Are we moving away from portability? How much is Obsidian locking our notes in?

Knowledge management
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As has been said elsewhere it depends to a large degree on how you view the issue of portability and what level of functionality you wish to have should you choose to move to another app. If it is a massive issue for you then presumably you are only really interested in the standard markdown core syntax for taking notes in which case there shouldn’t be much of a problem.

If you want to make use of plug-ins to enhance the features of the app then you have to accept that there will be content such as frontmatter and codeblocks that have no real meaning in the new environment. But even those shouldn’t break anything if ported elsewhere.

The same argument is also true of any core Obsidian feature. If it is non-standard markdown and that bothers you then don’t use it.

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I agree with @Dor, I tried Scrivener, but could make it work for me; this is my way of saying that this is just my opinion and not intended to be detrimental towards Scrivener. My use of these apps is based on the science and engineering research that I needed to do for my job. I easily saw it being used for non-fiction and textbooks, but ultimately to me, Scrivener couldn’t shake the novel-writing biased foundation, which is why it excels in that direction. Obsidian seems to flow better for my brain.

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@chrisaalid, I believe it’s based on the structure that you decide to use, as succinctly put by @icebear. Due to having to migrate things between software packages in the past, I have learned to use community mods for non-critical purposes. I keep a core structure of folders and notes, that would likely make the most liberal Zettlegiestian weep then, for example, I use data view to generate separate “reports”. Images are renamed from the numerical mash to something that actually describes what’s in the file, etc. Does that mean I may lose out on using some really cool functionality, perhaps, but so far I’m pretty happy.

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@anon12638239 Your post is so relevant for me! I’ve also been using Scrivener. I’d be interested in using Obsidian for my long writing projects (papers and books) but there is one feature I can’t seem to replicate in Obsidian, Scrivener’s—scrivenings. I use this often to temporarily combine documents to get a better feel for the flow of long text and transitions. Ulysses has a similar feature, “glueing sheets.”

Do you know a way to accomplish this in Obsidian?

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As I have considered this, I am taking comfort that in most cases, any “lock in” can be navigated by some simple scripting – if obsidian vanished, I could write a simple script to pull YAML tags and convert them to #tags. I would lose things like Dataview and Graph view and a bunch of other things that give me excellent views to the data that is there, and accessible as plain text.

If I compare that to Notion or Evernote, a lot of my data is “trapped” – locked in a proprietary format that might feasibly be saved by a script, in some cases, but it would be far more involved. (for me).

In short, if Obsidian went away, could I recreate the experience in 1:1 feature parity? No … that’s why I CHOSE Obsidian. Could I get to my most important data in less than 5 minutes? Absolutely. Could I, in short order, have a servicable system up and running again with another tool? Yep.

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One thought is that you create a master document which contains links to blocks in other pages. This way when you hover over a link you will see it in a popover pane. You can freely change the order of the links and even write new text between them that connects the passages better if you need to.

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I totally agree with you, I copied my essay formatted in Obsidian into Typora, all my formatting got messed up.

A big reason I copy from Obsidian to Typora is to escape that subtle lock-in in Obsidian, Literally there is no way to copy back formatted data from Obsidian to another tool like MS Word

(please, anybody may guide me If I am missing any feature that will help solve my problem)

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I agree. So, our community has to work from today on those scripts, so that they are easily available 20 years later.

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I believe what you’re looking for is Pandoc. Off the top of my head, there’s a plugin for Obsidian and an Alfred workflow for an easier UX

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Thanks, yeah that’s good, but using it is not easy for me.

I understand that it is still not possible to keep things portable. And yes there’s also a ‘pure markdown export option’ on the roadmap, but I ask why the devs didn’t implemented ‘md to docx’ as a built-in solution, when there are many open source scripts lying out there on github?
isn’t it a kind of locking?
Also consider the growing user base, who not only use it for PKM, but also to share and do many other things. I sometimes feel, it is just a method to secure the revenue model.

I think instead of complaining I should request someone to build a plugin for that. (md to docx)

This little app supports docx to md and reverse albeit the tables: https://www.calmlywriter.com/

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but I ask why the devs didn’t implemented ‘md to docx’ as a built-in solution, when there are many open source scripts lying out there on github?
isn’t it a kind of locking?

Hi again! :slight_smile:

Yeah, well, in my mind: to not natively support all formats ever constructed by other developers can hardly be called “locked-in”.

Most app developers try to concentrate on “doing their thing”, their “Unique Selling Point” (USP) as well as possible first and foremost. Do remember that this whole thread mainly is about if plugins, and their use by us, the users, creates a kind of lock-in or limitation in portability.

It is mostly not core functionality we are talking about in this thread, it is voluntarily added functionality created by users for other users. You, as a user, can just as easily chose to not install the plugins mentioned. What you will be left with is a “vanilla” Obsidian, which writes Markdown, and does it well (IMHO). Markdown is generally considered to be very portable, even though there are a couple of dialects (such as “Github flavour” etc).

I think you should turn your question around: would it not make more sense if Microsofts Word-team created an “import markdown” function? Markdown is an open standard that is very possible for them to add, if they were to prioritise users coming from Markdown based software, and MS Word tried to lure those users in to the fold.

To me that would make more sense than to say “Obsidian doesn’t export to my preferred external format, therefore it is lock-in”. Then another user might come along and say “booo! It doesn’t natively export to json, which is my preferred format!” and then a third one coming in saying “oh noes! Obsidian doesn’t support direct export to RSS, which I love!” and all of the sudden the very limited Obsidian developer resources have to concentrate on, and dig out, every format ever created by man, to create export functionality for those formats.

Ok, slight exaggeration, but you perhaps get my point? I know lots of apps that does not export to .docx. I wouldn’t dream of saying they therefore are locking users in, as I wouldn’t consider it to be true.

Another thing users often forget when it comes to development is maintenance. If any of those formats were to change, which they do (in many cases often too), things will start to break if all apps that claim they export to one of those formats doesn’t also update their code base to cater for the added/new/changed/deleted functionality in that format over there. In Obsidians case that could grind actual feature addition development to a halt, just keeping 67 export formats up to date whilst being backwards compatible.

So…many developers, rightfully so, concentrate on doing their thing, and to do it well. That is not lock-in.

IMHO of course. :slight_smile:

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It used to be a full time job for word processor companies to keep up with Microsoft’s secret tweaks to .doc and .docx so they could maintain compatibility.
Which meant that a big chunk of their development time was spent on Microsoft’s product rather than their own.

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If I’m effectively locked into Obsidian, what difference is that compared to just using Notion or Roam. How are people mitigating this?

There has been a good discussion in the thread on the other questions in the original post, but I feel this part was sort of forgotten. I think so because the main difference with Obsidian compared to both Notion and Roam is: Privacy. Privacy was my main trigger for finding Obsidian in the first place, having discarded Roam and Notion for their lack of Privacy.

Both Notion and Roam are online services, only, right? I haven’t actually tried Roam, only read about it, but that is my take-away (please correct me if I’m wrong). I know Notion definitely require me to be online. If any of those services went away, so would your notes. If Obsidian went away I would lose access to future updates. I would still have my files on my E2EE encrypted hard drive. I can still access my files within Devonthink, in which I have a DT Db indexing my Obsidian vaults.

Sure enough, and to your point, in Devonthink I can’t (already today) utilise the benefits of Dataview and a few other Obsidian plugins which I have voluntarily chosen to install as they improve my workflows within Obsidian, but to me still, the main difference compared to the mentioned services is that the files are mine, to do with what I wish, and as they unlike for example Evernote still are plain text files all content will never be lost. My files can’t be sold, they can’t be bought and “I can see them, right there [points]”. :slight_smile:

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So the user may be locked in but the data is free :grinning:

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Obsidian and plugins do not really lock in anything - that’s the beauty of Obsidian and one of the biggest selling points for me. Let me break down the way I choose tools.

TLDR: Obsidians way of handling your content is the best possible way for future-proof data retention - all other options are worse.

Do the developers have an income stream to support development long-time?

Open-Source is great, but life’s strange. Everyone has a breaking point in life when continuing to work on open-source for free is not sustainable anymore. Companies may fail as well or be bought, but the risk of not being able to work on a project anymore is much more common without a revenue stream.

Obsidian is developed by Dynalist Inc, has several streams of income

What happens if development is stopped?

Obsidian is not a service that can be deactivated or deprecated - it and its plugins run locally, so even if something happens, it just keeps running. In stark contrast to online services.

Nothing would happen, so great

What happens if Dynalist starts to charge or change the license or do ?

Same as before, just continue using your local copy.

What if I really cannot use Obsidian anymore (kill-switch, security issues, ?

Markdown as the Domain-Specific Language (DSL) Obsidian and the plugins use and extend is standardized and easy to grasp. Since its just text-files, it’s easy to move files into any new order you like and use search-and-replace or Regular Expressions to rewrite your content to a new format of any tool that you might want to use to replace Obsidian. This is in stark contrast to pretty much any other persistence method (online, databases, etc.). Just ask NASA - they had refound some old data tapes from the beginning of the space race in a cellar, but were unable to read them anymore and had to spend hundreds of thousands of man-hours to reverse engineer the format again.

And while it surely would be cumersome and breaking your workflow for some time, the worst case scenario is having to spend more time to do everything manually. With most other tools, the worst case scenario is loosing everything.

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I am not able to locate that plugin from him? Are you talking about the web clipper?

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Search Community Plugins for txt - txt as md

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Thanks I found it. I was looking here - deathau (Gordon Pedersen) · GitHub - for some reason it is not listed. I don’t know my way around GH very well so maybe it’s right in front of me there I am not seeing it.

EDIT - I see now I had to click out of the Overview tab into the Repo.

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I would like to add, I can effectively replace Obsidian with Typora (or a similar .md viewer/editor). So long as I can always access my notes as .md files I can always switch to something like Typora.

The key feature Typora simulates from Obisidian is the spotlight search feature and organizing my notes as a file tree. This is the cornerstone of my Obsidian system. Everything else I consider a bonus. (But don’t get me wrong: they are incredibly nice bonuses that do increase efficiency that I would not want to leave behind.)

Hell, I could even do my notetaking system as a paper-only system. For me, digital programs are about replicating an analog system and then maximizing efficiency of that system.

I would say the only two situations where I would leave Obsidian are if they decide to DRM lock my notes in a similar way to Notion (which is extremely unlikely, and I have two third-party backups so it’s unlikely this would happen so suddenly I would lose the chance to jump ship with notes intact) or if they go out of business. If either of those happen, I can use Typora. And while it would be less effective than Obsidian, I have learned so much about PKM from using Obsidian and participating in the community here, that it would be a far more effective system compared to what I did before I stumbled on Obsidian.

It’s always a question of Costs vs Benefits; everything is like this, even paper, and I think the costs of using Obsidian are still significantly lower than other programs, even though the utility they provide (or third party devs provide) does soft-lock us into it.

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@Dor - many thanks for this reply, the OP’s question is something I have been wondering about as well but I felt too new to Obsidian to even know how to ask the question.

May I ask a follow up question though: when you say you use Wikilinks, can you explain what you mean? I’m still on a learning curve when it comes to Markdown and using URIs and ‘actions’ and ‘shortcuts’ etc, so I’m trying to figure out how to achieve interoperability between DevonThink and Drafts5 in particular. If there are ways of maintaining links that work independently of which software is being used, this is of particular interest to me as I’m still figuring this out.

Your suggestion to use .txt files is helpful, so I’ll give that some thought as I progress my thinking on workflows. I too have decided to keep my Obsidian implementation to core plugins. I’ve read elsewhere on the forum that there may be security risks of using plugins from unscrupulous developers, since the only way to know they are ‘safe’ is to check the code yourself (which I lack the knowledge to do). Is this something that you worry about on a practical level, or do you just watch the comments on plugins and avoid being an early adopter?

Thanks again, this is helpful.