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The cult of Obsidian: Why people are obsessed with the note-taking app
(www.fastcompany.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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Technology
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The driver of enshittification is extracting money from your user base and investors alike. Lacking one doesn't stop it.
If I was going to trust obsidian, their code would be fully foss. Since it isn't, there is nothing future proofing my notes in their software. Might as well switch now to something which largely works better and is more feature rich.
Which is relative to personal taste and needs.
I definitely agree that I wish it was fully foss, but i also think it is a far better option than notion, onenote, etc for most people (as long as it meets their needs and preferences) since with obsidian you do actually own your data and you don't need to pay unless you want their sync.
Even if, worst case, Obsidian enshitifies, all the notes are markdown or json (json for config and things that don't work in markdown, but the community and the devs work hard to keep that to a minimum) so you can still access your stuff in any text editor and it will be fairly easy to get the important data migrated into anything else. (I often use vs code to manage my notes, for instance, esp for big find and replace or re-org tasks) Even the non-standard markdown from obsidian and the most popular plugins reads well and could fairly easily be replicated with remarked or other markdown libraries. In this way, i think Obsidians approach is far superior to a tool which uses a database to store its data, since a database would require some effort to use standalone, or some work to migrate it to another tool or some sort of minimal client interface.
By its design, Obsidian could also be replaced by reverse engineering their api. If obsidian takes the dark path, we will probably see a foss community grow from the plugin dev community to replace it and be as compatible with plugins as possible, even if its just the basic text and display components. Tbh, it could totally be a vs code plugin, an emacs mode, [insert any text editor with plugins here]... thats how portable the data is. The obsidian devs know this, and they are intentional about staying this way. A shift in attitude here would be noticed by the community very quickly.
Everything about this discussion is.
OK.
Why bother when I can do it now with the better option rather than in a couple years with several thousand notes?
Also it should be noted that peculiarities about how obsidian works makes transfers non trivial. Individual notes are fine, file structures not as much, but it's minor.
Trilium has a pretty robust export system last I checked. Not rally worried about that, meanwhile I get the massive speed upgrades and stability associated with a database.
Sure it could be reverse engineered... Or just use the software that's already basically there...
You're doing that thing where someone starts going to bat and listing off this that or this other thing to rationalize their own choice or rationalize the choice for others.
I've used obsidian for years. I switched to trilium for reasons I stated above. Unless obsidian goes fully foss, and gets way way more stable, i'll be using the genuinely better choice, thanks though.
Linking in trillium notes is PITA.
How do you work efficiently? Trillium is much more friction I felt when testing it out.
I agree that trilium could use more worth on linking efficiently. It's no various complements. I don't really have a method I just deal with it, sorry to disappoint.
But what is your workflow then?
Just curious because I can see trillium notes as worthfully when really creating sophisticated notes, like finished documentation.
But for working with small/atomic/draft notes the workflow is just too much friction for me to use it as a tool despite documenting past stuff.
I generally finish thoughts out in sections in a note and if I feel I need a new note I can drop in a link or I can send a section into a new note. I find it actually has cut down on note bloat, my main pain point is quickly writing aliases. If I was a script writer I don't think it would be hard to improve the feel of it tbh.