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Ditching Obsidian and building my own

amberwilliams.io

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Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#241

Post by montagg »

Wait. Sync is “free” if you want to use some other service other than Obsidian’s. I pay for Obsidian sync partially for slightly more convenience (fewer non-integrated points of failure) and also to support the app itself.

I’d gladly pay $1000 over a decade for a crucial tool. If the concern is open source and true longevity, I get it, you don’t get that here. But cost for value? Holy shit. $1000 over a decade is absolutely worth it for something you depend on.

If you’re a regular at a bar or restaurant, you pay an order of magnitude over $1000 a year for THAT service. This one is probably worth more.

I can, however, relate to the “every five years my system changes” problem. It’s not fun. At the same time, this is a reasonable cadence to re-evaluate things. If you found something perfect for you that works >5 years, holy crap. You are blessed. That honestly should not be the standard for tools these days—ESPECIALLY in a today’s world.

All that said: I don’t knock the author for trying to build software that can work for someone for 20 years or more. I salute that attempt—and I hope they can do it!—even if I think the specific details of how they got there are flawed.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#242

Post by airtonix »

miki123211 wrote: post #240
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…

Even better, set up Tailscale. It's far easier to set up, is much more reliable (e.g. when devices are behind firewalls), and uses direct (encrypted) connections when possible. You can get it to do what you want with just a few clicks. Things like exposing a IoT VLAN on your Tailnet or setting up an exit node to tunnel all internet traffic through your home are super easy. You can even share specific devices with fri…

or zerotier

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#243

Post by nis251413 »

scubbo wrote: post #231
vunderba wrote: post #3

Good article but as a heavy user of Obsidian (and previously Evernote), I would offer some counterpoints: > After some mental gymnastics weighing if I should continue with Obsidian, I found solace when asking myself "Can I see myself using this in 20 years?". I couldn't. The thought of cyclically migrating notes from one PKMS to another every 5 years, as I had done from Evernote to Notion to Obsidian, made me feel ti…

> Again, a little bit odd considering that the author is technically savvy enough to write an entire PKMS but didn't seem to consider that you can just check your markdown notes into a git repository and sync with the native android/iOS Obsidian app on a mobile device. Even simpler, I have mine in a Dropbox folder. Felt very strange for _this_ to be the straw that broke the camel's back for the author. Nonetheless, v…

Yeah, syncing text files across devices is a problem that has little to do with obsidian or whichever editor/renderer one uses. As long as one keeps things relatively simple with plugin-related syntax flavours, editors are interchangeable.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#244

Post by kepano »

charlie0 wrote: post #115

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) .

As of Obsidian 1.8.10 on Android you can choose to store your notes in the sandboxed app storage which means other apps can't access those files.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#245

Post by nickthegreek »

williamsss wrote: post #114
charlie0 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

your ai will straight up write you the plugin if it hadnt already done that seamlessly when you requested it render your file.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#246

Post by Sytten »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #181
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.

> But lets be realistic, 1000$ over 10 years is nothing Where is the limit ? While $100/year maybe doesn't sound like much, it's hardly the only subscription service you have, and they all add up, from your mail provider, office suite, cloud storage, streaming services, phone bills, internet service, etc. Personally I find $100/year to edit notes on my phone to be a bit much, but then again, I just use iOS Notes. I a…

I think that no matter that they do you will always find people complaining. That is humanity's favorite sport. Even when it's free and open source people still complain.

Making software for individual consumers is freaking hard. My own perspective as a founder shifted from "this is a viable method to build a sustainable business" to "let's use it as the base for B2B sales, but it is not viable".

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#247

Post by avtar »

charkubi wrote: post #193
mutoyoru wrote: post #41

> 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…

Apple allowing iCloud directories to be permanently downloaded fixed this for me.

Does the iCloud & Windows caveat still apply? https://help.obsidian.md/sync-notes

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#248

Post by wkat4242 »

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…

I do this too yes. It's a great extra level of security though probably not too smart to rely on as the only one.

It's true you're already screwed if they get past the VPN and I also don't set up Auth for stuff that doesn't have any private details. But don't count on just the VPN for sensitive stuff. Like password manager.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#249

Post by dankebitte »

miki123211 wrote: post #240
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…

Even better, set up Tailscale. It's far easier to set up, is much more reliable (e.g. when devices are behind firewalls), and uses direct (encrypted) connections when possible. You can get it to do what you want with just a few clicks. Things like exposing a IoT VLAN on your Tailnet or setting up an exit node to tunnel all internet traffic through your home are super easy. You can even share specific devices with fri…

> If you aren't comfortable with trusting them with control over your network

Wrt the possibility of Tailscale being compromised, there's the in-beta tailnet lock feature:

> Tailnet lock lets you verify that no node is added to your tailnet without being signed by trusted nodes in your tailnet. When tailnet lock is enabled, even if Tailscale infrastructure is malicious or hacked, attackers can't send or receive traffic in your tailnet. [1]

[1] https://tailscale.com/kb/1226/tailnet-lock

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#250

Post by bloqs »

Zambyte wrote: post #94
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.

These solutions are composable. Just run it on a VPS over a VPN.

But what if your home hypervisor goes down?
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