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.
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.
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
This is how I’ve been thinking of it too. If an equivalent open-source solution comes out, it’ll be really easy to switch to, but right now Obsidian is just unbeatable.
I use it to organize my notes for the Dungeons and Dragons game I’m playing in. It’s fabulous for linking NPCs and locations with my notes for each session.
This is a wonderful idea. I don’t play DnD personally, but this example gives me some ideas. Essentially what you’ve done is organize creative works by breaking them down into bite sized interconnected pieces.
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.
I started using Obsidian about a month ago. So far I’ve been treating it like a personal wiki. It took me a while to start really figuring out what to create, but now some of my primary subjects are technical notes (programming), ancestry, health, academic notes, etc.
I mainly feel prompted to create notes based on learned information. I might take an article found online with really interesting information, then convert it into my own words and save that as a note. The more concise I can make the note, the better. It’s preferable to try and get to the main point of a subject in a few sentences or less. Doing it this way makes future me spend less time retrieving the information I need.
One shortcut that has helped me a lot is CTRL + O. It will open a promp to find a note, or create one if that doesn’t exist. It’s important to give your notes basic tags as well for what topics they pertain to do that you can make searching easier.
As for how much I use it, currently maybe a couple times a day, but I anticipate my usage growing as my note collection becomes larger.
When you capture what you’ve learned from articles, how do you keep the information accessible in the future? My concern is that the cardinality of note topics is so high it will be difficult to find myself in a situation where I recall a note when I need it… But maybe I just need to give it a shot myself to see if it works.
In my case, it’s a mixture of life wiki, personal project wiki, videogame wiki, and journal (not daily, but more for a few significant days).
Like, there’s this cluster with all the people that I know, pointing to their respective communities, and who participated in which annual social gathering (which have their own articles with pictures and videos). With one (usually rather empty) article per person, I can just link to them from other relevant places.
Then there are all my (software) projects and generally intellectually interesting stuff I thought about, which I wrote down over the years (which took me a few weeks to digitalize/find/sort once I got my hands on obsidian).
In terms of video games, it’s either the knowledge/realizations I made or rough copies from some online wiki articles. Considering my internet provider is horrible and unreliable, having an offline source can be really nice sometimes.
In general, it’s really useful to support my shitty memory. Having detailed descriptions of what I’ve made or what happened just makes it easier to re-experience certain moments.
And even though the graph is an interconnected mess, the clusters are still mostly distinguishable from each other. funnily enough, the video game articles blow their space out of proportion because of all the attachments. some of my video game articles tend to be asset or screenshot-heavy.
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.
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.
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.
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