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Ditching Obsidian and building my own

amberwilliams.io

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Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#491

Post by Jarwain »

ezst wrote: post #392
Jarwain wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Oh that all sounds super neat!

My current workflow is to drop almost everything into my daily notes, whether time-based, time independent, or reference. The non-time-based notes I'll #tag and logseq will create a new page for the tag or add the block to that page's references.

That way I have both my thoughts on a #topic, and when I thought about it. If I go back and look at the topic and notice a bunch of notes about it spread across time I know that it's a more consistent interest of mine, and can consolidate that info into the body of the topic page, and might start adding further thoughts there directly.

Generally my goal is to get a distraction out of my head ASAP in a way that I feel like I'll be able to find it again later or it'll otherwise be useful, so that I can keep focusing on whatever I'm currently trying to do. Sometimes that'll mean I have notes on two or three different topics on the same daily page that's easy for me to hop between and add to, but it also stays relatively organized.

The other thing I like are "unreferenced blocks" where if I don't think to tag a stray thought I have about, say, RAG, it'll still show up on my #rag page.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#492

Post by remram »

bryanhogan wrote: post #200
mutoyoru wrote: post #41

> 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…

I've also been using Obsidian a lot. I recommend the SyncThing Fork over SyncThing. I myself currently use Google Drive with DriveSync on Android to sync my notes, which works great. Other cloud providers also work well. I wrote a comparison of different tools to sync here: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/how-to-sync-obsidian

SyncThing has some gotchas when it comes to sync, for example I've had files reappear when I edit them on one device and move them on another. It also seems to create "sync-conflict" files when there is no conflict at all (no modification on one side). I'd also quite like to be able to see the history of my notes sometimes...

I also had this nice surprise literally today, all my synced folders stopped working and had to be re-added: https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android/issues/1430

But overall it has worked well, I am using it between 4 devices.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#493

Post by williamsss »

low_tech_punk wrote: post #466

I'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/…

I really admire the way you've solved this.

This is exactly the type of thing I want to inspire others to tinker with! Some of the readers feel there's a single optimal solution. Though I'm confident that there's room for a plethora of PKMS solutions

Oh and funny enough I'm in the process of working on an open-source chrome extension for bookmarking things I've read it looks similar to your https://github.com/osmoscraft/osmosmemo project. Picture of the tool in use is here https://notes.holeytriangle.com/admin/files/a969c5f6-fa9c-44...

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#494

Post by williamsss »

thederf wrote: post #467

About 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 b…

You're the first person I've heard of that has gone this route. Cool to know I'm not alone.

And yeah I have the same gripes around the writing experience. I prefer Vim so I've been looking into ways I can use my notes as local markdown which sync on save. Of course, keeping the Directus editor for my mobile device edits.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#495

Post by patmorgan23 »

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!

GitHub is not git

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#496

Post by williamsss »

Daril wrote: post #430

I think an PKMS is strictly related to how each of us thinks. It's similar to project management/organizer tools. I also created my own ( https://brainminder.it/ ) based on how I think: I prefer to organize items by type with different fields that I can add and search. Instead of simply collecting ideas and thoughts, I'm trying to build a system that can help me evaluate leveraging what I've entered.

Reminds me of the Zettelkasten note-taking method.

I'm not confident I understand how it works from the site though. A video of how it works would be helpful.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#498

Post by wim »

I_am_tiberius wrote: post #460
wim wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The workspace data is encrypted with a (symmetric) workspace key. Each user gets hteir own encrypted copy of that key, using the user's public key. By wrapping the data-encryption key for each user the content is only encrypted once but each authorized user can decrypt it.

Ah ok. I guess that means when a user leaves the team, you have to re-encrypt the codebase with a new symetric key (as the user would still know the old symetric key)?

Depending on the threat model you want to protect against, yes. For example, although a revoked user doesn't have direct access to data anymore, they could technically collude with us to get future encrypted messages and then decrypt them. At the moment rekeying is only possible by exporting a workspace, changing its key (with a command line tool), and then reimporting it.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#499

Post by williamsss »

deafpolygon wrote: post #473

Funny - I went the opposite direction. Built my PKM in neovim (still a works in progress) + lua + markdown [main plugins I use is treesitter, telescope]; the upside? It's the same tool I use for editing all of my code, config, documentation. I have already re-implemented features such as Dataview and Tasks (not a 1:1 re-implementation, but covering the gaps) using common shell tools (i.e. lua, rg, sed, etc). I have w…

Sounds cool. Is it open-source?

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#500

Post by kepano »

billfruit wrote: post #480
kepano wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The primary reason it's recommended is that it provides more freedom and interoperability. Read this thread and you'll notice that many people sync their notes using Syncthing. You cannot use Syncthing with app storage because the files are sandboxed. Many people enjoy the freedom of being able to read/modify notes using multiple apps. The secondary reason is related to user expectations and file deletion. The device…

That(using whole device, all files access permissions) is entrusting all your files to the good senses of Obsidian, which is not an open source app. There isn't a good reason to grant an app unlimited file access permissions.

If Obsidian didn't allow people to store files in the device storage it would be accused of forcing people to use the paid first-party Sync. Offering both options lets people make the choice that's better for them.
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