Obsidian's business model might be genius. Open file formats; closed source.
By making a great product, they attract users. Usually the main argument against software like this is vendor lock-in. But by using open formats, there's always an escape hatch. If they decided to squeeze their users, I suspect a decent open source alternative would pop up very quickly. In the meantime, casual open source alternatives are very unlikely to catch up in terms of quality and features, because they don't have a funded team working on them full time.
On the flipside, Obsidian is incentivized to keep their customers happy, because their moat isn't so large as to allow complete complacency.
Overall some of the best aligned incentives I've seen. Though it does make me sad because I feel like we almost never see this good of balance in open source software.
itsjustjoe 147 days ago [-]
The third party plugin community is fantastic as well, I use it for GMing TTRPG sessions and I have a pretty powerful workflow built out.
zappchance 147 days ago [-]
Care to share which plugins you use? I'm interested in GMing some lesser known RPGs.
abhinavk 146 days ago [-]
I only wish they be sandboxed or audited before release. It would be perfect.
throwbmw 147 days ago [-]
Please write a blog about it
boraoztunc 147 days ago [-]
Products are the reflections of their makers. Obsidian is a great example. Happy from the beginning.
soulofmischief 146 days ago [-]
Unfortunately, I think it's ultimately unethical to support the normalization of closed-source text-editing software, because it sets a bad precedent for the level of trust a user should have in their computing environment. For this reason, I much prefer Logseq. https://logseq.com/
Grimblewald 145 days ago [-]
I compared many options and after being messed around by my last provider which used a closed format making leaving hard, having my entire vault as a folder of files that remain in an open and broadly used format? A dream come true. It ranks among the top products I pay for in terms of absolute satiafaction as well as value add per dollar spent. The community plugins are fantastic, the core plugins are incredibly useful, the whole thing is sleek amd well designed. I cannot express how much I love this produt and the community that has built up around it.
abhinavk 147 days ago [-]
Yeah. It's one of my most used apps. I pay for Sync to support their model even though I hardly use it on my phone.
Apart from no lock-in, another benefit of the open format model is that you can complement it with other tools. Since their code editor is not that great, I just open the vault folder in Vim/VSCode when it becomes cumbersome.
slightwinder 147 days ago [-]
> On the flipside, Obsidian is incentivized to keep their customers happy
I think at this point, it's more about people not making unhappy. Development is already slowing down and focusing on fixing bugs, and the community seems to have shrunk to specific areas of interest. Which is kind of a problem IMHO, because we've already seen many add-ons becoming unusable and dying as a result of updates of the main-application.
chrisweekly 147 days ago [-]
> Development is already slowing down and focusing on fixing bugs
Yes - because it's stable and powerful. So grateful they care about quality and are not becoming bloatware / chasing random features.
As for the plugin ecosystem, it was always inevitable that a significant portion of them wouldn't be well-maintained and wld become obsolete.
As an Obsidian early adopter and heavy daily user, I have only good things to say about the core software and the handful of high-quality community plugins that support every workflow and use case I desire.
slightwinder 147 days ago [-]
> Yes - because it's stable and powerful. So grateful they care about quality and are not becoming bloatware / chasing random features.
Yes, but this is only good for the satisfied users. Users who wait for certain "promised" features, might slowly become unhappy over time. Other will simply not find what they need.
I guess a bit of the problem is that Obsidian exploded in interests far beyond what the devs imaged, and now they are left with multiple different groups which are all not maintained equal well.
> As for the plugin ecosystem, it was always inevitable that a significant portion of them wouldn't be well-maintained and wld become obsolete.
Then remove them. It's not good if you offer the users add-ons which are not even working anymore.
chrisweekly 147 days ago [-]
There's a bright-line distinction between core plugins (official) and community plugins. It's not the core team's responsibility to determine whether someone might be getting value out of a community plugin. TBH it seems like you're trying to find
things to complain about, but have yet to raise anything substantive.
slightwinder 146 days ago [-]
Community-Plugins are also offered and managed through the app itself, so they do have some sort of responsibility for what they make available.
phren0logy 147 days ago [-]
I'm of two minds about this. I'm not sure continuously adding features is really necessary or desirable in software like Obsidian. I want new, shiny things but perhaps those should come in the form of optional plug-ins I could buy if I want/need them.
I have used and loved both DokuWiki and Obsidian (although I use Joplin these days). As the author noted, DokuWiki is best with collaborators and when public facing. However I've found a Git repo with Markdown files that link to eachother makes a killer decentralized collaborative KB. Add to that forges like GitHub/GitLab/Codeberg which render the markdown and list the files in your browser and it's truly great.
entrepy123 147 days ago [-]
It's possible to basically avoid the second step ("Convert all text files from DokuWiki Syntax to proper Markdown") by only ever writing Markdown in Dokuwiki to begin with.
To write Markdown in DokuWiki, the "DokuWiki Commonmark Plugin" [0] is pretty great.
To use it, tips are:
- REQUIRED: On the top line of each page, put `<!DOCTYPE markdown>` (using the new toolbar button or typing it in). So that Dokuwiki knows the page is in markdown.
- STRONGLY SUGGESTED: In the Dokuwiki Config, set the `maxseclevel` to 0. Since the Commonmark markdown plugin currently unfortunately sort of messes up edit-section.)
That's basically it. Makes the Dokuwiki files that much more immediately-portable, in theory.
Interesting, didn't know about <!DOCTYPE markdown>. Though as an SGML pedant, I have to say using this doctype declaration in this way just tells an SGML or XML parser about the base ("root") element and is thus simply incorrect since there is no "markdown" element. The proper way would be to use just "html", and adding SGML shortref declarations in the "internal subset" for markdown-to-HTML mapping, like sgmljs is doing.
yibbix 146 days ago [-]
I use obsidian daily and while I love it, I do feel it’s got lots of flaws. Mostly I feel the development team is pretty opinionated with some of its choices, especially regarding its tab management. I find myself annoyed by a lot of the basic functionality and am constantly having to add custom css or plugins. I’m grateful that the plugin community is pretty large, but it sucks needing so many plugins just to make the program useable in the way I want to use it, rather than obsidian having more options and toggles built in.
kepano 146 days ago [-]
What are the plugins or toggles you think should be included in the app?
yibbix 145 days ago [-]
Some plugins are Another Quick Switcher, File Explorer++, Force note view mode, Remember cursor position, and Open in New Tab. These plugins mostly chance existing functionality to work better how I would expect them to or add some QOL features. Obviously I don't expect Obsidian to implement massive features like Dataview, Kanban, Projects, Calendars, etc.
One of my biggest complaints though is Obsidian's tab management. Notes are always opened in whatever tab I am currently in, even if the note is already open in another tab. I know that I can just hold shift or ctrl to do a new tab but I forget to do that all the time and would just love a toggle to always open notes in a new tab, or swap to an existing tab that note is already open in.
The default quick switcher I feel is also very bare bones. I can't search by tags for example.
I would also love it if obsidian had native markdown table support similar to how the advanced tables plugin works. I know I can just use that plugin but it does not work in live preview edit mode which is what I prefer to use. I don't know if that's an Obsidian issue or a plugin issue.
I'd also like to see tree style tabs or just vertical tabs in general similar to vscode's open editors feature. I tend of have many tabs open and am constantly switching around.
Overall though maybe I'm just using Obsidian wrong or its just not for me, but out of all the note taking apps/markdown editors I've used, Obsidian is the closest to perfect that I've seen.
EDIT: I should add as well, I do appreciate that Obsidian allows for plugins and custom CSS. I'd rather be able to change the things that I don't like rather than be locked into the default functionality. However with some of these plugins being implemented in "hacky" ways as their description says while also not being updated in quite some time, I do wonder how much longer they will continue to work before an update breaks them permanently.
kepano 145 days ago [-]
Thanks, I'll think about it :)
paradox460 148 days ago [-]
I've been using foam instead of obsidian for my personal knowledge base. It works rather well. And it's completely free and ultimately just markdown. While I might wish it was djot, I don't wish hard enough to make that so myself
Not sure it would work for me, as a lot of time I have a random idea I don't want to lose while I'm not at my computer. And while I know it's just markdown and thus any text editor could open them on my phone, I do enjoy having something like Obsidian which works well on my phone and syncs files over git.
abhinavk 147 days ago [-]
It makes VSCode very slow though which itself is getting heavier every release. Obsidian doesn't feel like an Electron app just like VSCode from a few years ago..
Visual Studio Code binaries from Microsoft's website is proprietary [1] even though their source code is available under the MIT License. VSCodium provides MIT License builds with Microsoft telemetry removed [2][3].
Now why would someone blindly download an executable from a security and privacy point of view?
richardwhiuk 147 days ago [-]
Curious how you installed Linux.
egberts1 146 days ago [-]
Linux from Scratch.
None of that systemd and its PID 1 doing network socket opened.
richardwhiuk 146 days ago [-]
I assume you read all of the code yourself, and wrote a 1st stage compiler by hand?
egberts1 146 days ago [-]
even read and helped patched the GNU Compiler.
nfriedly 148 days ago [-]
I haven't tried Obsidian, but I'm pretty happy with NextCloud Notes
which saves all my notes as either plain text or markdown and keeps them in sync across my phone, and various computers.
suprjami 147 days ago [-]
I recently spun up a self-hosted Nextcloud and was pleased to see my existing directory of Markdown notes just worked.
aidenn0 147 days ago [-]
FWIW, Pandoc can convert from dokuwiki to markdown.
ahmed_ds 146 days ago [-]
I honestly think if Pandoc had a GUI, it could genuinely be the fourth most popular word processing software out there. Just a simple GUI and a rich text editor—that's it.
ndarray 148 days ago [-]
This website is a good test of who actually clicked the link, not able to read a thing, coming back to the comments to report the bad experience, and who didn't click the link/is a bot, talking about the article as if nothing happened.
daemonologist 148 days ago [-]
The styling isn't broken for everyone (looks fine to me, Firefox on Fedora in dark mode), so I'm afraid the test may have some false positives.
arp242 148 days ago [-]
Yes, it's only broken in "light mode"; looks like there's a bug/omission in the CSS it doesn't correctly set the background colour (but does set the text colour).
crabmusket 148 days ago [-]
I simply flicked on reader mode (Firefox/Android). But to the OP yes, please do fix your styles!
dsr_ 148 days ago [-]
Same, FF/Mac.
al_borland 147 days ago [-]
I came to the comments to see if it was just me. Dark gray on black seemed bad it had to be a rendering issue, but at the same time, background color and color seem like the CSS that would always work.
147 days ago [-]
freilanzer 146 days ago [-]
Works fine for me, and I'm not a bot (I think).
eviks 147 days ago [-]
This comment is a good example of people coming up with bad tests: reader mode exists, you know, and non-bots can use it
fransje26 147 days ago [-]
Works absolutely fine in Firefox on Android.
juujian 148 days ago [-]
Looks fine on mobile
al_borland 147 days ago [-]
Which mobile? I’m on Safari on iOS and it’s bad.
fransje26 147 days ago [-]
Firefox, Android.
kaeruct 147 days ago [-]
Thanks everyone for the feedback regarding the issue with readability in light mode. I completely missed it!
crabmusket 148 days ago [-]
I've just gotten interested in Dokuwiki for use in a small association I've joined which is slowly realising that just having a free Slack account is not going to cut it for all our shared knowledge needs.
And since we have a WordPress site, Dokuwiki is about a 30-second installation away.
Looking into the project governance/maintenance it looks sturdy- while seemingly one person does a lot of the work, there's a community there. It appears to me, a newcomer, like a project that could last a very long time while being boring and doing exactly what it needs to, no more and no less.
As for the subject of the post itself; for a single person personal wiki, I'd also use Obsidian. I love that I can sync it to my phone with Syncthing, which is a mild pain but free!
kristianpaul 147 days ago [-]
It took me a while to realize that there wasn’t an obsidian git repository to check out the source
Xen9 147 days ago [-]
Regarding note-taking, an Obsidian plugin that generates Loci's palaces where you get to add all sort of things, using stable diffusion & other new technology (rotable 3D => better spatial memory) would be great.
poglet 148 days ago [-]
I started migrating from OneNote to BookStack wiki. Loving it so far, but am not sure how backups and data exports work.
It's nice to be able to have it publicly available and accessible from any internet connection.
scblock 148 days ago [-]
Site is nearly unreadable on an iPhone or Firefox on Windows, showing up with a dark background and dark text. Something broken in the CSS?
mirshko 148 days ago [-]
Seems text color is driven by light / dark mode at the OS level, but the background color is not.
jholman 147 days ago [-]
If you're already using Firefox, all you have to do is click the Reader Mode button, at the right edge of your URL bar.
Same problem on macOS, in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
rowlandc 148 days ago [-]
This site is borderline unreadable, maybe a little tiny bit of CSS testing in order before sharing stuff here... ouch, my eyes.
Multicomp 149 days ago [-]
Nice! I've been resisting Obsidian because I prefer the multimedia capabilities of OneNote, but since I have an old dokuwiki install that has floated around for a long time, I may just use this to finally kick the obsidian tires.
BenFranklin100 148 days ago [-]
If you’re looking to incorporate markdown into OneNote, you may want to look at the OneMark addin:
Thanks, I’ve been looking for something like this.
CWuestefeld 147 days ago [-]
I've been a OneNote user for years, but a few months ago MS sabotaged the clipper extension for Firefox - and for no apparent reason except, apparently, to force people toward Edge.
If they're going to maliciously break my workflow, then who needs 'em?
So I've switched to Obsidian, although I'm finding it a little clunky and I've also been playing Zoot.
hi-v-rocknroll 146 days ago [-]
Current Obsidian user having migrated from Apple's Notes.app.
I used to use DokuWiki about 15 years ago (~2008) to document the IT systems at a biomedical informatics department.
yegle 147 days ago [-]
I wonder if migrating to tiddlywiki would be a better option. Mostly writing in Markdown, lightweight, intended for single user, open source & have good mobile web UI.
graemep 147 days ago [-]
Tiddlywiki or Zim or one of many tools meant for single users.
Dokuwiki seems like overkill for a single user.
egberts1 148 days ago [-]
i couldn't put import various media into Obsidian.
Kichererbsen 147 days ago [-]
What kind of media? An Obsidian vault is just a folder with files in it - and with the `![[file-name]]` syntax or the `` syntax if you prefer plain markdown (for portability?!) it just embeds?
I got dark on more dark. Hope this was awesome, but I can't read it.
Chrome.
RsmFz 148 days ago [-]
Looks correct now on Firefox on macOS (light mode, probably)
iforgotpassword 148 days ago [-]
The screenshot doesn't load for me, but I see a very dark color, maybe purple, on black background. Absolutely no way to read anything, just about able to make out that there is some text.
By making a great product, they attract users. Usually the main argument against software like this is vendor lock-in. But by using open formats, there's always an escape hatch. If they decided to squeeze their users, I suspect a decent open source alternative would pop up very quickly. In the meantime, casual open source alternatives are very unlikely to catch up in terms of quality and features, because they don't have a funded team working on them full time.
On the flipside, Obsidian is incentivized to keep their customers happy, because their moat isn't so large as to allow complete complacency.
Overall some of the best aligned incentives I've seen. Though it does make me sad because I feel like we almost never see this good of balance in open source software.
Apart from no lock-in, another benefit of the open format model is that you can complement it with other tools. Since their code editor is not that great, I just open the vault folder in Vim/VSCode when it becomes cumbersome.
I think at this point, it's more about people not making unhappy. Development is already slowing down and focusing on fixing bugs, and the community seems to have shrunk to specific areas of interest. Which is kind of a problem IMHO, because we've already seen many add-ons becoming unusable and dying as a result of updates of the main-application.
Yes - because it's stable and powerful. So grateful they care about quality and are not becoming bloatware / chasing random features.
As for the plugin ecosystem, it was always inevitable that a significant portion of them wouldn't be well-maintained and wld become obsolete.
As an Obsidian early adopter and heavy daily user, I have only good things to say about the core software and the handful of high-quality community plugins that support every workflow and use case I desire.
Yes, but this is only good for the satisfied users. Users who wait for certain "promised" features, might slowly become unhappy over time. Other will simply not find what they need.
I guess a bit of the problem is that Obsidian exploded in interests far beyond what the devs imaged, and now they are left with multiple different groups which are all not maintained equal well.
> As for the plugin ecosystem, it was always inevitable that a significant portion of them wouldn't be well-maintained and wld become obsolete.
Then remove them. It's not good if you offer the users add-ons which are not even working anymore.
To write Markdown in DokuWiki, the "DokuWiki Commonmark Plugin" [0] is pretty great.
To use it, tips are:
- REQUIRED: On the top line of each page, put `<!DOCTYPE markdown>` (using the new toolbar button or typing it in). So that Dokuwiki knows the page is in markdown.
- STRONGLY SUGGESTED: In the Dokuwiki Config, set the `maxseclevel` to 0. Since the Commonmark markdown plugin currently unfortunately sort of messes up edit-section.)
That's basically it. Makes the Dokuwiki files that much more immediately-portable, in theory.
[0] https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:commonmark
One of my biggest complaints though is Obsidian's tab management. Notes are always opened in whatever tab I am currently in, even if the note is already open in another tab. I know that I can just hold shift or ctrl to do a new tab but I forget to do that all the time and would just love a toggle to always open notes in a new tab, or swap to an existing tab that note is already open in.
The default quick switcher I feel is also very bare bones. I can't search by tags for example.
I would also love it if obsidian had native markdown table support similar to how the advanced tables plugin works. I know I can just use that plugin but it does not work in live preview edit mode which is what I prefer to use. I don't know if that's an Obsidian issue or a plugin issue.
I'd also like to see tree style tabs or just vertical tabs in general similar to vscode's open editors feature. I tend of have many tabs open and am constantly switching around.
Overall though maybe I'm just using Obsidian wrong or its just not for me, but out of all the note taking apps/markdown editors I've used, Obsidian is the closest to perfect that I've seen.
EDIT: I should add as well, I do appreciate that Obsidian allows for plugins and custom CSS. I'd rather be able to change the things that I don't like rather than be locked into the default functionality. However with some of these plugins being implemented in "hacky" ways as their description says while also not being updated in quite some time, I do wonder how much longer they will continue to work before an update breaks them permanently.
https://foambubble.github.io/foam/
Not sure it would work for me, as a lot of time I have a random idea I don't want to lose while I'm not at my computer. And while I know it's just markdown and thus any text editor could open them on my phone, I do enjoy having something like Obsidian which works well on my phone and syncs files over git.
[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/license
[2] https://vscodium.com/
[3] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/releases
None of that systemd and its PID 1 doing network socket opened.
And since we have a WordPress site, Dokuwiki is about a 30-second installation away.
Looking into the project governance/maintenance it looks sturdy- while seemingly one person does a lot of the work, there's a community there. It appears to me, a newcomer, like a project that could last a very long time while being boring and doing exactly what it needs to, no more and no less.
As for the subject of the post itself; for a single person personal wiki, I'd also use Obsidian. I love that I can sync it to my phone with Syncthing, which is a mild pain but free!
It's nice to be able to have it publicly available and accessible from any internet connection.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...
https://onemark.neux.studio
If they're going to maliciously break my workflow, then who needs 'em?
So I've switched to Obsidian, although I'm finding it a little clunky and I've also been playing Zoot.
I used to use DokuWiki about 15 years ago (~2008) to document the IT systems at a biomedical informatics department.
Dokuwiki seems like overkill for a single user.
Chrome.
Firefox on android, no dark mode.