Ditching Obsidian and building my own

That's not necessarily true. Some apps keep only cached copies of the data and the rest on the cloud. Sometimes the local files are in a binary format that is unreadable without the export functionality, and newer releases of certain apps remove the export functionality.

> 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

Obviously this depends on the exact app.

But I don't think you can credibly claim that a textual format like markdown isn't easier to parse than... well, almost any other format.

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

I didn't make it up. It depends on the alternative app you're talking about. Some export full data including all metadata, some don't include all metadata, etc.

My point is that if all the data is actually just markdown files on your computer, there is no question of whether you have all the data.

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

Once again, depends on the specific app. I was a long-term user of Evernote, and still have a subscription. I just checked, and it looks like you can export to a format called "enex", or to a single html page, or to pdf. That's awesome! And the chance that you won't be able to use this in another app is next to nothing, since everyone works to be able to import Evernote.

It's still a tradeoff between the extra functionality you get from Evernote, vs. the simplicity of the "export" files you have. In Obsidian, there's no separate export, the files are stored in simple-to-read Markdown. But you get less functionality.

It's a tradeoff. I'm not saying one is better than the other. But pretending there isn't a tradeoff is quite simply wrong.

> 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

Yes. I wouldn't use Obsidian to do anything that would require a spreadsheet. I'd simply use Excel, since it's a billion times better at it.

I'm certainly not against using the right tool for the job, nor am I against proprietary formats in general.

I don't see it being discussed that widely.

Also another aspect is that many people seems to think Obsidian is open source, while it is not so.

Other than that it's exactly what it says on the tin, a hacker's digital notebook. While it would take a bit of rolling up your sleeves to make it look as nice as Logseq or Obsidian it's actually closer in form and function to something like org-mode for Emacs (though not quite hitting the mark regarding linking sadly).

It would seem to me that it would leave out a whole lot of complexity to just use Google Drive / OneDrive / iCloud Drive to handle the synchronization across devices, and if need be you could then just add encryption on the cloud storage (if desired), which you would need to do anyway for the dedicated sync service. It would also reduce the infrastructure cost a lot, and utilize resources already available.