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Ditching Obsidian and building my own

amberwilliams.io

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Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#71

Post by rafram »

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…

The downside is that if you’re on a two-week vacation and your home network/server goes down on day two, there’s probably nothing you can do until you get home. If it’s hosted online, you can count on that 99.99…% uptime and SSH access no matter what.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#72

Post by layer8 »

bayindirh wrote: post #30
layer8 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not practical if you want to also sync with non-Apple devices.

I think any app which can sync in the background can automatically sync things? Dropbox, Moebius, PCloud, Google Drive? My Office vault lives in a separate cloud service, and it works?

My understanding is that on iOS your only non-paid choice is iCloud, and iCloud doesn’t reliably sync to non-Apple systems. To clarify, the use case here is that you have an iPhone but also non-Apple systems, which is a fairly common scenario.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#73

Post by misnome »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #12
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.

FWIW, I’d be more concerned about the implications of the company having my notes in lieu of the pure cost perspective. But the thing is, you can avoid that entirely too by implementing your own sync

FWIW unless they are outright lying this is a choice, one of the choices when setting up a vault is E2E that you have to enter whenever setting up a new sync, but they are really clear that if you lose this password you are at the whims of your own backups.

They do also publish the “verify the encryption steps” for this.

Of course, depending on your threat model this could be insufficient, but then you probably wouldn’t trust obsidian in the first place.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#74

Post by Saris »

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…

Syncthing is a lifesaver, it's such a useful tool!

There are also several Obsidian community plugins for sync, I use Remotely Save via WebDAV.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#75

Post by jauntywundrkind »

rafram wrote: post #71
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…

The downside is that if you’re on a two-week vacation and your home network/server goes down on day two, there’s probably nothing you can do until you get home. If it’s hosted online, you can count on that 99.99…% uptime and SSH access no matter what.

Ssh exposed on a non-standard port, with root disabled, using key-based auth should be pretty non-controversial.

The security through obscurity (non-standard port, no root) are both kinda silly but why not.

That said, with awesome services like TailScale, it's pretty hard to get locked out of your network. TailScale is so so good at "just working".

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#76

Post by williamsss »

e28eta wrote: post #47
williamsss wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Made a comment in the thread explaining this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44023090

I expect my PKMS to evolve and wouldn't rule out a self-hosted Git server if I find it's a better option long term.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#77

Post by AlienRobot »

I'm not saying AI is going to replace programmers, but it's been almost a century already and we still don't have a decent note taking app or even a todo list app and that's like the first app you learn to make. Maybe humanity just kind of sucks at this whole application development thing.

I use cherrytree currently, by the way.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#78

Post by misnome »

layer8 wrote: post #27
bayindirh wrote: post #17

> 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. Obsidian charges $8 a month to access the same notes across multiple devices. Errm, no? Obsidian sync is optional. I pay for it to support them, but my main vaults are all synced by iCloud, which was auto set-up by Obisidan during initial setup on my iPhone . On the Android side, any servic…

Not practical if you want to also sync with non-Apple devices.

Then use the git-sync plugin, or many of the others mentioned here.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#79

Post by Saris »

layer8 wrote: post #72
bayindirh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think any app which can sync in the background can automatically sync things? Dropbox, Moebius, PCloud, Google Drive? My Office vault lives in a separate cloud service, and it works?

My understanding is that on iOS your only non-paid choice is iCloud, and iCloud doesn’t reliably sync to non-Apple systems. To clarify, the use case here is that you have an iPhone but also non-Apple systems, which is a fairly common scenario.

TBH that sounds like a better reason to get something other than Apple systems instead of changing all your apps to work around Apples bizarre limitations.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#80

Post by vhanda »

rafram wrote: post #71
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…

The downside is that if you’re on a two-week vacation and your home network/server goes down on day two, there’s probably nothing you can do until you get home. If it’s hosted online, you can count on that 99.99…% uptime and SSH access no matter what.

I think what they meant is that if it's hosted online / home-network, only allow access to all services through a VPN. Wireguard is relatively easy to setup, and you can configure all your services to only be available through wireguard.

Ever since ssh almost got backdoor-ed, the only thing "exposed" on my servers is Wireguard, which is UDP based and therefore harder to know if it's running. SSH also goes over wireguard.

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