A pretty big issue. I can’t really trust it to survive for long or that it won’t be ruined by bad decisions. Because of that I use org mode, but if Obsidian was FOSS I would switch.
However, I have a strange feeling about it not being open source. The recent events with Reddit have only increased this discomfort.
Well, Obsidian is not a live service. If the developers disappear tomorrow or decide to aggressively monetize it, you still have access to the app in its current state, and the whole plugins ecosystem.
So far I only use MoC for listing what comes in through Omnivore. Omnivore is a read it later app that has amazing integration with Obsidian. You can bring over whole articles or what you highlighted in Omnivore (that’s what I do) tagged and all. I have it set up so it drops all incoming into an omnivore folder in my vault and then I have MoCs (dataview) that list the articles/highlights per topic. For example in my leather craft folder I have a MoC that lists all links to articles saved and tagged with “leathercraft”. So I don’t have to search through my omnivore folder (which is structured by date saved).
Otherwise I think I don’t have enough content for a single topic to have a MoC yet. I might eventually if the folder gets so full you have to scroll far. But I link a lot within notes so I mostly jump around like that.
I really like obsidian and use it even though I usually prefer FOSS tools. It just suits my needs perfectly at the moment.
Having the markdown files on my drive is the primary reason I don’t stress over it too much.
I’ll probably start using Zettlr if it improves significantly or if I feel betrayed by Obsidian.
Minimal theme, without a doubt. It increases customization of the editor immensely, I can hide whatever I don’t need, focus mode is neat, and generally it feels not too far from vanilla obsidian experience
There is a loooog thread on the official forum on open source for Obsidian app: forum.obsidian.md/t/…/1515
IMO the best approach would be for them to make the promise, that they’ll open source the code if they become unprofitable or uninterested in further developing ObsidianMD and then leave. In that case, the community has a fully open source stack.
I am aware, that Obsidian is closed source, I try to keep the number of non-compliant uses of markdown minimal. While I use quite many plugins, I am aware, that the plugins being open source removes the risk a bit.
Your data, being in Markdown format, is portable to anything that can handle the format so should Obsidian change its policies or make the app itself paid you’re not SOL. But you will lose the functionality that Obsidian and its plugins provide, which could make that data less valuable to you in the short term. Nothing’s perfect.
Honesty I think Obsidian as a product. They have done a pretty good job of keeping my data open and available in the Obsidian Vault.
I pay them for Sync, so I consider it a service for them to maintain and upgrade the software. I would prefer the client be open source but it would hurt their ability to stay afloat and profitable to pay their employees.
If they go under or start an “enshittification” I can just take my JSON and markdown and make my own client or use one of the hundreds of other markdown clients to get my information.
For me, knowing that it’s basically a text editor that has neat features, I’m not super concerned. If they ever shut down Obsidian, I’ll switch to LogSeq or one of the Emacs modes that does the same thing, maybe I’ll have to run a converter over the files, but that’s not a huge deal for me
Nice to see people so involved with Obsidian here!
OK, these are my favourite five plugins per category. The links lead to a blog post I’ve written where I detail what each plugin does and from where they can be downloaded, both via GitHub and via Obsidian desktop:
This is really neat! I use Obsidian heavily and have been dipping my toes into more of the LLM/AI stuff that is making its way around and this is a great cross-section of those tools and interests.
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