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Ditching Obsidian and building my own

amberwilliams.io

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Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#111

Post by raesene9 »

hartator wrote: post #15
Sytten wrote: post #5

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.

I think the author point still stands though: Obsidian won’t probably be here in 20 years.

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.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#112

Post by accrual »

rafram wrote: post #71
lolinder wrote: post #6

> 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 th…

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.

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.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#113

Post by lolinder »

SahAssar wrote: post #97
lolinder wrote: post #6

> 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 th…

So you've managed to unlearn the last decade of security learnings in regards to zero-trust and similar concepts?

I'm not running a business, I'm running a home. The threat models are totally different and I adjust my security posture accordingly.

Besides, I don't bother with auth for simple services, not stuff that actually hosts data. If someone unauthorized is inside my network they're not going to be interested in using my TTS/STT service or in finding out the last barcode I scanned or in using my tiny consumer GPU to generate tokens on an LLM—there are way worse things they could be doing at that point than fiddling with the many tiny services I have set up.

Also: I couldn't set up so many silly, inconsequential services if I didn't have a VPN. With my setup, every new idea I have can be a quick service on my network accessible by me anywhere in the world. If I had to expose each of these things to the internet I wouldn't bother running them at all lest they have an exploit that ends up being an entrypoint into my network.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#114

Post by williamsss »

charlie0 wrote: post #109
williamsss wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback! Agreed Git can be used to sync your notes. Its a great solution for those comfortable putting their notes into a Git repo like Github. I wasn't comfortable with that however. Currently vetting a way to sync my database files with my markdown files on my laptop, so it functions similar to Obsidian. I enjoy Vim too much to work constrained to Directus' markdown editor!

The odd part here is why take it to 100%+ when you can just build a plugin on Obsidian rather than re-building the whole thing? Seems a bit extreme.

In 20 years will that plugin work? I doubt it.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#115

Post by charlie0 »

I'm a lot more concerned about some random app on my phone accessing my Obsidian notes, which is why I haven't synced them to my phone yet, rather than Obsidian somehow knee-capping at some point in the future (which is not possible since it's all just md files in the end) .

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#116

Post by accrual »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #75
rafram wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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".

Fail2ban or rate-limiting SSH into a block table are useful layers to have as well.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#119

Post by flkiwi »

As a longtime Logseq user who was sick of their app focus (it used to be a webapp!) and skeptical of their revenue model, I switched to Silverbullet a while back. It gets the basics right, and I can throw together some Lua and make it do whatever else I want. Plus there's a small but enthusiastic community developing for it. I have it set up in a VPS and it has brought back most of the magic of early days Logseq.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#120

Post by bayindirh »

Saris wrote: post #106
layer8 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To clarify, by “on iOS your only non-paid choice is iCloud” I meant for the Obsidian app specifically. Other apps do provide the option to sync with non-Apple cloud storage, without payment. There are multitudes of pros and cons regarding choosing an iPhone. The restrictions of the Obsidian app is only a single one of those. Choosing an Android phone has drawbacks of its own.

Obsidian lets you pick any folder you want when setting up the notebook, so you could put it in any of your synced folders right? Or does the iOS version of Obsidian do things differently?

The iOS version asks you whether you want to store your vault in iCloud or not only.

However, if you don't store your vault in iCloud, it creates an Obsidian folder inside the area which can be accessed by Files app (as I just checked), which means, any application having files integration can access and sync that folder.

Even if you store your vault in iCloud, it's still accessible by any app which offer files integration [0].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43972056

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