your requirements 2. Select and pay for a commercial app do not waste your time and resources for it, just use a or some proper tools, and use the time for the most important things.
• tsurba 1y ago
  OSS alternatives with free syncing to your chosen cloud already exist, and have plugin systems. Why not just contribute to those? Because this is either advertising or procrastination.
• erispoe 1y ago
  > 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. My guess is that commercial note-taking apps have larger, more vocal communities that drown out the murmurings of other DIY solutions. Because we value our time.
• dutchblacksmith 1y ago
  I was hesitating to start writing my own PKMS. Today I started: Lisp and postgresql, thanks for writing this post!
  • williamsss 1y ago
    Nice one
• lilerjee 1y ago
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• low_tech_punk 1y ago
  I've been doing this for a while. My biggest hurdle was implementing sync between local and backend. I ended up using GitHub as my backend, Chrome extension as frontend, and implemented a simplified version of the Git client in SQLite with lots of triggers. Happy to share it with people. The app is here: https://github.com/osmoscraft/tundra https://github.com/osmoscraft/tundra and the sync logic is here: https://github.com/osmoscraft/tundra/blob/master/apps/browser-extension/src/modules/database/migrations/20230816.sql https://github.com/osmoscraft/tundra/blob/master/apps/browse...
  • williamsss 1y ago
    I really admire the way you've solved this. This is exactly the type of thing I want to inspire others to tinker with! Some of the readers feel there's a single optimal solution. Though I'm confident that there's room for a plethora of PKMS solutions Oh and funny enough I'm in the process of working on an open-source chrome extension for bookmarking things I've read it looks similar to your https://github.com/osmoscraft/osmosmemo https://github.com/osmoscraft/osmosmemo project. Picture of the tool in use is here https://notes.holeytriangle.com/admin/files/a969c5f6-fa9c-4418-ab57-a4154b082a42 https://notes.holeytriangle.com/admin/files/a969c5f6-fa9c-44...
    • low_tech_punk 1y ago
      Thanks for drawing the connections. I think hacking on PKMS is so satisfying because it combines multiple hard problems: text editor, search engine, graph database, sync engine, CMS; and you can go down a rabbit hole in any of them! Btw, I can't access https://notes.holeytriangle.com/admin/files/a969c5f6-fa9c-4418-ab57-a4154b082a42 https://notes.holeytriangle.com/admin/files/a969c5f6-fa9c-44... is that your private admin link?
• thederf 1y ago
  About a year ago I did the same migration: Obsidian to self-hosted Directus. My main reasons were: - Straightforward queries. I have a lot of structured data in my notes and lesson plans, and being able to work with SQL was ideal. - A web app was much more reliable than Obsidian's third-party sync platforms. - I could extend Directus to do all sorts of other things. I eventually built my wedding planner and website backend on the same Directus instance that holds my notes. (I also built a set of scripts on my Hackberry Pi that let me write text files on the go that saved to Directus) The biggest disadvantage is that the writing and saving experience isn't as fluid.
  • williamsss 1y ago
    You're the first person I've heard of that has gone this route. Cool to know I'm not alone. And yeah I have the same gripes around the writing experience. I prefer Vim so I've been looking into ways I can use my notes as local markdown which sync on save. Of course, keeping the Directus editor for my mobile device edits.
    • thederf 1y ago
      Here's a video I did for the Directus Changelog that shows how my system works: https://www.youtube.com/live/SZg6hYMA3yo?si=Qi-E5NGeoQicnpR_&t=1342 https://www.youtube.com/live/SZg6hYMA3yo?si=Qi-E5NGeoQicnpR_... It's highly eclectic, but might give you some ideas?
• wannabebarista 1y ago
  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-obsidian/43908 https://forum.obsidian.md/t/t2md-a-tool-to-migrate-trello-to...
• deafpolygon 1y ago
  Funny - I went the opposite direction. Built my PKM in neovim (still a works in progress) + lua + markdown [main plugins I use is treesitter, telescope]; the upside? It's the same tool I use for editing all of my code, config, documentation. I have already re-implemented features such as Dataview and Tasks (not a 1:1 re-implementation, but covering the gaps) using common shell tools (i.e. lua, rg, sed, etc). I have written a few small functions, plugins for neovim that I use myself. I've kept it as barebones and minimal as possible (don't want to overbuild) so I can maintain it myself and not incur maintenance cost for this. I sync using git between my two laptops - I have given up on mobile sync as I realize: I rarely need to edit my notes on the go, it's mostly for view only, and most of my deep work is on the laptop anyways. Yes, I have a "3 copies - 2 locations - 1 remote" backup system in place (I upload an encrypted volume once a week to iCloud [I'm already paying for it] for my remote). I wanted to eliminate a dependency on proprietary tools and I've found a way to manage my notes in the same way I manage everything else - using my filesystem, and common open source tools.
  • williamsss 1y ago
    Sounds cool. Is it open-source?
• fmxsh 1y ago
  > Will our preferred notes system last the sands of time? Yes... My note system will last. > Could you see yourself using your note-taking app you use today in 30 years? No, I do not trust apps to last. Therefore I use a simple file system hierarchy to categorize everything. Then I use the best avaliable browser and editor. My setup is Markor on mobile for browse and edit. Syncthing-fork to get it all into my big system where I run customized Neovim and can make scripts to interact with the data as well as syncing any generated output to the phone. Having been a Obsedian fan, with similar plug-in fascination, I also experienced the negatives the article mention, and I finally settled with a simple file hierarchy and resorting to as few and basic tools as possible. Obsidian is great, but I didn't need all the features. I need a way to categorize, to quickly find, to edit, and to easily sync and my current setup satisfies that and I'm productive with it. (of course it does not reflect Obsidian's second brain feature, but personally I found that concept to require more work than reward and it wasn't intuitive for me to get accustomed to, but I guess the second brain thing is more like a lifestyle).
• kubav027 1y ago
  I have switched to joplin from evernote and I am using webdav on synology NAS to synchronize notes. It is open source and also self hosted and works on all platforms without problem. I also share notes with my wife. We use it for planning and shopping lists and it works really great. It has some basic conflict resolution which is usable for two people. Joplin uses sqlite as storage but you can export collection to md files and there is backup plugin which does that periodically. Also you can setup external editor. I am editing notes in neovim and joplin is just for viewing.
• agambrahma 1y ago
  I'm assuming a lot of interest in Obsidian stems from (1) having underlying plaintext docs, and (2) preferring the doc-as-note unit If you ever relax these constraints, Tana is a great mix. I'd call it a mix of Roam + Notion. Now that it's in GA, easy to recommend too.
• rubymamis 1y ago
  I also built my own note-taking app[1] out of frustration of existing apps, so I can relate to the author. I wanted: - A flexible block editor like Notion. - That runs natively and FAST (unlike Notion). - Where the underlying data is always plain text (Markdown formatted). I wrote about its development on my blog[2]. [1] http://get-notes.com http://get-notes.com [2] https://rubymamistvalove.com/block-editor https://rubymamistvalove.com/block-editor
• lofaszvanitt 1y ago
  Obsidian looks a tad bit overcomplicated. I've used TheBrain.com since ages. It's simple to use, and straightforward.
• rolandpeelen 1y ago
  I started doing some stuff myself as well. Still very much in-progress, but I felt that obsidian was a way bigger hammer than I needed, yet still I found edges that didn't cover my workflow Ended up building: https://crom.ai/ https://crom.ai/ Here is a little write-up / more details on how it's built: https://notes.rolandpeelen.com/notes-on-building-crom https://notes.rolandpeelen.com/notes-on-building-crom
• limandoc 1y ago
  I have my own reasons why I left Obsidian and now building LimanDoc[1]. The enormous learning curve and a constant OCD itch (that I like to scratch) made me realise I am not actually improving my knowledge system. A constant hoarding is also putting an emotional pressure. I like the offline part, but for me Canvas was the best tool. I am also building a P2P synchronization feature for LimanDoc, and having offline LLM support is coming soon too [1] https://limandoc.com/ https://limandoc.com/