[dead]
Ditching Obsidian and building my own
461–470 of 570 posts
Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wasn't the syncthing android app deprecated relatively recently?
It was if you install it from google's app store, but it's still fully functional for now if you install it from F-droid.
I've been using Obtainium to install Android apps from Github releases and automatically update them. It's worked great.
Syncthing's .apk release files can be found here: https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android/releases
Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own
#463Wait. 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…
> If you found something perfect for you that works >5 years, holy crap. You are blessed. Having been unable to find an out-of-the-box app fitting my needs, I built my own personal finances app in 2012 and I'm using it weekly since then. I'll probably work again on it one day because the technical stack is old, which makes it harder to host, but otherwise it still does exactly what I want, how I want it. > That hones…
I think its not that its unhealthy, it's that things are unfortunately such that its arare and beautiful thing when it happens and if you expect more you are bound to be disappointed.
Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own
#464I 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…
Or use Joplin which is open source and also creates markdown files, and setting up sync to a cloud provider that you probably already have is free.
Joplin uses its own database, it can't edit Markdown files.
Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own
#465Good 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…
I think of the sync paid tier as analogous to a patreon membership, combined with paying someone a tiny amount to manage my data for me. The fact that it's all markdown makes me confident I could take my files and go play elsewhere at any time, but I enjoy knowing my money helps keep Obsidian going.
Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own
#466I've been doing this for a while. My biggest hurdle was implementing sync between local and backend. I ended up using GitHub as my backend, Chrome extension as frontend, and implemented a simplified version of the Git client in SQLite with lots of triggers. Happy to share it with people. The app is here:
https://github.com/osmoscraft/tundra and the sync logic is here: https://github.com/osmoscraft/tundra/blob/master/apps/browse...
Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own
#467About a year ago I did the same migration: Obsidian to self-hosted Directus.
My main reasons were:
- Straightforward queries. I have a lot of structured data in my notes and lesson plans, and being able to work with SQL was ideal.
- A web app was much more reliable than Obsidian's third-party sync platforms.
- I could extend Directus to do all sorts of other things. I eventually built my wedding planner and website backend on the same Directus instance that holds my notes.
(I also built a set of scripts on my Hackberry Pi that let me write text files on the go that saved to Directus)
Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own
#468For years, I used Trello for taking notes and tracking my reading/research. The feature I cared most about was being able to reference notes in other notes and have lists of notes. It turns out that Trello is an awful tool for this because their database doesn't scale well to large boards.
I built a bare-bones alternative where each "card", e.g. book or paper, is a JSON file. This was motivated by parsing the bloated Trello export file into individual files.
I tinkered with this until I came across Obsidian. I used a version of this tool[0] to parse my Trello export into markdown files. It's still not perfect and continually requires tinkering to do what I need, but my present setup is infinitely better than the prior. r.e. another comment: I can imagine using this setup in twenty years and am happy to pay for Sync.
[0] https://forum.obsidian.md/t/t2md-a-tool-to-migrate-trello-to...
Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
??? I have dozens of projects from 20 years ago that I can compile today.
With respect, I doubt it. Have you tried pulling out a 20 year old tarball and compiling it, without modification, on a modern distro?
I recently unearthed something that I thought was 20 years old when someone asked me about it. I checked and it was only 14 years old based on mtime (thought I suspect I started the project nearly 20 years ago). Another project I unearthed for a different reason was only 13 years old by mtime (again, it was started before that). I must concede that I haven't actually recently compiled and used anything that was untouched for 20 years.
I should note that the first program I wrote that was actually used for a purpose (it calculates energy based on an internal stopwatch and then typing in values from a volt and ammeter, for a science project in 1992) still works in qb64 today.
The second program I wrote that was actually used for a purpose assumes a parallel-port printer on DOS that uses a fairly old version of PCL, and was written in 16-bit C, so probably won't work today.
Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own
#470Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I just wanted to chime in here on what i see as a world view problem that might need to be updated with the times. I see your point about everything being subscription based. There are definitely software out there that do not deserve to be subscription based. But there are some developers that I think should be supported on a regular basis. Especially obsidian because they develop one product and continually wo…
> There are definitely software out there that do not deserve to be subscription based My personal experience with software switching to a subscription model is that often that means you will now only get "bugfixes", and new features are usually few and far apart. There's no longer any incentive to produce major versions with new breaking features, and instead it just turns into a maintenance product, if you even get…
Obsidian falls into the new features category of not just updates, hence why I think they are the exception to the rule about the laziness of developers around the subscription model. But I do understand where you are coming from. I just don't think everything above reflects the entire industry.