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Ditching Obsidian and building my own

amberwilliams.io

131–140 of 570 posts

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#131
Obviously no right answer, but personally I think worrying too much finding the perfect tool instead of just integrating more knowledge to your PKMS is a distraction.

Rolling your own solution is especially limiting in the context of the sheer amount of integrations the popular ones (like Notion for example) support.

You're basically saying you will quickly build something better than the X hundred engineers at PKMS company Y quickly and it will continue to be better than what X hundred engineers will iterate upon.

I think that time is just better spent learning and picking the subset of features that, for example, Notion offers that really improves your learning rate.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#132

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.

Some people just enjoy the process, and you'll always learn something new

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#133

Kudos to the author for scratching their own itch. People in a similar position might be interested in Joplin, which is indeed FOSS, and has lots of sync options. I personally use SyncThing, which keeps things free, but you can also use a number of other free cloud providers. You can choose to encrypt your notes to protect your privacy.

If you need a little bit more than Joplin (which is a great notes taking app, but not so much of a PKMS), give Trilium¹ a try! (I used Joplin for a little while, and it's a good tool, and it's fine not to chase for more if you don't need it, but if you do, not much beats Trilium, IMO)

¹: https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes/

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#134

> 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…

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...

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#135
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.

> 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.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#136
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…

+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.

On Android devices? If so: how? :)

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#137

> Obsidian charges $8 a month to access the same notes across multiple devices. It's $4 actually, for the normal plan that works perfectly well for most use cases. It's also end to end encrypted, which is great. And it's not just about syncing for me, it's about a backup solution for the notes. > I started to have concerns about the longevity of the plugins and app itself. Some of you may remember when Evernote aggre…

I tend to start a note with frontmatter in Obsidian, drop into vim to do the writing, then back into Obsidian to clean things up. Wish there were a cleaner way to do it, but it works for me.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#138
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".

Another option is port knocking. Super easy to set up and with 4 knocks it provides 64 bits of randomness.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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.

On Android devices? If so: how? :)

I don't use it with wireguard, but Zerotier works just fine on Android.
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