Obsidian is now free for work - Obsidian
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I used to get a lot of merge conflicts working with obsidian and syncthing, as I'd edit on my phone and my computer(s).
Honestly started considering just spinning up a git repo, but knowing me I'd forget to commit lol
The git plugin commits automatically. All configurable. I've set it up on both PC and Android once at the beginning and I didn't have to think about it ever again.
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A very successful one with a large extension ecosystem to boot.
What sort of extensions would one use for a note taking app? What sort of notes to you take with it?
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What sort of extensions would one use for a note taking app? What sort of notes to you take with it?
I use mermaid and git extensions personally.
Lots of AI bros add LLMs to it but that's not my cup of tea
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I like the Markdown-based approach but Sync is way to expensive for my use-case..
You could use regular Syncthing for any device other than iOS. And for iOS you could use Sushitrain/Synctrain: https://github.com/pixelspark/sushitrain
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What sort of extensions would one use for a note taking app? What sort of notes to you take with it?
There's lots of types, think even stuff like d&d monster blocks, or custom date ones
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Read whole page. Not sure what Obsidian even is?
It's like trillium, but not open source
Here is an enthusiastic person talking about the state of the art of one year ago for 20 minute.
https://youtu.be/XRpHIa-2XCE -
Can you selfhost a sync server? Be completely independent of them?
technically yes. they just recently made the sync server open source - https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook-sync-server - but their documentation for it is still pending.
I've been following their progress for a while and can say that they appear to be following through on all their goals. and are very responsive to issues on GitHub. but don't take my word for it, check out their roadmap to see when they release the self hosting documentation- https://notesnook.com/roadmap/
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Oh I don't disagree, it is worth it. I ended up paying for it myself before I switched to Joplin. I just went down a rabbit hole of realizing I technically could self host the backend and stubbornly tried to make it work well beyond what was good sense at the time.
Did you make it work? I kind of remember trying but failing. The promise of self host is a soothing edge against feature backsliding (enshittification) so it's a great selling point. But not if you try and it's not actually practical (looking at you signal)
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Holy shit this is huge. I can finally use obsidian at work! I was avoiding it due to the license and using Logseq. Which, to be fair, did admirably. But it's much more and Outliner or journaling system than a knowledge base I feel.
Me too! I've been having a blast with it today. It's so much more fluid and intuitive. I already have Syncthing set up everywhere (for Logseq) so there's been almost no friction at all.
I'm unreasonably happy about this
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This post was how I learned about Obsidian.
For those of you that love it, how do you use it daily?
Weekly.
As a personal knowledgebase and todo list. -
I use Obsidian as a tool to help my shitty memory.
I want to have one single place where I can go search for a thing I know I saw somewhere but can't remember where or what it was exactly
"Did I watch movie X" -> Obsidian -> Watchlist -> Movies and there it'll be.
Same for tv-series, anime, books, games. Yes there are services that do it like Trakt, Imdb, Letterboxd, TVMaze and god knows how many for games. They all get enshittified eventually requiring you to pay for basic functionality (looking at you trakt...)
I'm building a tool for getting my data out from all those services into Obsidian markdown format, maybe It'll get finished some day
(IMDB and Goodreads work, but you need to do a manual csv export)"How did I install that finicky piece of software last time" -> Obsidian, I wrote something down because I knew I couldn't remember it. Then I'll improve the guide + refresh with new data.
Now I have a pretty good step-by step guide on how to set up a computer, no matter the OS, just how I like it - all in Obsidian. Mostly just commands I copy-paste and some manual steps that I can't be arsed to automate.
Same with my daily notes, I just write down what I did maybe with some tags so I can find them when I start wondering when did I visit X or put up the curtains in the bedroom.
For the movies I use Jellyfin/Trakt and for what I still want I use the *arrs.
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It is a really good app. But was a pain in the ass to keep the archive in sync using multiple different platforms without paying for their sync addon in my experience. You can roll your own sync with stuff like Syncthing, cloud storage, etc. But the archive had a bad habit of seemingly finding ways to get out of sync.
I've had zero problems with Dropbox.
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This post was how I learned about Obsidian.
For those of you that love it, how do you use it daily?
It's my trapper keeper. I feed everything into it. I've got vaults within vaults.
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It’s $4 a month for 1GB of storage, not insane
I mean, that is an absolutely batshit insane price for storage. Backblaze is $6 per month for 1TB, and Hetzner is 4€ per month for 1TB, so literally 1000x cheaper, but you are also paying for development and the sync software.
I almost have my company going on putting our QMS wiki on obsidian because excalidraw with clickable objects works so nicely and it can visualize our process, but for some reason commercial was showing up as 50 USD per month per user, so they couldn't justify getting licenses but now it is showing up as 50 USD per year which is way way way more reasonable.
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Yeah but you learn it and it’s a far more organized approach
It doesn't matter if it's a "far more organised approach", logseq simply doesn't fit many types of workflows for note taking.
logseq is a zettelkasten program; Obsidian is a text editor
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It's interesting that a closed-source app has good reputation among FOSS enthusiasts. Surely they are not a Microsoft or Apple, but still who controls your computer, you or them?
least paranoid foss nut
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This post was how I learned about Obsidian.
For those of you that love it, how do you use it daily?
here's a bunch of possible applications:
- simple note taking. like notepad except you have your notes at a place where you can search through them and even link one from another.
- second brain. you can watch a video about it but basically to organize your thoughts, record things you learn, make connections between things to have a digital brain you can search or browse through.
- work or school. notes, to do lists, reminders, links to sources, etc all in one place with references via links
- journal. pretty straightforward, but you can imagine things you could do if you could link from your journal entry to a website, or another entry, or something from your movie collection.
- database. eg maybe you have a movie collection and want to document all the details, including which ones you watched, which ones you liked, and what you think about them. you can have a file for each movie but also files for directors, actors, etc that you can link to and from, in which you have info on those, including images, tags for easy search.
so you watched a movie and wonder what other movies you own have the same starring actor: search movie, click link to the star page, check backlinks.
obviously not the best use case because imdb exists but this is personal and could be extrapolated to any collection you have, maybe even all of them. why not have the movie adaptation link to the original book?
TLDR
you can think about it like: imagine if you could make a bunch of wiki pages. the formatting isn't quite as nice but essentially that's what you're doing. a bunch of pages with text, images, links and tags, that you can browse through. what would you use it for?
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The git plugin commits automatically. All configurable. I've set it up on both PC and Android once at the beginning and I didn't have to think about it ever again.
Oooh, I will be setting this up tonight! Thanks!
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You don't need a public repo to be FOSS. You don't need to accept changes. All you need is to provide a copy of the source code upon request. You can even automate that with a link to a tarball or something in the app.
My concern is less about privacy and more about security and longevity (i.e. what happens if they turn evil?). If it's FOSS, I can audit the source and fork it if they go in a direction I don't like. If it's proprietary, I'm SOL if they turn evil or stop development. Projects like these tend to die.
I don't really see any negatives here. The chance that someone makes a more popular fork is incredibly low, and the chance that someone audits it and points out a bug is a lot higher. They can retain control of the name, sell the software, etc. I really don't see how providing source code is a downside.
I guess we just have to agree to disagree then. Which is fine.
Your points are valid and thank you for detailing them for me. If I was in their shoes making others able to steal my IP, even if they're not allowed due to licensing and having to deal with constant scrutiny of the source code are k.o.-criteria, which hinder the project and lead to potential revenue loss.
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I just cant wrap my head around why they're willing to go so far to gain good will from people by having such a generous free tier, but somehow licensing the code under a FOSS license is out of the question??
Why not just go all the way and make sure everyone who cares about reading the souce could also give you free contributions?
Yep and the Android app is full of small things to improve, for sure someone would put in contributions for free
