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Ditching Obsidian and building my own

amberwilliams.io

291–300 of 570 posts

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#291
post #282

At the meta level, my life is already too short to allow closed-source tools for anything on which I may need to depend in the long term. Commercial entities come and go, for reasons important for them but not necessarily for me. Old, ancient code can be made to run, as long as it's available and legal to distribute and run. If it's useful enough, I will be not the only user by far, and there'll be enough collective…

On the inverse, even as a FOSS advocate, my life is too short to only use open source software all the time and to reinvent the wheel and tools that have been put together into one fantastic product by the combined effort of hundreds of people. I used Joplin for years, I even self hosted the Joplin Sync server, but Obsidian + Community addons runs literal miles around it from a performance and user cusomizability sta…

The product may be fantastic, and thus a force multiplier. But it can see an abrupt end, thus incurring a loss. Whether you win more than you lose, on average, depends on the use case, and the particular advantages. As everything in life, this us a trade-off.

My point is that for long-term, high-investment stuff, in my particular view, the possibility of interruption and loss outweighs any possible upside, and any migration would be costly. Similarly, a move from a house where you lived for 20-30 years by its disruptiveness may tantamount to surviving a flood or a fire.

For "short-term" tools this is not so, very obviously, but they do not need my investment, hence they would incur no loss were I to migrate off them if a replacement exists. I could not replace Google with anything, but then DDG and then Kagi appeared, and largely replaced Google web search for me, quite seamlessly. When a better LLM appears, I will start using it instead of Claude. Etc.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#292
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…

Any idea on how to segment a VPN between friends? I have a few critical servers on my VPN I only want one or two devices to access, but no other devices. Mostly so that in case a rogue device enters or a friend gets hacked, there's no access to my sensitive services.

You can do this on tailscale with their ACL. It is super flexible for nailing down exactly which users/devices can talk to what on your network.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#293
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

How do you identify yourself to Tailscale?

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#294
post #276
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Tailscale has made all of their client source code available for anyone to view so if you want to confirm that you’re not sending unencrypted data or keys through their servers you’re more than free to do so.

https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale

I think there is some merit to setting up wireguard (e.g. you want more devices than what Tailscale offers for free, or their servers become unreliable for some reason)

But people who push the “scarey boogeyman will look at your data” with Tailscale are either technically illiterate or overly-paranoid.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#295
post #232
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A proprietary format with an export function allows you the same inconvenience of having to write code for processing.

No. You might not be able to load the program to get to the export button. They might paywall it away. Etc.

No, there is no paywall or etc. This is not an imaginary anything goes area, but simple note taking where you have local client with locally synced data which can always export, so this risk doesn't exist

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#296
post #253

What do people's success stories with fancy PKMS looks like? I get writing stuff down, but I've never quite gotten the deep linking stuff. I tend to just be able to get away with some basic folders.

Same here. I get a massive amount of value out of writing things down at home and at work. I get comparably little value out of linking things together — beyond direct references at least. I think this may be a difference in how different people think and recall information.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#297
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How do you identify yourself to Tailscale?

My nodes identify themselves with keys signed by the other nodes as per tailnet lock: https://tailscale.com/kb/1226/tailnet-lock

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#298
Obsidian answers one of the key questions I asked these days of tools that I use, “Can I walk out of this easily and seamlessly?”

The best tools are the ones that get things done and get out of the way. When the time comes, you can walk out of Obsidian easily without being a hostage in any format.

The few plugins that I use are the ones I can walk out too and live without it. I love the idea of spending extra time to learn the details, shortcuts, and be able to use a tool natively without the help of plugins or extreme configurations that it takes hours/days to deviate too far away from the original configurations.

I wrote an article for me to remember it in future. https://brajeshwar.com/2025/obsidian/

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#299
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 traff…

The pricing page suggests this is only for the "enterprise" plan.

It is definitely on personal as I use it myself.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#300
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…

For the most part I like Tailscale, but there's weirdness on Android with their app + Private DNS.
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