#21

I think this is a very important point and one that people should take into account as they structure the way they write while using Obsidian. I don’t think that there is as much of a separation between the content a person makes and the way the tool influences how you create that content, as some tend to believe.

Even without using plugins this is a problem that everyone will have to face at some point. It’s great to have the open format, Markdown, but that’s not sufficient to prevent varying degrees of lock-in. In another thread, I was trying to raise this point by showing a screenshot of a very simplistic example of how different tools that support markdown but treat tags differently can change the way you structure your content. The example was probably overly basic but you can imagine, over time, changing your way of working to take advantage of tags in ways that are unique to the tool you’re using. This sort of feature/workflow lock-in is subtle and often doesn’t become apparent until you’re at that point where you’re forced to change for whatever reason.

Some people in this thread have recommended ways to mitigate the problem, which seems wise to consider. Still, I think it’s unlikely that it will be entirely possible to not be at least somewhat locked-in and experience some breakage.

7 Likes
#22

This concern makes sense, but it’s one that exists with just about any extensible program out there.

I use plugins in Chrome. I get used to them and it creates some lock-in of sorts.

I use plugins for my text editor of choice (outside of Obsidian). If my neovim plugins ever go away, or neovim itself, my entire workflow for daily work is going to be wrecked. Same could be said of VS Code.

People can opt in to the level of lock-in that they prefer. One nice thing about Obsidian is that so long as I still have the app, even if all the services go away, I should be able to run it for quite some time.

It’s also why I’m subscribed to Sync. I don’t really need it, but I want to support development, to help make sure that Obsidian remains around for a good long while.

I haven’t dipped into dataview yet, though, for this reason. It feels like it moves beyond what I’d expect. I am authoring some notes with it in mind, though, doing things like “This:: that” to be usable later.

3 Likes
#23

My solution is to continue using a classic file & folder structure as much as possible. I consider all the added features a bonus. Working in Obsidian is great for making new connections and breakthroughs but if I had to work with a plain text editor in the future I would still have a core structure. It would be messy but workable.

I agree as the power increases, my tendency is to move away from folders and load up files with nonconforming inserts. Anything I write in Obsidian I consider an important work I try to keep clean or clean up later and move to an appropriate folder.

2 Likes
#24

While I agree with this premise, I believe we ought to exercise a sense of proportion about the scale of the risk. The same things are true for written rather than spoken language, about LTR or RTL, about type vs pen and paper, about PC vs mobile. The OSs vary and Apple, and to an extent MS, love the idea of raising the wall around their gardens. Languages vary in their linguistic structures and the vocabulary. The programs many users switch from have both a locked in format as well as developing conditioned reflexes in workflow.

With Obsidian, the core program preserves all data in the open - though readability will depend on what is typed and the knowledge of the reader. Plugins, of course, are free to squirrel almost anything inside a database, but the way they work is, initially at least, visible to the developers and the community.

afaics most users want to do everything within this one program if they can. That does imply greater friction if switching to something else, but it’s a free choice and hs its own advantages as well as disadvantages.
I prefer using multiple tools which automatically reduces lock-in risk. I use Obsidian much less than I would if it worked natively with txt as well as md. But the multiple tool approach has its own costs, not least the cognitive load of maintaining familiarity with some quite different ways of working.

I do agree that understanding the risks, advantages and disadvantages, and compromises implicit in any choice should be important for many users. But for others it’s just something they use for some tasks, for a limited period in their lives and worrying about long-term effects and risks is irrelevant.

5 Likes
#25

As i read all of these posts i am starting to think everyone is used to app stores and the apps going away out of no where. Let’s remember that obsidian can technically never go away because you can keep your installs locally forever and the plugins as well. AND it is cross-platform.

In other words, if obsidian is amazing right now and works for you today, then you will have this version of obsidian forever!

Now, are you afraid of no future updates? well, they have a super long roadmap already and they are finishing up the mobile apps.

The mobile apps themselves testify that obsidian will be here for a very very long time.

Plugins are open sourced so they can also be updated in the future even without the devs sending anymore updates.

Obsidian does NOT have a kill switch.

10 Likes
#26

I can’t say I’m realistically worried about Obsidian either fading away or trapping my notes.

The best predictor of whether a product will endure is how strong its community is, and Obsidian’s community is amazing. If Obsidian died tomorrow, the community would dig up its corpse and reanimate it.

And if it did go away, since the notes are in plain text, whatever the syntax of that plain text, migrating it to another platform is as simple as a good Find and Replace script (which, heck, the aforementioned community might even crowdsource for you.)

5 Likes
#27

Exactly this. Even if Obsidian kicked the bucket and all the plugins stopped being maintained (i hope not though), we can literally use our local copy as we do today. This provides great peace of mind. All plugins are opt-in, we can choose the level of complexity based on our needs (along with the lock-in ““risks””). Even plugins like Dataview can be replicated with other apps as the source code is available publicly.

1 Like
#28

Another source of comfort is the export to standard markdown which is currently in development that should allow you to remove dependencies on any plugins if Obsidian disappears way down the road.

2 Likes
#29

Right – this isn’t like being locked in to a proprietary format. A simple augmentation such as wikilinks should be relatively simple for a successor program to implement our convert.

The direct access to my content as plain text files, together with a community enthusiastic about doing things with those files, makes me confident I’ll be able to use my files where I want and keep all the work I put in.

2 Likes
#30

A simple augmentation such as wikilinks

I think wikilinks are the most compatible thing, along with #tags that I see in Obsidian today. Lots of support across editors like 1Writer on iOS, VS Code extensions, etc. Same with #tags — at the end of the day, autosuggestions as you type a tag is important but a grep will find them.

My original point in this thread was the deeper things like dataview plugins, kanban stuff, etc. Deeper augmentations that while they are built on top of markdown and are technically plaintext make a vault full of files less and less portable.

#31

I think it’s true that it’s less portable.

But to make my intuitions more concrete, I will give scores for portability (just hunches, don’t fight me :wink:):

  • Plain text 100
  • Markdown 95
  • Markdown with wikilinks 92
  • Markdown with wikilinks and kanban 85
  • Evernote (with all of its notebooks, tags, formatting) 20

I don’t know dataview but I looked at the format for kanban in Obsidian. There are no binary blobs to decode or confusing ways of expressing things. It was very easy to understand what was going on. A coder would find relatively easy to interpret for a different app. (And if all else fails, my data is there in plain sight and I can use search-replace to tidy it up.)

So yes, using the kanban tool gives a reduction in portability, but not enough to concern me, and probably a good trade-off for someone who finds the kanban useful.

4 Likes
#32

Hi! … what’s the ‘Evernote’ category?

#33

For comparison?

#34

I am in the process of moving all my work to Obsidian because of portability. After fourteen years, I’m moving on from Scrivener:

  1. Obsidian is already a more powerful and flexible app, especially across platforms. It is also modern and progressive.
  2. While it is possible to hack into Scrivener projects to retrieve the base RTF files or to export to different formats, the plain text of Obsidian and the universality of markdown are just so much more stable to work with, as well as being accessible to other apps without the need to export or compile.
  3. RTF was originally developed by Microsoft in 1987 and then abandoned by them in 2008. No app should be using it natively these days. And RTF is a development cul-de-sac: there is no road ahead.
  4. Scrivener is essentially a one-person company: one principal owner / developer. There’s no community input (as there is with Obsidian) and the developer is only concerned with doing things that he likes. If the ageing developer retires tomorrow or contracts Coivd and dies, the company and the app risk being lost with him.
  5. Working between macOS and iOS is a nightmare with Scrivener. Syncing across platforms is terrible, and the iOS version has miserable functionality.
  6. The development of Scrivener on a single platform and across multiple platforms has been ridiculously slow, with new versions being years late in their delivery. Obsidian is in another realm.
  7. Scrivener is designed for linear writing and ideas. Obsidian allows thoughts and writing to develop along multiple paths and in multiple directions at the same time. Obsidian allows writers to be far more expansive and expressive.

Scrivener was a great product when it launched in 2007. But it launched on tech that MS killed in 2008. It badly needs to be rethought and rewritten, but there is no sign of that happening.

So glad to have found Obsidian, and feel that my work is now far more secure and far more capable of being augmented by being in plain text / markdown.

Angel

2 Likes
#35

I’ve never been an active Scrivener user, but I think that you are unfairly doing it down.

  • It has many functions for writers that aren’t available in Obsidian - or, indeed, any markdown based editor.
  • Many editors for writers are based on rtf and most word processors read and write to it (which isn’t the case for markdown). There are far fewer dialects for rtf than markdown.
  • It has strong community support in its forum even if it has no API or plugins.
4 Likes
#36

It’s good to cultivate our data in a way that many applications can process it. The data’s what’s important, not the app

1 Like
#37

Hello.

I only stuck to facts.

  1. Yes, it has some functionality other apps don’t have, but nothing that can’t be replicated or improved upon in some way by using other tools. It no longer has a lead in any area.
  2. RTF remains as an unreliable, basic interchange format. It has been deprecated by Microsoft, and the company has said that it shouldn’t be used. It’s also a security risk. No app should be using it as a native format. As MS says, no user should be trusting their work to it. It was last updated thirteen years ago. RTF has no future: it doesn’t sync well with mobile devices; files don’t transfer well between different writing platforms; and it was designed in an age when the focus was on supplying apps for office workers and producing work on paper. It isn’t a format for the twenty-first century. It isn’t a professional, modern, digital, portable format. It comes with short- and long-term risks for anyone who trusts their writing to it. Although people can make that choice.
  3. It’s a community dominated by closed-minded “Scrivener can’t be improved, and we love the developer” voices: a great many of them retired people who just don’t like or want to embrace change. That support has led to myopia and well-documented turgid “development”, with very little having changed in fourteen years. Fact is that today writers want to write on any device, at any time. Scrivener, largely because of the blind alley of RTF development, can’t offer that. It was built in a time before cloud services were a thing. Instead of rebuilding the app to work in the cloud-service age, the developer stuck with RTF and has ended up with an iPhone app that is a pain to sync and very limited in its capabilities. Other modern apps are the way forward. As someone who tested Scrivener before launch, when it was in beta, I hope Scrivener will change, but it has lost ground to apps like Ulysses and Obsidian, and it will be hard to lure back those who have abandoned it already. Personally, I know far more people who have given up using Scrivener than who still use it.

Angel

#38

Not sure I understand the question, sorry… It’s just my opinion on portability.

I mean that Evernote is bad for portability. Much worse than Obsidian, even if you have all kinds of plugins such as kanban, with their own ways of using markdown.

#39

Wow. Really? Do you have evidence to justify this before alienating yourself?

#40

I just got confused with ‘Evernote’ because it’s not a format but an application (I just Googled it) :slight_smile: