Ditching Obsidian and building my own
569 comments
·May 18, 2025vunderba
caconym_
> In point of fact this is actually an argument IN FAVOR of Obsidian. While the editor might be proprietary - the notes themselves are just standard markdown. If somehow all the copies of Obsidian magically disappeared off the earth tomorrow, I could easily switch over to Emacs org mode, VS Code, or literally anything else.
100% this. The reason I started using Obsidian in the first place is that it's built on the exact directory structure and file formats that I was already using to manage my writing and notes, and if Obsidian goes away for some reason, that won't change.
braden-lk
Big obsidian fan, but I will say: notes being “just markdown” is not entirely true depending on how you use obsidian. If you are a plug-in heavy user, and those plugins introduce new syntax and lots of JavaScript functionality, you are accumulating a bespoke custom syntax that only works on your copy of obsidian with your set of plugins. Obsidian and those plugins are still free and are a huge benefit, but just something to keep in mind regarding data hygiene and longevity.
edanm
True, but the format is still text. In a "catastrophe", you can always just a) ignore these, or b) write custom code to process them (e.g. port the plugin to VSCode or whatever).
Still far better than a proprietary format.
eviks
A proprietary format with an export function allows you the same inconvenience of having to write code for processing.
krick
Very much this. I cannot even fully agree with "plug-in heavy" remark: I mean, how heavy must it be, to be considered "plug-in heavy"? I consciously tried to limit plugin usage. But it really gets pretty wild soon. I was relatively lean for maybe the first 6 months, but when some patterns of how I use it become clear enough, it becomes pretty evident how inefficient many super-common situations are and how I can fix them just by installing a plugin.
Fast-forward a year, and all your vault structure implicitly relies on the quirks of Obsidian search behavior, the markdown you write is extremely obsidian-flavored markdown, and you don't even remember how to write LaTeX without LaTeX-Suite shortcuts.
datadrivenangel
I've been using Obsidian for years now and besides some experiments use zero plugins. What inefficient patterns are you running into?
joseda-hg
If you're willing to reimplement them in your own obsidian-like editor anyway, I don't quite see the difference
I wouldn't so I keep to markdown and minimize plugins where aplicable, if I need to run for the hills, I don't expect to lose much
theshrike79
I've thought about this and I think Templater and Dataview are the two plugins I'd miss if Obsidian was sold to a VC tomorrow and enshittified.
And I'm pretty sure both will be forked and modified to run independently of Obsidian within a week of the theoretical enshittification.
danieldk
Again, a little bit odd considering that the author is technically savvy enough to write an entire PKMS but didn't seem to consider that you can just check your markdown notes into a git repository and sync with the native android/iOS Obsidian app on a mobile device.
Also, Obsidian supports free iCloud sync if you are a Mac and iOS user. I know that's only a subset of users, but a nice option to get Obsidian to sync on the phone if you are in the Apple ecosystem.
Also, they have a cheaper Sync plan now that is $4 per month.
I can't really be bothered that Sync would cost up to 1000 in ten years. If you use Obsidian daily, it had an immensive value and it's cheaper than most services out there.
ErrorNoBrain
Syncthing... It can do it too
handles syncing my pictures too
joseda-hg
Wasn't the syncthing android app deprecated relatively recently?
Ardren
I can second Syncthing. I just use a simple markdown editor with Syncthing on Windows, Android, and a Linux.
_345
Yeah the article was painful to read. $1000 in a decade? Its a decade, who cares. If you make 100k a year its 0.01% of your salary towards something you found worthwhile enough to use for ten years straight
the cheap sync plan is a scam though, it doesn't do enough to be even worth bothering with iirc
throw10920
To add to your point, the phrasing of "$1K in a decade" seems convoluted to intentionally try to over-emphasize the cost. A much more fair/normal way of phrasing that cost would be $100/year, or $9/month, which is very little for someone who has the time and energy to write their own and gets enough value out of it that they find that worthwhile.
The tradeoff doesn't make sense otherwise. If you're poor, then you wouldn't have the luxury of the available time to write your own PKM - the opportunity cost is huge, it's massively preferential to use an existing free solution that is "good enough" (Obsidian without sync or using your own sync solution, Dendron, Roam, Org). If you're not poor, then $9/month is a rounding error, especially compared to the value provided.
pflenker
To add to your last point - 10 years is a very long time frame. Any recurring cost grows to eye-watering levels if the time interval is huge enough. In 10 years, a lot can happen in the space and you are not locked in with obsidian - if the next better thing comes along in 3 years, you can easily migrate.
mobilemidget
Even setting up your own couchdb + livesync should be a small task if one can consider to 'write a whole app' to replace obsidian
edit note, if you want to build something :) please expand livesync or a new plugin to allow easily sharing of self hosted obsidian notes :) All the ones I tried use some 3rd party hosting which I don't like even if its encrypted.
memming
iCloud sync is too unreliable and opaque for me.
danieldk
It has been reliable for me with Obsidian. I still prefer Obsidian Sync because it has good integrated version history and shared vaults.
Also agree with the sibling poster - I like subscribing to support them on a regular basis (and of course Catalyst).
themadturk
Obsidian Sync is great (it helps that I got in on early-bird pricing...but it really is reliable).
In addition, the Git plugin, coupled with Working Copy on my iPhone and iPad, also work extremely well, with a bit of added overhead. Though iCloud works reasonably well for just about everything else, I haven't used it for syncing Obsidian data.
graeme
Yes I found it wasn't reliable. Perhaps it has improved, but Obsidian Sync has been excellent. I'm happy to support the developer as I'd like Obsidian to stick around.
scubbo
> Again, a little bit odd considering that the author is technically savvy enough to write an entire PKMS but didn't seem to consider that you can just check your markdown notes into a git repository and sync with the native android/iOS Obsidian app on a mobile device.
Even simpler, I have mine in a Dropbox folder. Felt very strange for _this_ to be the straw that broke the camel's back for the author.
Nonetheless, very glad for them that they enjoyed and learned from the experience of building a replacement!
nis251413
Yeah, syncing text files across devices is a problem that has little to do with obsidian or whichever editor/renderer one uses. As long as one keeps things relatively simple with plugin-related syntax flavours, editors are interchangeable.
WickyNilliams
Yeah, I have my obsidian vault in Dropbox and synced to my phone and back with Dropsync on android. The obsidian mobile app Just Works™ with this. It was a one time setup. Of course there's no fancy conflict resolution going on, but it's unlikely I'm editing in two places at once so it's not needed.
pingiun
Even simpler, just pay for the feature
946789987649
Yeah agreed - does anyone really care for $4/month?
mock-possum
Fun fact: Dropbox doesn’t support emoji in file names ( or at least, didn’t last time I checked. )
Deal breaker for me - adding iconography to file and folder names can be a natural, zesty enterprise.
mh-
And here I am still coming to terms with using spaces in filenames.
peblos
Still doesn't. I recently moved my vault to Dropbox and had to rename a bunch of filenames
wiseowise
> Again, a little bit odd considering that the *author is technically savvy enough to write an entire PKMS*
I’m pretty sure author just wanted to build PKMS. These types of “oooh, will it be there in 20 years” are standard OCD/procrastination.
exe34
> 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.
quxbar
I think of the sync paid tier as analogous to a patreon membership, combined with paying someone a tiny amount to manage my data for me. The fact that it's all markdown makes me confident I could take my files and go play elsewhere at any time, but I enjoy knowing my money helps keep Obsidian going.
PurpleRamen
> In point of fact this is actually an argument IN FAVOR of Obsidian. While the editor might be proprietary - the notes themselves are just standard markdown. If somehow all the copies of Obsidian magically disappeared off the earth tomorrow, I could easily switch over to Emacs org mode, VS Code, or literally anything else.
Not really.. This problem runs far deeper than most are willing to see. First, Obsidian is using a personalized flavour of markdown, and seconds, for many heavy features it's leaning strongly on plugins which are prone to break or even die. Obsidian has a vibrant plugin-community, which also seems to die really fast. This becomes even more critical by plugins dying from changes in Obsidian itself. So while Obsidian is in theory a nice open app, it's longevity-aspect is really awful. I already had many features and plugins dying in the last years, and who know how much more will break in the next 20 years. Simply switching to another text-editor will not do, because they won't offer the missing features. So at best, you are just not losing your data, but you still won't have the tooling to use them.
Someone creating their own system, where they have full control over everything, even if they will have to sacrifice some benefit in the short run, just makes sense in a bigger picture.
themadturk
Plugins aren't required to use Obsidian. I have just a few, none of which make consequential modifications to my files. I've never had a need to use anything like Dataview, for instance.
To me, the "dialects" of Markdown have never made any difference in using it, even between applications. I think the only non-standard (for whatever "standard" means in Markdown) markup I use in Obsidian is "%%" to indicate comments. That's certainly something easy enough to search for should it be necessary in a text editor.
SamPatt
But you do have full control, if you want it. Nothing stops you from altering plugins or making your own.
The plugins sit in a local directory. Very easy to modify.
PurpleRamen
> Nothing stops you from altering plugins or making your own.
You still have no control over obsidian itself. Any change can and will break plugins. So you either settle with one version for the next decade, or you have to maintain them. This is just the normal dependency-hell that every project has, where you have to compromise with external dependency and their whims. Just that neither plugins nor obsidian (to some degree) are the level of professional software-projects in that regard.
And let's not talk about changing Obsidian on fundamental levels. You have even less control on how it works on everything which is not accessible by plugins.
matkv
Genuinely curious, which plugins do you mean for example when you say that many heavy features are leaning on them?
I could see the dataview plugin as an example (even though I don't use that one personally) but most other plugins seem like they just add more convenient ways to do something that would be still pretty simple to do manually. (Templates for example).
PurpleRamen
> Genuinely curious, which plugins do you mean for example when you say that many heavy features are leaning on them?
Depends on what you are doing. But the whole task & project-management-corner is constantly moving. Everything which modified the editor and preview was also regular breaking in the last years. For example, there were some plugins adding banners at the top of documents, or background-images or some icons. Or plugins modifying the yaml-area. They were all breaking multiple times when Obsidian was switching to the new live-preview-editor, then on changing frontmatter to properties, and on some other occasion IIRC. Usually after some months a new plugin appears, or someone forks the old one and fixes it. But as a user, it's pretty annoying to constantly have something breaking outside your control and getting stripped of features you want/need for various reasons.
Obsidian is useful, but far from being stable long-term yet. It's still very young.
> I could see the dataview plugin as an example
Yes, dataview was also very unstable the first 2 years or so, switching code and concepts, breaking old code along the line. It seems to be stable now, as the focus is on datacore.
> but most other plugins seem like they just add more convenient ways to do something that would be still pretty simple to do manually. (Templates for example).
Does it matter what a plugin is doing? If it breaks, it's a loss, whether it's crucial or just annoying.
someguydave
Don’t use plug ins
cdblades
then you lose a large amount of functionality and value. That's the point they were making.
lolinder
> 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.
miki123211
Even better, set up Tailscale.
It's far easier to set up, is much more reliable (e.g. when devices are behind firewalls), and uses direct (encrypted) connections when possible.
You can get it to do what you want with just a few clicks. Things like exposing a IoT VLAN on your Tailnet or setting up an exit node to tunnel all internet traffic through your home are super easy. You can even share specific devices with friends, which is super useful. If you have anything particularly sensitive (e.g. a notes app that you wouldn't want your children / partner to have access to), you can limit access to specific users / devices on the TS side, without bothering with implementing auth.
I think there's even a way to look up the user and device based on their IP, which is one way to add painless authentication to your apps. There are reverse proxies that do it and inject the info as HTTP headers.
If you aren't comfortable with trusting them with control over your network, you can always host your own Headscale server.
nine_k
What makes Tailscale more secure, or more reliable, than just a direct Wireguard tunnel?
Tailscale's complexity and features make sense when you have 200 nodes, or maybe 20 nodes at least. When you have 3-5 nodes, I think it's overkill, and a bunch of extra dependencies which may fail, and lock you out of your private nodes when you need it most.
supermatt
The benefit of Tailscale is that it gives you “lots” of wireguard tunnels that work through NAT with near zero configuration and a central admin interface.
I use a personal plan and have multiple nodes. Desktop, laptop, tablet, phones, docker containers just for me and a couple of raspberry Pis on my families home networks.
Only once have I been “locked out” of a node and that was due to an expired key.
Sure, for just connecting one node to another with a known IP and accessible port it’s overkill, but for anything more complex it an awful lot of awesome for very little effort.
pcpuser
NAT busting, and no key management. What extra dependencies does Tailscale have?
dankebitte
> If you aren't comfortable with trusting them with control over your network
Wrt the possibility of Tailscale being compromised, there's the in-beta tailnet lock feature:
> Tailnet lock lets you verify that no node is added to your tailnet without being signed by trusted nodes in your tailnet. When tailnet lock is enabled, even if Tailscale infrastructure is malicious or hacked, attackers can't send or receive traffic in your tailnet. [1]
cypherpunks01
Thanks for the tip!
I've had the Device approval setting on, and wished there were more robust lock features, but not enough to want to run my own coordinator. So Tailnet lock seems like a good security upgrade.
ra
The pricing page suggests this is only for the "enterprise" plan.
rtrgrd
Or, for those who are paranoid about relying on a company, setting up headscake is relatively quick and painless too - currently using it to sync between devices across multiple cities.
krick
Should I be paranoid? I never tried Tailscale, and the idea of trusting 3rd party with managing access to my network does give me chills. But IDK, honestly, maybe it's silly? Is it in all honesty less likely that I'll fuck things up setting my own Headscale server, than that Tailscale™ will (consciously or otherwise) fuck me up?
ycombinatrix
Tailscale is a VPN, how is it "better" than using a VPN?
newdee
Tailscale is more than just a VPN. It has a number of features and capabilities which make it more like a private overlay network that just seems to work wherever and whenever. Some of those features; WireGuard (the VPN bit), NAT punching, automatic key distribution, ACLs, split or full tunnel routing to internet resources, SSO. Just to name a few.
theshrike79
Unraid added native Tailscale support in 7.0, now you can just add an "app" (a docker container) and tick a checkbox and it'll appear in your tailnet directly.
throaway920181
For the most part I like Tailscale, but there's weirdness on Android with their app + Private DNS.
midasz
This is also my big frustration. I've set it to an Adguard instance that's also on tailscale and the app keeps getting into a faulty state. I've been looking into hosting the Adguard instance on the open web and securing it another way but bit short on time lately.
airtonix
or zerotier
caconym_
+1. I have Wireguard set up on all my mobile devices and configured to automatically start when connecting to any wifi that isn't mine, so I can take my devices anywhere and I'm still on my home LAN. It works seamlessly and flawlessly.
I self-host a lot of services, and without Wireguard (or equivalent), remote access just wouldn't be realistic.
Arch-TK
How did you automate it to start on networks which are not yours?
This is like the only piece of the puzzle for me.
thequux
Set the AllowedIPs wireguard setting (and/or the route, if you can set that separately) to one larger than your home network (i.e., if your home network is 192.168.1.0/24, use 192.168.0.0/23). Then, block wireguard packets from the internal network on your router. Then the tunnel will always be running; it just won't be used when you're at home because there's a more specific route
Arch-TK
To answer my own question, looks like there's WG Tunnel[0] on android which does what I need.
[0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zaneschepk...
runjake
For the Tailscale app on Apple platforms it’s called VPN On Demand. Here's how you can configure it.
caconym_
All my regular mobile devices are Apple, so whoever said that has it right. I also have a Linux laptop but NetworkManager support for Wireguard was broken last I checked, and at the time I didn't care enough to set it up by hand.
mcpeepants
This is a built-in feature of the Wireguard app on iOS, not sure about other platforms.
burnt-resistor
I have wg into home and wg into an aws instance. All my mobile and laptops can reach them.
brightball
Tailscale is actually great for this if you configure an exit node on a device in your home.
walthamstow
It doesn't need to be an exit node unless you want to direct all traffic through that node, like a traditional VPN.
The beauty of Tailscale is that it will only direct traffic to a node that is meant for that node, everything else goes via the internet.
rafram
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.
vhanda
I think what they meant is that if it's hosted online / home-network, only allow access to all services through a VPN. Wireguard is relatively easy to setup, and you can configure all your services to only be available through wireguard.
Ever since ssh almost got backdoor-ed, the only thing "exposed" on my servers is Wireguard, which is UDP based and therefore harder to know if it's running. SSH also goes over wireguard.
blooalien
> ... Wireguard, which is UDP based and therefore harder to know if it's running.
Isn't it basically impossible to know if it's running unless you have an authorize key? I thought it didn't respond at all unless you ping a valid entry key off it.
accrual
Although not perfect, I added a couple features to help ensure uptime:
* LAN components are on a UPS, helps keep continuity between power blips and breaker flips
* Dynamic DNS, cron runs a script 4x per day to ensure a DNS name points to my IP, even if issued a new one by the ISP
* Rebooting everything occasionally to ensure the network and services come back up on their own and I didn't make a mistake with some config that loads at boot, etc.
dpkirchner
I run Tailscale on an Apple TV which is on a UPS. The thing uses very little power so the UPS lasts a long, long time.
jauntywundrkind
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".
batch12
> The security through obscurity (non-standard port, no root) are both kinda silly but why not
I think these are decent controls when layered with others. The effectiveness differs depending on your threat models, of course, but at the very least it helps reduce the noise seen from most automated scans reducing the effort involved in monitoring your assets.
cyberax
Another option is port knocking. Super easy to set up and with 4 knocks it provides 64 bits of randomness.
johnmaguire
Disabling root provides more than security-through-obscurity if your sudo config requires a password to elevate: it essentially means you need both your SSH private key and your password to gain root.
accrual
Fail2ban or rate-limiting SSH into a block table are useful layers to have as well.
Zambyte
These solutions are composable. Just run it on a VPS over a VPN.
rafram
That’s a good point.
bloqs
But what if your home hypervisor goes down?
sammyteee
You can also enjoy your vacation instead :)
chris12321
You can also set up DNS records pointing to your home server's VPN IP, which, with Tailscale, I've found to be pretty static and then a reverse proxy on your home server. So I have my home network apps running on app1.my-domiain.com app2.my-domain.com, app3.my-domain.com etc, which only work when I'm connected to the VPN.
The downsides are that I need to be connected to the VPN at home to use the domain and I currently don't have SSL set up on the domains, so browsers complain when I connect to them. The second problem I could fix, but I'm not sure if there's a solution for the first.
sebws
You can fix them both in one. In your local network you host a local DNS, in my case I’m using pihole. It has records which point to the local IP of a reverse proxy. With this setup you can have SSL for your domain names on your local network.
To make it then work outside your local network, in tailscale settings you use “split dns” to set your DNS to be the IP of your pihole in the tailnet for your domain. Now when you try hit your local domains you should receive the same local IPs that you do at home. Then in the tailscale route settings of your machine hosting the reverse proxy you make it advertise the subnet of those local IPs. Now when you receive the local IPs your devices using the tailscale VPN should go to your home server with SSL and no external DNS.
Hope that’s somewhat clear enough
mynegation
There is a solution for the first. I have setup my home server torun Tailscale _and_ be a router to 192.168.2.x network (you can set this up in the Tailscale UI). I have server.mydomain.com to resolve to 192.168.2.x address and this way I can access it from the outside via Tailscale and from inside without the need to turn on Tailscale. I have https setup via DNS-01 challenge as well and updated automatically.
colordrops
I built a home server project that manages many of the rough edges around deployment of self-hosted apps. It includes DDNS, router+firewall, headscale, automatic setup of apps, and automatic deployment of subdomains and TLS certs for each app.
Apps are blocked to the public by default but accessible using a Tailscale client.
It's built on top of NixOS and completely configurable through a single module.
Still in heavy development but I've replaced an entire rack in my closet with an Intel NUC.
8fingerlouie
The internet is not a friendly place, so a VPN is a great idea.
With modern tools like Wireguard, you can even set it up relatively easy, either as Wireguard alone or as Tailscale (or ZeroTier, though that's not Wireguard).
Wireguard (and Tailscale) allows you to setup the tunnel so that only local (RFC1918 ie) traffic is routed over it, meaning it won't eat up your battery like when just routing all traffic over it.
I have Wireguard setup like that. It enables on any Wi-Fi network that isn't mine, as well as cellular, and the battery impact is less than 2% over a day.
sabellito
For single page web apps I use pagecrypt [0] and just publish the html file (with inline scripts and styles) as public files.
ThinkBeat
It seems to really be an ad for Directus (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
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.
KetoManx64
Yeah, if I wanted to store my data in a database, I'd just go back to using Joplin, a trusted and long term existing FOSS
ryanwhitney
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
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
The BSL and its revenue cliffs isn't open-source but shared-source.
mutoyoru
> 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.
mk12
I do this but additionally with an always-on Raspberry Pi, so syncing works perfectly even if the laptop and phone aren’t able to sync directly to each other. The SyncTrain iOS app arrived just in time for me: https://t-shaped.nl/posts/synctrain-a-rethought-ios-client-f...
bryanhogan
I've also been using Obsidian a lot. I recommend the SyncThing Fork over SyncThing.
I myself currently use Google Drive with DriveSync on Android to sync my notes, which works great. Other cloud providers also work well.
I wrote a comparison of different tools to sync here: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/how-to-sync-obsidian
remram
SyncThing has some gotchas when it comes to sync, for example I've had files reappear when I edit them on one device and move them on another. It also seems to create "sync-conflict" files when there is no conflict at all (no modification on one side). I'd also quite like to be able to see the history of my notes sometimes...
I also had this nice surprise literally today, all my synced folders stopped working and had to be re-added: https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android/issues/1430
But overall it has worked well, I am using it between 4 devices.
trwhite
It’s $4 a month to sync Obsidian notes, for anyone wondering.
galleywest200
This was news to me, so this must have changed recently, as I have been billed more than that ever since I signed up.
I looked at my account, and I am charged $10 but it seems they automatically moved me to a "Plus" plan that has more storage. So no complaints from me really. Either that or the $4 plan is new. [1]
The $4 only comes with 1GB of storage. I would recommend the $10 for 50GB if you use images in your notes.
kepano
The $4 plan was launched March 20, 2024
harvey9
It's a good price but still feels wasteful if you also run/pay for nextcloud or similar.
nsteel
There are plugins allowing you to sync via other means (for free). I don't know how the author fails to realise/mention this. I've been using Remotely Save with WebDAV or years without issue.
And the notes are all just markdown files. If the obsidian software were to disappear you have all your notes. It's fine someone wanted to spend a load of time writing their own software but none of the reasons presented in this piece make sense.
theshrike79
For me it was the It Just Works-iness of it combined with a handy way to support the project cheaply.
As long as I'm paying for it, I'm the client and not the product.
I tried some of the third party stuff, iCloud, Dropbox, etc and with all of them I either lost data because of notes not being in sync or had to manually fix stuff. $4/month and zero issues was well worth it for a tool I literally use every day.
BiteCode_dev
It's not wasteful to support great software.
bryanhogan
I think your comment is very disingenuous. And not just because it's another subscription. That plan does not work if you got more than one vault, and if you use Obsidian you will probably have more than one vault.
TheFreim
> if you use Obsidian you will probably have more than one vault.
Why would anyone ever want to use more than one vault? I just use different folders. The only reason I can think of would be if you are using Obsidian for work where you aren't allowed to use unapproved services.
trwhite
It's a time/cost tradeoff and for me personally $4 has been fine for out-of-the-box syncing between clients for the last ~2 years of using just the one vault. It's now $8 for 10 vaults (I only recently added my second), which is still a relatively insignificant amount considering I spend more than that on toilet paper.
freddie_mercury
I use Obsidian and don't have more than one vault. What a weird thing to claim.
jibal
I don't think you know what the word "disingenuous" means, and I advise you not to makes such personal attacks in any case.
charkubi
Apple allowing iCloud directories to be permanently downloaded fixed this for me.
al_borland
Yep. I use iCloud for my Obsidian vault, set to always be downloaded. I haven’t had an issue, and doesn’t cost me anything (beyond what I’m already paying for iCloud due to Photo Library).
avtar
Does the iCloud & Windows caveat still apply? https://help.obsidian.md/sync-notes
MSFT_Edging
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.
Saris
Syncthing is a lifesaver, it's such a useful tool!
There are also several Obsidian community plugins for sync, I use Remotely Save via WebDAV.
taurath
I did this and hooo does Apple make it difficult to sync files without iCloud. I felt like it was too janky for my liking, and paid for obsidian sync, but I felt like it was really silly how an official app could do it no problem, but you can’t get generic functionality to work with iOS.
moelf
too bad Syncthing is no longer officially maintaining andoird app https://forum.syncthing.net/t/discontinuing-syncthing-androi...
atrus
But the syncthing fork (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
For anyone who would prefer to get the Syncthing-Fork build from F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.catfriend1.syncth...
montagg
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.
wiseowise
That’s common thought process: “tool that I use more than 10 times a day to amplify my knowledge? $10 a month? Eye watering!”.
Oh well, time to grab that Uber eats for $20 third time this week.
theshrike79
People are really bad with quantifying things.
I can easily grab a few imperial stouts for the weekend for 20€ but will balk at paying for a search engine.
Until I did the math of use per euro and Kagi turned out to be well worth it. I just drink one beer less a month and it's paid for and I'm healthier too =)
Chris2048
The problem is that some things remain cheap by convention. Once you employ the above logic and show a willingness to pay for things, the rent-seekers will swoop in.
You can't break an imperial stout into parts and charge for each, and natural competition exist in supermarkets and/or even homebrew, limiting how much pubs/bars will charge.
The same is not true for computer service that can very easily become monopolised.
The addendum to "If you aren't paying for the product, you are the product", is "and if you are paying for the product, you are also still the product".
Chris2048
I think the rise of take-away services corresponds with a working professional middle-class for whom time spent cooking isn't worth the hourly rate of otherwise staying at work. Home cooking, or even eating out is still a much better proposition if you can afford the time.
I think professional tooling falls in the same category, but the problem I have is treating a general internet service such as a serach engine, or even an online encyclopedia as if it is also in the same category, where as I see it as a common utility, more akin to the availability of a library.
Dylan16807
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
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
So obsidian let's me get 40 hours of work had I used notepad for notes done in 13-20 hours?
wiether
> If you found something perfect for you that works >5 years, holy crap. You are blessed.
Having been unable to find an out-of-the-box app fitting my needs, I built my own personal finances app in 2012 and I'm using it weekly since then.
I'll probably work again on it one day because the technical stack is old, which makes it harder to host, but otherwise it still does exactly what I want, how I want it.
> That honestly should not be the standard for tools these days—ESPECIALLY in a today’s world.
Maybe I'm not interpreting it correctly, but you make it sound like having a perfect system for more than 5 years is unhealthy.
Whereas, I'd say it's quite the opposite.
Back to my finances app, since I'm using it I've been able to focus on improving/mastering other parts of my life. Not having to get back to find another system to manage my personal finances means that I'm able to focus on other stuff.
I have a hard time seeing how that would be a bad thing?
spencerflem
I think its not that its unhealthy, it's that things are unfortunately such that its arare and beautiful thing when it happens and if you expect more you are bound to be disappointed.
ozyschmozy
I don't disagree with the overall comment but this bit seems like extreme hyperbole:
> 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.
An order of magnitude over 1k per year is almost $30 per day, every day.
1123581321
It’s missing commas; it should say “an order of magnitude [more], over $1000 a year, for…”
coolcase
Hyperbole for some but hypobole for others I am sure
ezst
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/
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.
Jarwain
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
> 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 ²: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/note-hoisting.html
Jarwain
Book is exactly what I was thinking of!
I think my only other question is around my preferred "Daily Journal" workflow and unreferenced tags
On one hand I feel some surprise that you're noting a distinction between metadata/tags for collections of notes vs collections of blocks. On the other hand, it's a bit of a peeve of mine that there's a distinction between "pages" and "blocks" in logseq when it comes to linking & referencing.
out_of_protocol
Also, Trilium don't have mobile app which is very important for having notes available 24/7. Browser version don't allow offline access and not as convenient as an app
ezst
That's correct, there is no official mobile app with full offline sync at the moment, but there are independent efforts underway¹ and more or less involving workarounds².
If you have internet and don't need full offline sync, you should be able to use Trilium decently well today, with the recent responsive theming efforts that went into Trilium Next.
¹: https://github.com/FliegendeWurst/TriliumDroid ²: https://github.com/orgs/TriliumNext/discussions/827
komali2
I just downloaded trillium for Android, it seems to work fine.
JonChesterfield
I think trillium is stashing the notes in a database. Certainly it thinks there is a migration step needed to move files around.
The everything markdown feature of obsidian is the dominant one. I can edit the files in emacs when I want to and the sync sorts it out just fine. They're stashed in a fossil repo by one of the machines as a backup because I'm paranoid and that also works fine because it's all ascii files.
ezst
Trilium works alongside a SQLite DB. It backs-up your db.sqlite on a regular basis, lets you create manual backups, version-controls each and every note with checkpoints, supports full-encryption, and as soon as you set-up sync between clients/servers, you practically end-up with master-master replicas of your entire notes collection (I have my notes replicated at all time on 3 devices or more). All of this are native, supported features and transparent for the end-user (no offloading to a VCS, no scripting, etc).
Trilium also lets you import/export your whole database as folders of markdown files if you are really into that, I just don't see the point: this is free open-source software, there is no vendor lock-in and no reason to dumb-down the storage layer to text files. But to each their own :-)
Snow_Falls
There is the option to export the whole thing to HTML, Markdown and OPML (v1 or v2). Plus there is an included script in the trilium folder that dumps the contents of the database, so you can do it even if the trilium software itself doesn't work for some reason.
Snow_Falls
Trilium is fantastic, I can not recommend it enough. The fact that another enterprising programmer has made an android app, "TriliumDroid", has just made it that much more useful. Even if that app is still in beta.
flakeoil
But it doesn't seem to store the notes in text-files on your file system.
ezst
I reponded to that in this tread, FYI
williamsss
Another person in the thread recommended it. I'll have to check it out this week thanks!
surrTurr
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.
cloverich
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
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.
Sytten
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.
8fingerlouie
> But lets be realistic, 1000$ over 10 years is nothing
Where is the limit ?
While $100/year maybe doesn't sound like much, it's hardly the only subscription service you have, and they all add up, from your mail provider, office suite, cloud storage, streaming services, phone bills, internet service, etc.
Personally I find $100/year to edit notes on my phone to be a bit much, but then again, I just use iOS Notes.
I am so fed up with everything turning into subscriptions, that I've just completely stopped buying things that are subscription based.
I understand developers need to make a living, but simply throwing a subscription on top of it won't convince me to buy your product. You convince me by making a compelling product, and by continuously updating it, adding new features, which will convince me to buy another version.
al_borland
Personally, I just set myself a budget of $100/month for subscriptions. I was going to drive myself crazy judging every one all the time, so I decided as long as I’m under this threshold I’m not going to stress.
I track the ones I have so I can compare the cost, looking at either daily, monthly, or yearly cost. Sorting by price, I can look them over to judge if one of them seems unusually expensive for what it is, and regularly review to see if there are and I’m not using and need to be cancelled.
My most expensive is the could backup for my NAS. $8/month is about what I pay for Proton, which offers a lot more than just note syncing. So $8 for notes does seem like a lot. Looking at Obsidian’s pricing page[0], the $8/month is for publishing… hosting a website with your Obsidian data. Just syncing is only $4, and there are many free ways to do it. That part of the article felt like the author was trying to justify writing their own tool due to cost. That doesn’t feel justified, and they were stretching… but the good thing is there doesn’t need to be any financial justification at all. Just make your own tool for the sake of making your own tool. That’s good enough.
trinsic2
Yeah I just wanted to chime in here on what i see as a world view problem that might need to be updated with the times. I see your point about everything being subscription based.
There are definitely software out there that do not deserve to be subscription based. But there are some developers that I think should be supported on a regular basis. Especially obsidian because they develop one product and continually work on it to make it better. IMHO they deserve the money.
On side note I wish there was a way for it to be open source, and the team's reasons for not supporting open source seems a little iffy. They could still make money of of Obsidain Sync or other features that does not need to be part of a Open Source Release. Commercialism of a project this important worries me because people that depend on it can be easy side-lined if the team decides to sell out. Look what happened to the Atom editor. Microsoft brought it then killed it. I know with Obsidian you can walk away from it and thats good, but I always worry about commercial domination of a market causing limited choice.
I know your point was about subscriptions, and I guess I am saying im more supportive of that model, based on the times we are in, for developers that have genuine passion for a project that they want to continue developing.
Heck I know am realizing I need to support open source projects with regular donations because I want them to thrive long term
8fingerlouie
> There are definitely software out there that do not deserve to be subscription based
My personal experience with software switching to a subscription model is that often that means you will now only get "bugfixes", and new features are usually few and far apart.
There's no longer any incentive to produce major versions with new breaking features, and instead it just turns into a maintenance product, if you even get that.
An Example could be Sublime Text, that while not traditionally subscription based, the license expires after 3-4 years, and needs to be renewed, so it's just a 3-4 year subscription. It was released in May 2021, and receives 1-2 updates yearly, and every update since 2021 has been "fixes" or "improvements". Nothing new has been added for 4 years.
Another example could be Arq Backup. Version 7 was released in February 2021, and while the changelog does have some "new feature" entries, those are mostly just "added the possibility to backup to X service". It does however see much more frequent updates than Sublime Text.
Don't get me wrong, bugfixes and improvements are great, but I expect new features as well. I expect the product to be moving forward, keeping up with current "best practice" standards, and not just turn into a money pit for the developer, just pushing out the obligatory "yeah, we fixed a few bugs" releases.
There are of course also various projects that do things "well enough" that new major releases are not required, like NextDNS. NextDNS works well, and is priced cheap enough to rival the electricity consumption price of a Raspberry Pi running at home. They don't have big releases, are mostly doing maitenance releases, but for the cost, and function of the service that is OK.
And no, not all software falls into this category, and there are plenty of great software that i pay for, which is actively maintained.
Sytten
I think that no matter that they do you will always find people complaining. That is humanity's favorite sport. Even when it's free and open source people still complain.
Making software for individual consumers is freaking hard. My own perspective as a founder shifted from "this is a viable method to build a sustainable business" to "let's use it as the base for B2B sales, but it is not viable".
TiredOfLife
Obsidian is not free and not open source
gr4vityWall
> 1000$ over 10 years is nothing
It's a non-trivial amount of money to a lot of people (myself included). I spend way more than that on Free Software, but I'm not throwing money to a proprietary program if I can choose.
SOLAR_FIELDS
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
misnome
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.
para_parolu
And implementing local sync for obsidian is just running on docker container
hartator
I think the author point still stands though: Obsidian won’t probably be here in 20 years.
no_wizard
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
raesene9
For me that's one of the great points about obsidian's choice of all notes being Markdown.
Even if Obsidian vanished tomorrow and the application became unmaintainable, I'd still have all my notes in a text based format.
al_borland
I wish all markdown editors just had their markdown files in a simple folder like Obsidian does.
I wanted to like Bear, which advertises that it uses markdown. But when I went looking for the files, they were locked away in a database. This was many years ago, so if this has changed, I’d be happy to hear it.
I’d love to be able to easily jump between apps, which markdown should allow in theory, but in practice view apps allow for. I don’t find using a text editor to be ideal here as a solution, as I want my notes to look like notes and hide away the syntax when the cursor isn’t on the syntax. Obsidian handles this well, most text editors do not.
theappsecguy
Why not? It’s got a huge user base, a massive open source plug-in ecosystem and a sensible revenue model. It’s probably one of the note apps that has the largest community around it outside of Notion, which is heavily VC influenced and is more of a do everything app
MissTake
Neither solution is guaranteed to stick around for 20 years.
As we’ve seen before, it takes one VC investment to change a source available license into something not so friendly and forks are never guaranteed.
wiether
One of Obsidian's creators is saying exactly the same actually.
trinsic2
We'll see. I think there is a chance that it will.
AstroBen
even better: Obsidian is only $480 over 10 years!
TiredOfLife
Can I have those 1000$ if you think that is nothing?
harvey9
Sure, but only in installments over the next 10 years and in exchange I need you to provide a sync service for my notes.
komali2
I'll install https://syncthing.net/ on your computer right now for 100 bucks!
vijucat
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.
williamsss
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!
OlivOnTech
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
The guy just created some bullshit excuses in order to advertise his new product.
AstroBen
> 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
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.
trwhite
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.
AstroBen
Ah, I've never had an issue there
darkwater
Directius (the foundation on what this was built) is Source Available [1] and not Opensource.
williamsss
Thanks I'll revise the article
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.