Obsidian is amazing because it is a notepad with pretty colors and the graph that gets everyone's attention. The graph is often the most overhyped and underused thing there. It looks complicated and that's the selling point of all that ecosystem around productivity systems and all that. The appearance of deep complexity and work.

I love how many just ended up here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864134

> There is so much wankery around Obsidian, it's so cringleworthty. Obsidian is a nice/fancy editor for markdown files. That's all it is really. People have created so many addons to bolt so much stuff onto it, but that's all it is at its core. You can search your notes, you can tag them.

It is a simple markdown editor yes but it's the addons that make it so different. There's tons and tons of markdown notetaking apps, but this one just hit the right balance for me. End to End encryption, self-hosted livesync (I can see myself typing from another client), good mobile support, fast searching. Self-hosting is a must-have for me, even with end to end encryption.

The one thing I miss is a bit more security on Android (it would be great if the app offered an option to hide its files from other apps by locating them in the app's private storage area). And for it to start quicker, it has to load a whole browser on every open because it's an electron app even on mobile.

But overall it's great for me. Not earth-shattering but it just offers the right combination of features for me.

I don't really see what the 'wankery' is.

> Just use the _core_ addons of Obsidian. That's all you need. Then if you find you really are missing something, have a look in the community addons. You'll probably find what you want.

For me there are several third party addons that are invaluable. The livesync plugin first of all, it's really great sync and fully self-hosted. This is quite a complex thing to get working and one where so many other apps fall down.

ReadItLater for capturing websites is also pretty nice. And the copilot one for searching notes with RAG.

yea how about you do you, and live and let live

nobody cares what you think people "should" do

While I agree that the zettle-nerds take it way too far, I disagree with this:

> Well it's completely wasted time now that an LLM can search the whole vault and aggregate an answer across dozens of your notes.

I've actually found that having well-linked files _more_ important since I started pulling the vault into Cursor. The other day, for example, I was able to point to the page where I had aggregated links to all of my "<Project> Onboarding" notes and know that I was giving the right context when I asked it to help me brainstorm a six month plan. The alternatives were to instead put everything in a single note (not feasible), manually include each note as context (and hope I didn't forget one), or hope that Cursor found the right ones (unlikely).

> nice UI to edit a collection of markdown files

wow okay, I kept thinking that there must be more to it, why does it only list my files that I can already see in my filetree on the left, like what's the point? I was expecting to see something like what Atlassian has in Confluence (which was also far more intuitive to create btw) https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/create-a...

Remember, this is basically your own personal Wiki. You can either embrace and accept a rigid organizational structure or not. You are signing up for a lot of up front maintenance and design this way. The alternative is to heavily use links, tags, and other tools that make it easy to find data later.

For a personal knowledge base I think the latter approach saves time in the long run. I have clusters of well organized information. Well tagged and linked. I can always find my movie ideas, projects, and deep thoughts when I want them. I like the idea of just curating the clusters I care about. Just enough organizing. I then have a few highly connected entry points to my clusters. Often I find people don’t link enough in their Obsidian. It’s free and puts things in a more graph oriented layout that the tool can show you.

Edit: oh, also remember, these are text files. Grep still works. Also, we have very powerful CLI LLMs to summarize and categorize text data rapidly. Like “suggest 3 tags for this document based on <prompt magic here>. :)

No “hey idiot” but for what it’s worth: are you making things too complicated? It almost feels like you’re a bit distracted by all the dimensions of data you want to track. Could this all be one page with a bulleted list, each one might have sub bullets if you care to record things like who shared it and other notes? You can just Ctrl+F for “wife” when you need that sub query.

I’ve been using Obsidian at work for a few years now, and things like this are why I ignore almost all Obsidian content on the web. Everyone seems to create these really complicated setups, in the name of zettelkasten, that seem nearly impossible to maintain and use in real life. If I want to make a list of movies to watch, I use a simple checklist in one note and move on with my life. I keep Obsidian simple so it gets out of my way.

I tried going down the road like you’re talking about one for managing past, present, and future trips. It technically worked, but it was so fiddly that I hated using it. I just made a few folders instead.

I suppose now, if I wanted all the metadata you’re talking about, using a base would make the most sense. But I’d still need to be realistic about how I’m going to use it. Do I care enough about future sorting abilities to turn adding a movie to a watch list into a multi-field form, where I need to consider all these potential futures to fill it out, creating a lot of friction to the action?

The default search is not great and the syntax of the dataview plugin is not amazingly well designed. Even the author of dataview admitted to that.

The author started working on a new dataview-like plugin called datacore, but that project is stalled afaik

Hyperlinks are all you need: https://ezhik.jp/hypertext-maximalism/

Linter and Templater are the two I can't live without. The rest are just nice to have.

Dev has a history of installing cryptominers in his previous projects and rootkitting people into starring and forking his projects.

https://www.v2ex.com/t/534800

SiYuan doesn't have canvas. Obsidian Canvas is great for diagrams.

Coming from Logseq... this looks ideal for me.

I can’t believe my eyes. Is that the self hosted notion alternative many of us have been looking for?

Idk—I use Obsidian all the time & I don't even [[link]] my notes, much less need a database feature like this. Regardless of how many features it has, it is also simply a good markdown editor at heart.

Debatable. I use Obsidian specifically because it can be relatively minimalist and it's easy to get the view I want and use 99% of the time: List of files on the left, main note window (sometimes with tabs and/or split) in the middle and a calendar that can jump me to a daily note on click on the right. You can't make such relatively small UI adjustments in the more minimalist note-taking apps, so even if you may not use all of the functions and plugins, Obsidian can still be a relevant choice.

> at its core it glorified overlay to the file system and a Markdown viewer

For me it's a feature.

Breakage is the best-case scenario. Mass data exfiltration is the bigger concern. The community plugin system is both an unacceptable security risk, and a necessary part of achieving even a baseline level of usability. Imagine the scale of theft that must already have taken place.. the targets may never even know. The fact that Obsidian falsely claims to audit this cesspool is hilarious.

One of the best things about Obsidian is that even all this new stuff is done through built-in plugins and can just be turned off.

> Supports ... code blocks with syntax highlighting.

Based on the documentation and the screenshot next to it, I don't see how it differs from Obsidian on this point.

A Markdown code block in Obsidian is going to be highlighted as expected.

Actually it appears that they both relies on Prism to achieve this :

- https://help.obsidian.md/syntax#Code+blocks

- https://github.com/suchnsuch/Tangent/blob/main/apps/tangent-...

You can also create a code block in markdown and then write the language type at the top. This also creates highlighting.

‘’’go {your code} ‘’’