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Ditching Obsidian and building my own

amberwilliams.io

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Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#391

Post by meander_water »

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…

Totally agree, I personally have obsidian set up on multiple devices, and they all automatically sync to my local Synology NAS.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#392

Post by ezst »

Jarwain wrote: post #351
ezst wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've noticed that trillium has hierarchical notes; is there a view to look at an item higher on the tree and have it also have the contents of all its children? You are right that the "atom" of content is the block in an outliner and the Note in Trilium. If you can tolerate⁰ the coarser-granularity, you can make Trilium behave pretty closely to an outliner: notes can be embedded within notes, either manually, or vi…

Book is exactly what I was thinking of! I think my only other question is around my preferred "Daily Journal" workflow and unreferenced tags On one hand I feel some surprise that you're noting a distinction between metadata/tags for collections of notes vs collections of blocks. On the other hand, it's a bit of a peeve of mine that there's a distinction between "pages" and "blocks" in logseq when it comes to linking…

> I think my only other question is around my preferred "Daily Journal" workflow and unreferenced tags

how do you generally go about that? Trilium has the concept of day notes¹, incrementally building a time-structured hierarchy (years/months/days, but you can configure that however you want), under which you can park your notes. Or you can just let them stay unordered under an "#inbox"² for later categorisation. It's up to you.

My workflow include both time-based (log of events on that day, meetings and appointments happening on that day, etc), and time-independent notes (notes on projects, places, etc), and I have essentially 3 top-level hierarchies:

- Journal ← time-based

- Hierarchical notes ← time-independent

- Reference notes ← collections of things being often referred to

  - People

  - Places

  - …
(and I have a workspace³ for Personal-stuff and another for Work-related-stuff, but the Reference notes are "cloned⁴" - and hence accessible ‑ in both).

Interestingly, "Book" recently gained a "Calendar" mode, so you can very easily manage notes as events as well, move them from day to day, etc.

> On one hand I feel some surprise that you're noting a distinction between metadata/tags for collections of notes vs collections of blocks. On the other hand, it's a bit of a peeve of mine that there's a distinction between "pages" and "blocks" in logseq when it comes to linking & referencing.

At least it's consistent in that Trilium always holds metadata/tags at note-level. And using Inheritance⁵ and Templates⁶, you can guarantee that all your Reference notes are consistent in terms of type of metadata they hold (all Persons have a "born in" attribute, etc). At the moment I'm working on an extension of the "Book" note type to enable bulk metadata edition in an ag-grid control, effectively managing metadata like a database (not unlike what exists in Notion, but with composition/inheritance and proper sum types).

¹: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/day-notes.html ²: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/attributes.html ³: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/workspace.html ⁴: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/cloning-notes.html ⁵: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/attribute-inheritanc... ⁶: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/template.html

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#393

Post by coolcase »

ozyschmozy wrote: post #380
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…

I don't disagree with the overall comment but this bit seems like extreme hyperbole: > If you're a regular at a bar or restaurant, you pay an order of magnitude over $1000 a year for THAT service. This one is probably worth more. An order of magnitude over 1k per year is almost $30 per day, every day.

Hyperbole for some but hypobole for others I am sure

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#394

Post by coolcase »

KetoManx64 wrote: post #286
Dylan16807 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of tools that are very useful but I'm not going to spend that much on. My water bottle is one. And I don't think food is a good comparison. Or renting a physical space, depending on what you get out of being a regular. Still, the basic price of $50 a year for sync is something I wouldn't be very upset with... except my main goal is a collaborative setup with other people and I'm not paying 5x or more to…

It comes down to how much is your time worth. If you're a developer making $100K+ a year, a $1,000 over a decade is nothing if it increases your productivity 2-3X compared to your collegues, which considering the fact that some of my colleagues store their notes in Windows Notepad is a complete underestimation.

So obsidian let's me get 40 hours of work had I used notepad for notes done in 13-20 hours?

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#395

Post by coolcase »

poulpy123 wrote: post #386
yathaid wrote: post #356

> Obsidian charges $8 a month to access the same notes across multiple devices. While not a huge amount for such a useful app, it adds up to an eye-watering amount - almost $1,000 if I planned to use Obsidian for a decade. This highlights one of my personal bugbears. People have a mental barrier when it comes to recurring, low-cost payments; even though the net sum is small in comparison to other things that they wou…

> People have a mental barrier when it comes to recurring, low-cost payments; It's because they add up. In this specific case, considering OP job and it's heavy use of obsidian, it makes no sense to not pay for the synchro, if only to support the company[1], but if I was paying 8€/month for all software and service I'm using I would be bankrupted immediately. Ironically this hurt open source and companies proposing g…

Also it is competing with a free editor and USB stick that has been around since 2000. That's the anchor.

Then now you have Google docs, Dropbox, O365, Notion, Confluence, etc.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#396

Post by Ardren »

ErrorNoBrain wrote: post #371
microtonal wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Syncthing... It can do it too handles syncing my pictures too

I can second Syncthing. I just use a simple markdown editor with Syncthing on Windows, Android, and a Linux.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#397

Post by Zambyte »

akerl_ wrote: post #302
Zambyte wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing. You probably though I said "VPN over a VPS", which would just be the same as a VPN, which isn't composing the solutions.

You're suggesting to use a VPS in a thread that's specifically about self-hosting on a home network, and about there being cons to that compared to hosting on a cloud/VPS platform. So you're sort of driving parallel to the existing commentary.

The parent comment to mine did that.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#398

Post by midasz »

throaway920181 wrote: post #300
miki123211 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is also my big frustration. I've set it to an Adguard instance that's also on tailscale and the app keeps getting into a faulty state. I've been looking into hosting the Adguard instance on the open web and securing it another way but bit short on time lately.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#399

Post by FinnLobsien »

I'll always applaud people building things and experimenting and building momentum, so I think this is a worthwhile exercise, but practically questionable.

I think this is extreme micro-optimization of something that ultimately matters little (or not at all).

The hard part of PKM isn't finding the perfect tool, it's to take the time to:

-read/experience something and actually take good notes on it -actually retrieve something from your notes and add to it with new knowledge

Those two activities are how you get almost 100% of the benefit of note-taking, whether you're using a self-hosted sync or a folder of txt files.

Of course, a few things make these easier (linking, RAG, daily docs), but most of the common tools now offer this

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#400

Post by dax_ »

thenoblesunfish wrote: post #335

My solution: a bunch of Markdown files in a git repo. I move between files with Vim's `gf`. I sync manually. If I really need to, I can edit through GitHub's web UI. Not ideal in amy way, but wicked simple.

Can't you do the same with Obsidian too? It's also just Markdown, and I believe there's even a plugin to perform Git commands within Obsidian. The main issue you can run into, is when you overly rely on markup syntax that only works in Obsidian.
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