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Ditching Obsidian and building my own

amberwilliams.io

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Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#321

Post by theshrike79 »

harvey9 wrote: post #63
trwhite wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s $4 a month to sync Obsidian notes, for anyone wondering.

It's a good price but still feels wasteful if you also run/pay for nextcloud or similar.

For me it was the It Just Works-iness of it combined with a handy way to support the project cheaply.

As long as I'm paying for it, I'm the client and not the product.

I tried some of the third party stuff, iCloud, Dropbox, etc and with all of them I either lost data because of notes not being in sync or had to manually fix stuff. $4/month and zero issues was well worth it for a tool I literally use every day.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#322

Post by trinsic2 »

hartator wrote: post #15
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.

I think the author point still stands though: Obsidian won’t probably be here in 20 years.

We'll see. I think there is a chance that it will.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#323

Post by theshrike79 »

wiseowise wrote: post #311
montagg wrote: post #241

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 abs…

That’s common thought process: “tool that I use more than 10 times a day to amplify my knowledge? $10 a month? Eye watering!”. Oh well, time to grab that Uber eats for $20 third time this week.

People are really bad with quantifying things.

I can easily grab a few imperial stouts for the weekend for 20€ but will balk at paying for a search engine.

Until I did the math of use per euro and Kagi turned out to be well worth it. I just drink one beer less a month and it's paid for and I'm healthier too =)

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#324

Post by Wilder7977 »

I_am_tiberius wrote: post #58

Does anyone know of a tool that can e2e + collaboration (or in other words: notion but e2e)?

Anytype. Local-first, p2p sync with e2ee. It uses the notion model (everything is an object, you can create "databases" with queries of objects). It doesn't store markdown directly I believe, but it can export into markdown perfectly.

I recently moved to anytype from logseq as it hit for me all the right notes for personal stuff, shared family stuff and work stuff.

I wanted something like notion but faster and most importantly, private.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#325

Post by hexmiles »

cobertos wrote: post #264
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…

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.

In my case I simply create two wireguard tunnels (one called "vpn", the other called "guest") and use firewall rules to block all traffic from the "guest" tunnel to all service except the one that should be "public" (in my case a minecraft server).

I think you could technically do it with a single tunnel by using firewall rules that refer to the IP address of the single peer but it's less convenient.

NOTE: I also added a dedicated dnsmasq instance only for the "guest" tunnel so that they have DNS working and can use hostnames instead of IP address.

This setup is trivial with both OpenWrt and OpnSense, but it should be doable also with manual setup

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#326

Post by shellwizard »

bloqs wrote: post #250
Zambyte wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But what if your home hypervisor goes down?

If you trust someone in your neighborhood/family, you can ask them to power cycle your host and water your plants

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#327

Post by memming »

microtonal wrote: post #313
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. Also, Obsidian supports free iCloud sync if you are a Mac and iOS user. I know that's only a subset of users, but a nice option to get Obsidian to sync…

iCloud sync is too unreliable and opaque for me.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#328

Post by eviks »

edanm wrote: post #316
eviks wrote: 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.

Not true for a variety of reasons: 1. You're relying on the external service to continue providing the export functionality, or else doing regular backups. 2. The format of the exports might be proprietary, so it might be orders of magnitude more difficult to parse. 3. The export might not contain all the data. 4. Even if the export isn't to a proprietary format, it might be to a format that's much harder to parse th…

1. No, the data is already local, the app is already local, you're not relying on anything.

2. Or it might be orders of magnitude easier to parse vs replicating all the plugins functionality. You're just arbitrarily making the alternative worse

3. That's again something you've made up that's not a generic feature of alternative proprietary format

4. It might also be export to markdown. Again, unless you make up artificial barriers

But you can also do it the other way, for example, anything non-trivial like some large table with in-cell formatting won't be readable in your primitive plain text-based proprietary format, so it will be much worse that the unreadable Excel xml or its binary alternative, but that would still be a much preferable export format since no, you're not going to develop a new spreadsheet parser that some obsidian plugin uses to make sense of it

> it's fairly readable even without any parsing, as opposed to, say, exporting in HTML.

that's true for primitive formatting needs, but in this case there are tools that can convert html to markdown that would easily do that

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#329

Post by surrTurr »

I also tried to build my own Obsidian[^1] a few months ago. However, I stopped using it after some time, since maintaining it would realistically be a full-time job. What I also found super annoying was the feeling that I'm never done with it. Whenever I encountered a rough edge or missing feature, I had to (obviously) implement it myself.

All in all, I find Obsidian as good as it gets. Also, Obsidian is probably one of the best options in terms of longevity, as all notes are just Markdown files, no proprietary DBs or other BS that could lock you in.

[1]: https://github.com/AlexW00/brainforge-desktop

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#330

Post by smarx007 »

ryanwhitney wrote: post #280
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.

I think, to be fair, we need to evaluate if this will still be true in 20 years - the same standard to which Obsidian was held.
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