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Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

obsidian.md

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Re: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

#31

Post by ericax »

amflare wrote: post #27

I want to like this application, and the little time I was able to spend in it certainly displayed a lot of promise. But it only worked for one day. Since then, it will not display any of the files. I know it is still connected since I can make new files and folders and see them appear in my directories, and before I tried to refresh the vault I could still see my tags. But Obsidian refuses to show anything in the fi…

Could you please reach out on our forum or Discord so we can help you debug?

Link to forum and Discord: https://obsidian.md/community

Re: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

#33

Post by programmarchy »

joaogui1 wrote: post #3

I've migrated from Roam to Obsidian and it's really awesome. I have ownership of my files, there are constant updates with newer features and bug fixes and the community is really nice :)

I haven't gotten my invite to Roam yet, but isn't an aspect of Roam that you can network with others to aid in collaboration and discovery?

Privacy is great, but for collaborative research, Obsidian's model seems to be at a disadvantage.

Re: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

#34

Post by katktv »

justtocomment wrote: post #22

Can't comment on the merits of the product itself. That in the first five minutes of this post being online, several users more or less claim that this has changed their lives in their first-ever comment on HN strikes me as a little odd however. (Yes I'm aware that this is also my first-ever comment on HN.)

This got shared on their discord, but I s2g that it really is the case, given that I use a similar tool called Roam, which recently had such a big spike of attention (in part due to Thomas Frank's video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxOffM_tVHI) and somewhat popularized what Obsidian is kind of aiming for here (so much that Roam had to close registrations due to massive traffic influx). Plenty of ppl just swear by Roam at this point, including its creator who has big vision for a thing. Here is his white paper on a thing: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/help/page/Vu1MmjinS.

I can attest to that as well, and given that Roam is unavailable, would suggest to try out this alternative that is pretty decent for what it does (even though Conaw (Roam's creator) does think it doesn't exactly align with what Roam really seeks to do, yk the thing)

Edit: to elaborate, I am not raving about either Roam or Obsidian, I am raving about they approaches they provide, and after nearly a month of using Roam it honestly feels like a game changer to me. Solved my art block a bit as well.

Re: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

#35

Post by justtocomment »

ericax wrote: post #25
justtocomment wrote: post #22

Can't comment on the merits of the product itself. That in the first five minutes of this post being online, several users more or less claim that this has changed their lives in their first-ever comment on HN strikes me as a little odd however. (Yes I'm aware that this is also my first-ever comment on HN.)

We have been in private beta for a few months already, with 5000+ beta testers and a community. We did let them know that we're doing a "Show HN" today. Hope that explains things!

Thanks for taking the time to reply! I guess it does explain things ...

Best of luck with the product, also +1 to the suggestion of an open source client from a sibling thread!

Re: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

#36

Post by loughnane »

I will never again build any kind of workflow for my knowledge on top of anything that isn’t open source. 5y is a long time and 10y is an eternity for these sorts of products but its just a fraction of my working life.

My own personal setup is a bunch of markdown files and it’s great, so I like that approach, but I’m very cautious about investing time for something so important in a product i don’t control.

Re: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

#37

Post by DC-3 »

cxr wrote: post #14

It looks like this isn't open source. If this is supposed to be one's second brain, please at least consider using a time-bomb FOSS license. Something like: you're permitted to use Obsidian under Apache/MIT/GPL license either 7 years after a given release, or effective immediately in the event that Obsidian shuts down.

Thanks for raising this. I couldn't imagine using anything like this without a serious guarantee that if development ever bogs down I'd still have some way to keep it working and up-to-date. Even if the founders honestly intend this to be the case, who is to say that the firm that buys them up feels similarly?

Re: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

#38

Post by abledon »

ericax wrote: post #7

Maker here, excited to be on Hacker News. Obsidian is going into public beta today! (We're also on Product Hunt, come check us out!) We made Obsidian to be your long-term second brain and personal knowledge base. As you put in more notes and make more connections, the knowledge base gets more valuable, so we think it's important that you can 100% own your data and not rely on any cloud services. We believe you second…

can you do a quick and dirty screenshare demo of how you use it and post that to youtube? e.g. setting up some notes after a fake brainstorming session or micro LSD dose etc..

Re: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

#39

Post by qppo »

I actually get a lot of value from cloud hosted solutions, I bounce between 2-3 machines daily and multiple OS installations several times a week, and would like for my notes taken on one machine to just be there when I write notes on another machine.

Another thing I need to do often is type up design docs collaboratively, we use google docs for this currently but it sucks for our use cases.

And finally, I read and write a lot of GH wiki pages and various markdown notes in git repos for open source collaboration, which isn't really helpful for cross referencing information.

Is there any way to do this with obsidian? I'm all for owning my data but tbh, a lot of the powerful features you demonstrate only make sense for me if I can throw my data up on a server and make it accessible from anywhere with an internet connection.

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