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The Future of Obsidian Plugins

obsidian.md

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Re: The Future of Obsidian Plugins

#51

Post by btown »

kepano wrote: post #30

Obsidian CEO here. We've been working for nearly a year to launch this new Community site and review system. I'm very excited about this first version but there are many more improvements to come. I've tried to be exhaustive with the blog post, FAQs, and next steps on our roadmap, but I am sure I forgot some things, so feel free to ask! This has been an incredibly challenging project for a number of reasons. We're on…

Congrats on the launch! Curious about whether the automated scanning system flags expansions of scope and network domain access for internal/human review.

For instance, an AI summarization plugin that starts by saying it accesses url="api.openai.com"+path with a user-supplied OpenAI key is going to be incredibly common - and I'm really excited for what the community builds here!

But what if that plugin has an update that allows the "user" to choose an arbitrary endpoint as an OpenAI-compatible API - how do you ensure that's not a malicious update that has coopted that flexibility to create a network egress that will bypass your scans, and might subtly prefill that with a malicious endpoint?

Re: The Future of Obsidian Plugins

#52

Post by random3 »

joeblogsmomma wrote: post #47
dakiol wrote: post #32

I want to use Obsidian... but I won't as long as it's not open source. I know I can keep all my files as plain text, but that's not enough for me. Using a KB on a daily basis shapes my workflows and having to change that from one day to another (e.g., because maybe Obsidian changes in a way I don't like) is too much for me. I could already handle all my plain txt files using simply the file system, but of course I wo…

Unless you have crazy custom files I feel like this is a non issue Obsidian is just rending markdown so any potential future app (or the influx of slop AI markdown editors/renderers) out there could do the job albeit worse than Obsidian.

Obsidian doesn't just render markdown though. There's a ton of functionality on top of Markdown which makes switching to any other tool very hard in reality. This is further exacerbated once you start relying on plugins (which arguably is the case with the majority of Obsidian users).

Re: The Future of Obsidian Plugins

#53

Post by simonw »

kepano wrote: post #30

Obsidian CEO here. We've been working for nearly a year to launch this new Community site and review system. I'm very excited about this first version but there are many more improvements to come. I've tried to be exhaustive with the blog post, FAQs, and next steps on our roadmap, but I am sure I forgot some things, so feel free to ask! This has been an incredibly challenging project for a number of reasons. We're on…

I have a bunch of projects with plugins and I've sometimes thought about introducing a "reviewed" mechanism where the project marks specific versions as reviewed and trusted.

One of the things that's held me back (aside from the huge time commitment) is my fear that people will come to depend on that review process, such that if the process misses an obfuscated exploit the project itself will be blamed for the subsequent attacks.

How are you thinking about that?

To me it feels like the difference between the Debian/Ubuntu approach - everything in their registry is tightly reviewed - and the PyPI/npm approach where there's no review guarantees at all.

Re: The Future of Obsidian Plugins

#54

Post by bryanhogan »

soupfordummies wrote: post #36
dtkav wrote: post #13

For those not aware, it has basically been impossible to submit new plugins due to the manual review (and how easy/fun it is to write a plugin with AI). The developer community was becoming increasingly frustrated, and the team was burning out under the load. So congrats to the team! This relieves a huge scaling bottleneck. It has been really cool to see how y'all build and scale.

Got any cool plugins you recommend? I'm finally getting comfortable after switching from OneNote and getting sync set up.

I got a few plugins recommended here: https://github.com/BryanHogan/obsidian-vault-template#recomm...

So:

- FolderNotes

- Filename Heading Sync

- LanguageTool Integration

- Periodic Notes

Trying to keep the amount of community plugins as low as possible. Why I use each one of these I explain in that section, or in more detail on my post about my Obsidian Vault setup: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/obsidian-vault

Re: The Future of Obsidian Plugins

#55

Post by alcazar »

soupfordummies wrote: post #36
dtkav wrote: post #13

For those not aware, it has basically been impossible to submit new plugins due to the manual review (and how easy/fun it is to write a plugin with AI). The developer community was becoming increasingly frustrated, and the team was burning out under the load. So congrats to the team! This relieves a huge scaling bottleneck. It has been really cool to see how y'all build and scale.

Got any cool plugins you recommend? I'm finally getting comfortable after switching from OneNote and getting sync set up.

[dead]

Re: The Future of Obsidian Plugins

#56

Post by pier25 »

lnxg33k1 wrote: post #29
pier25 wrote: post #28

Very cool. Shame the website is dark mode only which only makes it harder to read for people with astigmatism.

But a very rare form of astigmatism I guess? Because I've had it for 30+ years and I can read it perfectly without any effort?

I can read it for like a minute or two. After that I get halation issues and the white text seems to start burning into my retina or something.

It's not so bad for a UI like eg Spotify but anything with actual text content is an issue.

Re: The Future of Obsidian Plugins

#57

Post by pier25 »

kepano wrote: post #31
pier25 wrote: post #28

Very cool. Shame the website is dark mode only which only makes it harder to read for people with astigmatism.

That's because Obsidian is black. But we're planning to add light mode in the near future :)

I'm a fan of Obsidian and your work but dark mode only is an issue for a big percentage of the population.

https://medium.com/@h_locke/why-dark-mode-causes-more-access...

Re: The Future of Obsidian Plugins

#58

Post by computershit »

random3 wrote: post #52
joeblogsmomma wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you have crazy custom files I feel like this is a non issue Obsidian is just rending markdown so any potential future app (or the influx of slop AI markdown editors/renderers) out there could do the job albeit worse than Obsidian.

Obsidian doesn't just render markdown though. There's a ton of functionality on top of Markdown which makes switching to any other tool very hard in reality. This is further exacerbated once you start relying on plugins (which arguably is the case with the majority of Obsidian users).

I mean, we're not talking about a hosted service here. Albeit not OSS, the client is free, API stable, fully functional offline, and very extensible. Even if Obsidian the company went away, the latest version of the app would continue to work and you would still own your data.

Re: The Future of Obsidian Plugins

#59

Post by dtkav »

soupfordummies wrote: post #36
dtkav wrote: post #13

For those not aware, it has basically been impossible to submit new plugins due to the manual review (and how easy/fun it is to write a plugin with AI). The developer community was becoming increasingly frustrated, and the team was burning out under the load. So congrats to the team! This relieves a huge scaling bottleneck. It has been really cool to see how y'all build and scale.

Got any cool plugins you recommend? I'm finally getting comfortable after switching from OneNote and getting sync set up.

IMO Obsidian is currently the king of "personal software frameworks". You can look at YT channels for inspiration of what other people are doing, but I'd avoid trying to copy someone else's setup (for the vague promise of productivity), and instead just start to tinker and tailor your environment to yourself. The base experience is really good. What matters most is that you spend time actually writing useful things down.

For personal use - Obsidian + AI (claude code / codex) + self-authored plugins is the best AI experience available. Folks like Karpathy have been writing a bit about LLM-powered wikis and context management. That seems to be causing a big wave of interest at the moment.

What I see from our business customers is all about AI in a collaborative context. The more advanced customers are typically developing an in-house plugin for their agent so they can make setup really easy, centralize token tracking, and aggregate learnings (while respecting employee privacy/customization). We also see strong interest in the privacy/security aspect from red teams (trying to track the huge influx of vulnerabilities).

IMO the practices for using Obsidian effectively in a work environment are under-represented on YT and in tutorials (we have done some light consulting in this area).

(I'm the developer of Relay / https://relay.md )

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