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Ditching Obsidian and building my own

amberwilliams.io

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Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#41

Post by mutoyoru »

> Obsidian was a great tool for me personally for a long time. But I felt frustrated when I wanted to access my notes on my phone while on-the-go and saw that I had to pay for this feature.

I'm using Syncthing [0] to sync my vault between devices. On my main PC, Syncthing runs constantly in the background. Say, if I made a change, and want to send those changes to my phone, I open the application on my phone and let it fetch the changes. It's not perfectly smooth, like Obsidian's own integration, but I prefer this instead of setting a Git repository. Also, the files don't stay in a remote server.

[0]: https://syncthing.net

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#44

Post by Trasmatta »

> Obsidian charges $8 a month to access the same notes across multiple devices.

It's $4 actually, for the normal plan that works perfectly well for most use cases. It's also end to end encrypted, which is great. And it's not just about syncing for me, it's about a backup solution for the notes.

> I started to have concerns about the longevity of the plugins and app itself. Some of you may remember when Evernote aggressively limited free users to 50 notes, many users migrated their notes elsewhere. I was one of those users.

The great thing about Obsidian (in comparison to Evernote), is that everything is just a plain text markdown file on disk. You can open those files in any app. If Obsidian goes away someday, all your notes can continue to be edited in any plain text editor. Sometimes I open notes in VS Code, because there are certain things I just prefer writing there.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#45

Post by TiredOfLife »

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.

Can I have those 1000$ if you think that is nothing?

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#46

Post by shigi42 »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #9
horsellama wrote: post #8

fwiw, on mac/ios you can put your obsidian vault inside icloud directory and have a “free” cross-device sync feature.

Works if you are in the Apple ecosystem entirely. I have read there are difficulties if you want to sync to a non Apple device under this approach

This is one of the reasons I use a git repo along with iCloud. Anyway, using iCloud across 4+ Apple devices has not been a problem in general.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#47

Post by e28eta »

williamsss wrote: post #29
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…

Thanks for the feedback! Agreed Git can be used to sync your notes. Its a great solution for those comfortable putting their notes into a Git repo like Github. I wasn't comfortable with that however. Currently vetting a way to sync my database files with my markdown files on my laptop, so it functions similar to Obsidian. I enjoy Vim too much to work constrained to Directus' markdown editor!

What about git makes you uncomfortable?

I saw that you didn’t want to use a 3rd party provider, but why not stick a git repo on your VPS (which you are trusting with your data today) and use that to coordinate syncs between your client devices?

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#48

Post by williamsss »

ollien wrote: post #25

I wrote my own CLI tool for notes a few months ago ( https://github.com/ollien/quicknotes ). A web interface with proper rendering is something I thought about, but didn't pursue because I just know my UI skills aren't up to the task. Directus is a really interesting compromise!

This is just the sort of tooling there should be more community around.

A gif would help clarify what your tool does. I've used an automated flow with Github Actions and Charm's VHS (https://github.com/charmbracelet/vhs) in my repo here to demo my CLI tool I built a while back (https://github.com/Amber-Williams/yall/blob/main/demo.gif). Might be of interest : )

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#50

Post by sabellito »

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…

For single page web apps I use pagecrypt [0] and just publish the html file (with inline scripts and styles) as public files.

[0] https://pagecrypt.maxlaumeister.com

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