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Ditching Obsidian and building my own

amberwilliams.io

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Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#271

Post by taurath »

twodave wrote: post #269

Maybe I’m just not a very insightful person, but I can’t imagine ever having so many original and valuable thoughts that I’d need a place to store them. In fact, many of the things I think end up being wrong, so I’d rather use the Internet as my “PKMS” since it is more likely to refine what I think I know.

It’s more like.. project ideas you actually want to pick up, projects in progress, notes while learning something, journals, writing. It can definitely get heavy, but like a personal knowledge base can really be helpful. I store my measurements, health stuff.

Granted, I am neurodivergent and have memory issues, so it’s hard for me to say what use it’d be to anyone else. But like, if you’re doing research into something deep, experiments, etc , and you have to put it down sometimes, it’s nice to be able to pick up right after you left off.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#272

Post by taurath »

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…

I did this and hooo does Apple make it difficult to sync files without iCloud. I felt like it was too janky for my liking, and paid for obsidian sync, but I felt like it was really silly how an official app could do it no problem, but you can’t get generic functionality to work with iOS.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#273

Post by aidenn0 »

9dev wrote: post #194
williamsss wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can’t even compile stuff from 20 years ago without some extensive archeological efforts. I doubt this is your largest problem by then.

???

I have dozens of projects from 20 years ago that I can compile today.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#274

Post by barbazoo »

> Obsidian charges $8 a month to access the same notes across multiple devices. While not a huge amount for such a useful app, it adds up to an eye-watering amount - almost $1,000 if I planned to use Obsidian for a decade. I was surprised at this fee because I thought Obsidian was open-source.

Before going out and building my own software I’d have looked into self hosting the files. To save those couple bucks.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#275

Post by krick »

There are community plugins to self-host the sync-server though.

Anyway, I hate the fact I'm using closed-source editor, because it kinda is a sensitive thing, but the more I'm using Obsidian, the more unlikely the switch seems. I was kinda stingy with installing new plugins too, but, well, you cannot just ignore the productivity benefits. It doesn't seem feasible to build something like than on my own (for multiple platforms too!), and nobody brave enough seems to have made it so far.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#276

Post by krick »

rtrgrd wrote: post #252
miki123211 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, for those who are paranoid about relying on a company, setting up headscake is relatively quick and painless too - currently using it to sync between devices across multiple cities.

Should I be paranoid? I never tried Tailscale, and the idea of trusting 3rd party with managing access to my network does give me chills. But IDK, honestly, maybe it's silly? Is it in all honesty less likely that I'll fuck things up setting my own Headscale server, than that Tailscale™ will (consciously or otherwise) fuck me up?

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#277

Post by nine_k »

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…

What makes Tailscale more secure, or more reliable, than just a direct Wireguard tunnel?

Tailscale's complexity and features make sense when you have 200 nodes, or maybe 20 nodes at least. When you have 3-5 nodes, I think it's overkill, and a bunch of extra dependencies which may fail, and lock you out of your private nodes when you need it most.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#278

Post by pcpuser »

nine_k wrote: post #277
miki123211 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What makes Tailscale more secure, or more reliable, than just a direct Wireguard tunnel? Tailscale's complexity and features make sense when you have 200 nodes, or maybe 20 nodes at least. When you have 3-5 nodes, I think it's overkill, and a bunch of extra dependencies which may fail, and lock you out of your private nodes when you need it most.

NAT busting, and no key management. What extra dependencies does Tailscale have?

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#279

Post by krick »

braden-lk wrote: post #158
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…

Big obsidian fan, but I will say: notes being “just markdown” is not entirely true depending on how you use obsidian. If you are a plug-in heavy user, and those plugins introduce new syntax and lots of JavaScript functionality, you are accumulating a bespoke custom syntax that only works on your copy of obsidian with your set of plugins. Obsidian and those plugins are still free and are a huge benefit, but just somet…

Very much this. I cannot even fully agree with "plug-in heavy" remark: I mean, how heavy must it be, to be considered "plug-in heavy"? I consciously tried to limit plugin usage. But it really gets pretty wild soon. I was relatively lean for maybe the first 6 months, but when some patterns of how I use it become clear enough, it becomes pretty evident how inefficient many super-common situations are and how I can fix them just by installing a plugin.

Fast-forward a year, and all your vault structure implicitly relies on the quirks of Obsidian search behavior, the markdown you write is extremely obsidian-flavored markdown, and you don't even remember how to write LaTeX without LaTeX-Suite shortcuts.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#280

Post by ryanwhitney »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #235

It seems to really be an ad for Directus ( https://directus.io/ ) (?) That he used to replace Obsidian. One of the first image to hit me when I got there is a button "Start For Free". And if I want to run it on my own server in "production" it costs money? or at least you have to fill out a form and "Lets chat". When I go to a page, I click on pricing, and what I get is a form to fill out and "Lets Chat", I am out of…

Pricing page:

Open License $0 for qualifying users

Freely download and self-host Directus for any project without the need for a license. Get Started

If you and your organization have less than $5M in total annual income (revenue and any funding), then you do not need to pay for self-hosting Directus. This applies to all projects, including production and commercial projects.

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