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Ditching Obsidian and building my own

amberwilliams.io

221–230 of 570 posts

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#221
I applaud the action, but motivation is strange. I am all for making custom software for your own needs and tailored for own use cases, but price?

How much does your VPS costs vs Obsidian subscription? I wonder. Is it like 1 5$/month micro machine and you just pray that it will survive for 10 years without data loss?

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wish all markdown editors just had their markdown files in a simple folder like Obsidian does.

I wanted to like Bear, which advertises that it uses markdown. But when I went looking for the files, they were locked away in a database. This was many years ago, so if this has changed, I’d be happy to hear it.

I’d love to be able to easily jump between apps, which markdown should allow in theory, but in practice view apps allow for. I don’t find using a text editor to be ideal here as a solution, as I want my notes to look like notes and hide away the syntax when the cursor isn’t on the syntax. Obsidian handles this well, most text editors do not.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#224
post #147

I wish there was something as lightweight and as well integrated as Apple Notes. Just support MD, sync well and have a search function.

I replaced Obsidian with VS Code and a git repo. After using Obsidian for a couple of years I realized use a very limited set of features - editing markdown in a directory structure. All I needed was really the directory structure view to the left and content to the right.

That’s also one of the options I considered. Right now I have a git-synced obsidian but it feels awkward.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#225
post #203

I find it just a bit crazy that this is still an issue. I too jumped from Evernote when they did their rug pull in 2016, landed on Emacs+org-mode, and never looked back. Since then I've adopted Orgzly for org-mode on my phone, and syncthing to keep it all synced. The only real issue I ever had was the occasional conflict, which I resolved by splitting one of the files further into things that got modified on the lapt…

The discontinuation of Syncthing for Android bothers me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41895718

I did see that a while back, but I haven't had any issues so didn't look into it. A quick search just now though shows Syncthing-Fork on F-Droid, so it should be an easy migration if there does come a need. I did the same with Orgzly a few months ago as it too was forked due to the original dev going MIA, and there were a few annoyances I wanted resolved.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#226

> 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…

Same. I admit I've running into a few syncing headaches over the years, but given the cost of $0 and the fact it's open source, I recommend it too.

I previously rolled my own notes system and I find Obsidian plus Syncthing is better. Plugins are a big deal.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#227
post #96

I ditched for [silverbullet]( https://silverbullet.md ). MIT licensed, markdown editor with embedded lua scripting. It's a PWA app that works offline and syncs well.

Thanks for mentioning this, it looks exactly what I want; a markdown web app that stores the files using the filesystem on the backend!

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#228
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…

You can also set up DNS records pointing to your home server's VPN IP, which, with Tailscale, I've found to be pretty static and then a reverse proxy on your home server. So I have my home network apps running on app1.my-domiain.com app2.my-domain.com, app3.my-domain.com etc, which only work when I'm connected to the VPN. The downsides are that I need to be connected to the VPN at home to use the domain and I current…

You can fix them both in one. In your local network you host a local DNS, in my case I’m using pihole. It has records which point to the local IP of a reverse proxy. With this setup you can have SSL for your domain names on your local network.

To make it then work outside your local network, in tailscale settings you use “split dns” to set your DNS to be the IP of your pihole in the tailnet for your domain. Now when you try hit your local domains you should receive the same local IPs that you do at home. Then in the tailscale route settings of your machine hosting the reverse proxy you make it advertise the subnet of those local IPs. Now when you receive the local IPs your devices using the tailscale VPN should go to your home server with SSL and no external DNS.

Hope that’s somewhat clear enough

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#229
> 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

On Android, I solved this problem quite simply by pointing Obsidian's mobile app at a syncthing folder, which cheerfully communicates with my workstation (and about a dozen other devices I own) and keeps things up to date. Works way better than I expected it to. Honestly the most infuriating part is that Google seems to have decided that apps like syncthing aren't welcome on the Play Store anymore, leaving the maintenance of that particular app up in the air. But the point here is that Obsidian can point to any folder, and the syncing task is totally separate. It's nice to have the convenience of their hosted option, but it's by no means the only solution to that problem.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#230
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.

I have wg into home and wg into an aws instance. All my mobile and laptops can reach them.
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