1) 10,000s of notes 2) Can blocks include their own hashtags?

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I’ve been using my own knowledge manager app, now I’m contemplating switching to either Obsidian or Roam. My notes are very block oriented (short). In my app, I keep 100s or even 1000s of such short notes in one file. Questions:

  1. I could break my files into tens of thousands of (mostly) one-liner “notes”, but would Obsidian deal with tens of thousands of short files, performance-wise?
  2. I could also keep my short notes as “blocks” in one “note” (using Obsidian’s terminology). But can blocks in Obsidian have their own hash tags (independent of the “note” they’re in?
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Obsidian should handle it just fine.

Obsidian performance is much much better than its competitor TfT Performance: Interim Results - by Alexander Rink

It can easily deal with 100,000 Interlude: Obsidian vs. 100,000 - by Alexander Rink.

If you’re asking about the block ID then I think the answer is no. But I think this need more clarification of your use case to see if it actually affects your usage.

I also want to suggest you check out Logseq as an alternative to Roam.

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Obsidian does block IDs, but you’d have to check whether they’d work as you want. And they are always part of the note they are in.

The big factors when comparing Obsidian with Roam are the very different designs. Roam is a (primarily online) database outliner centred on blocks. Rather atypical markdown. Obsidian is built around local markdown files; slightly extended conventional markdown.

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The reason I said no is because I feel like @element was asking if a block can have a unique block ID that helps Obsidian identify it regardless of the note they’re in, which allows you to move the block around freely between notes (and won’t lose any links to the block), which I don’t think is the case with Obsidian (If you copy the block together with its ID to another note then the connection to that block is broken). Is my understanding correct?

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Everything depends on method. You can have unique block IDs and even do them manually. Obsidian will be able to identify the block, irrespective of the note it is in.

But the block is always a part of the note it’s in, and Obsidian uses the full address when finding and tracking it. So moving (cut/paste) a block isn’t tracked. I don’t believe you can move blocks in the same way as in Roam. Or Logseq.

afaik. I don’t use block links extensively myself.

Personally, I wouldn’t use micronotes in Obsidian. I doubt Obsidian would be overwhelmed, but I suspect it would quickly become unmanageable.

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Could you please tell me how to do that? I didn’t know that it’s possible to do this in Obsidian. The linking syntax I see always include the note name.

In Logseq you can open 2 notes side by side and drag and drop a (few) blocks from one note to another and any connections to that block will be preserve. I don’t use Roam so I’m not so sure, but think it likely behaves the same way.

Very wise advice. I also totally agree with you about the significant difference in the design philosophy of Obsidian vs. Roam/Logseq. Took me a while to realize that (I’m a former Logseq user).

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Assuming Unique ID, search works. Manual but effective.

Yes, with Roam and Logseq being block databases, it’s easy to move blocks. Not so in Obsidian; for that you need to look to plugins.

There are 3 I have used.

  • mgmeyers Block Links
  • Artem Barmin Drag-n- Drop for Blocks (only works for list items atm)
  • Murf’s Obsidian Block DragnDrop (don’t think it has been updated for Codemirror 6).
    I don’t use any of them sufficiently to be aware of their limitations.
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That’s not what I was looking for. Having to search manually for the ID defeat the purpose of using apps like Obsidian.

Thank you for the 3 plugins you suggested but none of them solve the issue. They created block refs in a new page but the original blocks stay on the original page. I agree here it’s a fundamental difference in design between these apps.

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Most of what I do, I do manually and deliberately. I avoid automation in Obsidian.
For automation, I’d prefer a database app usually.

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Thanks for all the comments. I don’t expect to move “blocks” around much. In my own app, I’ve settled on a stable classification, so my one-line blocks stay put. What I’m interested in is per-block tags, so that I can use some graph visualizer tool to find unusual conceptual links between ideas. I haven’t heard of Logseq, I’ll look into it. I’ve also just found something called “Nodus” which seems to auto-link blocks based on text alone (not user-specified tags).

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Thanks for the link. When these graphs show numbers like “2,000” it’s not quite clear what units of information are being compared. In Obsidian, presumably, it refers to individual “notes” or .md files. What’s the unit used for Roam? Roam’s “pages”? Roam’s “blocks”? In my use case (short notes), the correct comparison would be 1,000 “notes” in Obsidian (.md files) versus one Roam “page” with 1,000 Roam “blocks” (short ideas)

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This link here TfT Performance: Interim Results - by Alexander Rink, 1st paragraph, has the details about the methodology if you want to dig deeper into it.

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Thanks. Like I thought, he made 5,000 “notes” in Obsidian and 5,000 “pages” in Roam. For my case, a closer comparison would be 5,000 short “notes” in Obsidian and, in Roam/Logseq, one “page” with 5,000 blocks

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Sort of. Hashtags apply to the whole note, but the default way they’re viewed behaves like they belong to the blocks. The default search results (which are how you view hashtags) show each instance of the tag, and clicking the preview takes you to that part of the file. (But if you fully collapse the search results, you’ll see only the note names.)

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