My biggest Obsidian gripe is I want the sync service for easy collab with my coworkers, but I want to self-host it for free on a VM somewhere.
We use Git sync today and its very cumbersome.
Why I Like Obsidian
361–370 of 376 posts
Re: Why I Like Obsidian
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not all information needa to be remembered. Most of useful information should just be easily available. It's good to have a single place for all of that with the ability to easily move stuff from one place to another. It saves a lot of time and effort as well as makes everything work in the first place (you are making notes, actively thinking what to write, what is generally important and what is super important to b…
> Not all information needs to be remembered. So that's where I'm experimenting with this stance: it's either useful and I'm better off remembering it, or it's useless and I don't even need to write that down (see my first comment in this thread). > It's good to have a single place for all of that with the ability to easily move stuff from one place to another. Why aren't our brains better places for this, provided w…
>it's either useful and I'm better off remembering it, or it's useless and I don't even need to write that down
No, that's obviously not how the universe and information work. Pareto principle here at play as well.
> Why aren't our brains better places for this
Because they aren't. That's a strange question. Reality is reality., Our brains are not made for remembering (rote memorization; a mere 3-7 items can be short-term remembered and juggled with at one time), but for thinking and making connections.
Computers are amazing at storing information, but can't think.
If one is smart, he utilizes the strengths of tools/opportunities that are available to him instead of using them inefficiently.
Re: Why I Like Obsidian
#363I tried obsidian but felt it had too many gears and knobs and spent too many times fiddling with them. I fell back on this app which is based on local markdown storage but takes it up a notch.
The fact that everything is in plain text files on my computer is very important for me and future proofed.
Re: Why I Like Obsidian
#364Obsidian is a killer app and I've moved all my note taking to it over the past few months. The app is top notch in my opinion and with git integration you basically get a free Evernote with no restrictions and control over your data. I would say the one downside is that it's only "free" for those that have the technical knowhow to setup git sync. I tried converting my stepfather to using it but he didn't like that yo…
You can also put it in a Dropbox directory.
I actually do both. On one machine I keep it in the dropbox folder, and have Sync turned on.
Importantly, don't do this in multiple machines. Either: 1) Use Dropbox to store and keep your notes in sync across multiple machines 2) Use Dropbox as a backup on one machine, and use Sync on that and all other machines, but on the other machines, only point the Obsidian app to a copy of your vault outside of dropbox.
Otherwise, I could see you ending up in a horrible sync/dropbox update loop that would be a mess.
I do it this way so if Obsidian ever dies as a Sync service, I have a secondary backup. I might even eventually git a github repo for extraness.
Re: Why I Like Obsidian
#365I like Obsidian, too, having recently switched over from 9 years of OneNote (the fact that there's a tool to import my OneNote notes helped a lot). The most important tip for getting started with Obsidian, in my mind, is to absolutely ignore all of the Obsidian "power users." I'm 99% convinced that no one actually uses zettelkasten seriously, but even if so, it's overkill for when you're just checking out the app. An…
I tried it a few times but had to stop because: 1. Obsidian imposes its own take on Markdown. For instance, why can't we disable "indent using the tab key"? It's so annoying to accidentally indent/quote text while pressing tab to do something like "accept autocomplete suggestion". Obsidian's response to users' complaints about this was not reassuring: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/option-to-disable-tab-to-indent/... 2.…
Those are all good points. But to be clear for point #1, the devs never responded to this feature request. What you see in that thread is a couple of the community moderators (myself included, and all of my replies are tempered with "and I'd like it too") discussing some of the reasoning for why it likely is the way it currently is, and mostly just trying to simmer strong accusatory language. (But I totally understand the passion for our tools!)
#3 I'd likely be using my IDE (nvim) as well, except that I rely a lot on media and attachments for my work. And I just like to have dashboard/Kanban style views of things.
Re: Why I Like Obsidian
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tried it a few times but had to stop because: 1. Obsidian imposes its own take on Markdown. For instance, why can't we disable "indent using the tab key"? It's so annoying to accidentally indent/quote text while pressing tab to do something like "accept autocomplete suggestion". Obsidian's response to users' complaints about this was not reassuring: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/option-to-disable-tab-to-indent/... 2.…
Those are all good points. But to be clear for point #1, the devs never responded to this feature request. What you see in that thread is a couple of the community moderators (myself included, and all of my replies are tempered with "and I'd like it too") discussing some of the reasoning for why it likely is the way it currently is, and mostly just trying to simmer strong accusatory language. (But I totally understan…
In retrospect, you all did a decent job of evenly responding to my spicy comments.
I will admit I assumed at least one of my direct responses was from someone involved directly with the development or design, or I probably wouldn’t have taken the confrontational stance I did. A year or so later, it does feel a bit accusatory, as you say.
All said though, I also don’t use that forum anymore (though I sometimes land on it from Google searching for plugins or tips) and I certainly don’t submit bug reports.
Obsidian’s biggest flaw remains, IMO, that there’s not a good way to report an issue with any confidence it’ll get an even chance of being addressed.
As far as I could tell, at least at the time, if the devs didn’t jump on it immediately, it’d end up automoved to a graveyard before it could ever possibly get traction. When things felt like they started getting actively argued down without considering user stances, that’s what tipped me over.
But, as I said in another comment, I eventually came back to Obsidian and renewed the commercial license so I could use it at work. It is a good system. I just think it’d be that much better with a more effective feedback loop.
Re: Why I Like Obsidian
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not all information needs to be remembered. So that's where I'm experimenting with this stance: it's either useful and I'm better off remembering it, or it's useless and I don't even need to write that down (see my first comment in this thread). > It's good to have a single place for all of that with the ability to easily move stuff from one place to another. Why aren't our brains better places for this, provided w…
>it's either useful and I'm better off remembering it, or it's useless and I don't even need to write that down No, that's obviously not how the universe and information work. Pareto principle here at play as well. > Why aren't our brains better places for this Because they aren't. That's a strange question. Reality is reality., Our brains are not made for remembering (rote memorization; a mere 3-7 items can be short…
We're not talking about remembering whole Wikipedia articles though, and I'm guessing nobody puts entire encyclopedia articles in their Zettelkasten. Granted, we're not made to remember TBs of data, but the information I envision to find in somebody's Zettelkasten (well, mine, if I had one) is far more amenable to be remembered via SRS than TBs of random data. That was my conditional "provided we can retain the information": in my case, it'd be just as costly to enter it in my Zettelkasten as it'd be to remember it, so why not remember it instead?
I guess I'd need to see somebody either solely using a Zettelkasten, or Zettelkasten and SRS, and see what's in the Zettelkasten that I couldn't put in an SRS just as conveniently. It must also be content-specific; maybe I'd see a benefit if I were a sociologist like Niklas Luhmann was, but I'm not.
Another thing that changed since Luhmann's time is just how cheap it has become to retrieve most information. His Zettelkasten probably allowed him to quickly fetch information he remembered vaguely, faster than it'd be to open his books and see where it is. This benefit is mostly gone now that there are even faster options.
Re: Why I Like Obsidian
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those are all good points. But to be clear for point #1, the devs never responded to this feature request. What you see in that thread is a couple of the community moderators (myself included, and all of my replies are tempered with "and I'd like it too") discussing some of the reasoning for why it likely is the way it currently is, and mostly just trying to simmer strong accusatory language. (But I totally understan…
In retrospect, you all did a decent job of evenly responding to my spicy comments. I will admit I assumed at least one of my direct responses was from someone involved directly with the development or design, or I probably wouldn’t have taken the confrontational stance I did. A year or so later, it does feel a bit accusatory, as you say. All said though, I also don’t use that forum anymore (though I sometimes land on…
Since the time of that thread, the dev team has grown, and WhiteNoise has joined the team officially in charge of bugs. I don't know the full systems they use in the background.
But I think I can definitely see where some of the burden of sorting and cleaning things up (following bug templates, or avoiding duplicate feature requests, etc.) could be abstracted away from the users, so that even if they can't be guaranteed any followup, they at least don't get the experience of being instantly shot down, just because we're trying to organize a busy forum.
For example, I really like how Linear App takes feedback. They have a button in the app, with a simple text-field prompt, "What if...". All the sorting and prioritizing is invisible to the users, but then somehow they even send a courtesy email to users after a related change has been made. That might be a function of team size vs. userbase size. No idea.
Definitely some room to improve. I'll pass this conversation on to the team, thanks.
Re: Why I Like Obsidian
#369Obsidian is great. For those looking for an open source alternative (or don't want to pay the Obsidian fees for professional usage) check out Logseq: https://logseq.com/
Search for “Logseq data loss $current_year” and you’ll see horror stories of people who did everything exactly right and still lost a bunch of data from it. The most recent one I saw involved someone getting on a plane and thus losing Internet access to the paid syncing service. They did a bunch of work as they flew across the country. When they landed and the connection resumed, it synced everything back to the pre-…
Pretty much a weekly occurrence for my work with Confluence.
Never happened to me with Logseq, also why are we making a trend of something that has happened to 5 people out of 10000 users?
Kind of a bias when you see only horror stories of people losing data, but not the rest who are fine.
Re: Why I Like Obsidian
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don't need the extensive extension library of obsidian and want an open source tool, I would advise for Joplin. Tthe philosophy of logseq is completely different of obsidian (and joplin), being centered on lists instead of documents
Logseq is journaling app with graphs. Notes are not organized in folders, but tags. I find journaling much better. I never procrastinate deciding into what category/folder/doc notes should fit. I just put everything into journal and fluently refactor as time goes.
+1 and if you need to replicate some structure you can use namespaces like review/weekly