Relay by System 3 is a new plugin that brings true multiplayer functionality to Obsidian. You can share folders with other Obsidian users, and then collaborate in real time with live cursors. Try it out.
Relay uses CRDTs to enable conflict-free team editing:
in real time — you can edit the same paragraph/sentence/word at the same time without data loss
asynchronously — if you’re offline or have a slow connection, your edits will be merged smoothly when you come back on
We think that Obsidian was born to be multiplayer. Obsidian is a tool for thinking, and thinking is a team sport. When you consider language models and AI agents, this becomes even more true. That’s why we’re building Relay.
About us
We’re two people: Dan, a software engineer, and Matt (me), a product manager and therapist. We’ve both left our tech jobs and are attempting to make a sustainable business building tools for thought that are good for the soul. System 3
It’s early days for Relay. We’d love for you to try it out and tell us what you think. There’s a lot of iterating to do and your input will make a difference.
Wow, that looks incredible. I probably won’t use it, because I don’t have the need to. But I can definitely see the use of this plugin, and would be willing to pay for it. I’ll keep it in mind and who knows, maybe I can use this plugin in the future.
For me because i have some experince with CRDTs there is a way to setup a server and host it on glitch.com for free (you won’t hit the free tier limit unless you are a big big team because you can make 4k requests an hour)
i like this approch even if i am not collaborating with anyone because this means your devices will have the same documents and your changes on any device won’t be lost
the plugin above from what i read dosen’t expose self hosting options
Edit:
they say they won’t release the server code also it shouldn’t be hard to make a yjs sync server i made one in few days there is open source servers you can connect to this plugin but you might need to change the code a little bit
I’d love to have a self host option for this but i don’t have any experience to make it work… i do have a home server tho which would be great for this
If you were able to build such server code i’d love to host it for me and my friends if you’re ok with sharing
While our authentication server is closed source, the collaboration server can now be self-hosted. It does require some minor setup on our end at the moment.
This is awesome! Was looking for some sort of collaborative edit feature as I am trying to build up a Publish site for surgical techniques, and this might be it. Thanks for your work Will test later.
I’ve been waiting for something like this ever since I started using Obsidian a few years ago. People I collaborate with: we’ve dipped our toes into a rough version by syncing parts of our vaults with the inevitable sync-conflicts. This sounds like the fully-featured solution and I’m naturally very excited to see where this will go. As a fellow psychologist, I love your company name too. It neatly describes the effects Obsidian and other “distributed cognition” tools has on the mind.
There’s one simple reason why I won’t use your plugin: I would have to upload my vault to your server with no privacy guarantees.
Since your code is closed source and unencrypted, that’s a tremendous privacy concern. I have 30.000 notes and my second brain (or system 3 as you call it) is only getting vaster by the day and most of it is something I would collaborate on. A few years down the road and those privacy concerns will just increase in importance. I would urge to seriously build this into your project from the beginning. If you nail that part, it will have great potential.
By your own description, you’re AI-centric. So you understand the value of people’s data. I have two questions that builds on my concern.
My first question: Will you use people’s data to train AI-models? I wouldn’t want you to use my vault for that. Thus, it would be nice to know. I could trust you to not do it, if you say so, although I can’t find a disclaimer on your website. But then consider this scenario: A few years down the line, your company is bought by an AI-company. They inherit all the users of Relay as well as access to their vaults. They see an opportunity to feed their LLM with all those .md-files. Facebook have recently been caught basically pirating the world’s collected library (Library Genesis and Anna’s Archive) with no consequences. If Facebook bought Relay, I would expect them to feed their AI-models with all the data, whether that’s legal or not. That brings me to my second question: Which safeguards do you offer against that scenario?
Trying out Relay but it seems not able to share pasted images within the shared document? Even if we put the image to share in the shared folder - these images are not shared. Any way to share images embedded into Obsidian docs?
I get your concern. I also have a lot of private content in my vault that I also don’t want to upload anywhere. One clarifying point is that (unlike obsidian sync) you choose which folders you want to share selectively (opt-in), so you can only pick folders that you want to collaborate on with other people.
The folders that are shared are clearly marked with a connection indicator and a highlighted line on the left.
We have no interest in looking at user written content (never have). I’d like to get to a point where it is impossible for us to look at user data. The gold standard is end-to-end encryption (supported by Obsidian Sync), but at the moment there is too much complexity in real-time collaboration for us to support that. It makes debugging nearly impossible. I hope to offer that once we have some of the basic product features the way that we want them.
We did just start offering self-hosting of Relay Servers. The architecture is such that our server authorizes user access via cryptographic signatures. We don’t require a network connection to the Relay Server. If you host your server on a private network then it would be impossible for us to access any of your content. If this is of interest, feel free to reach out on our discord. Even if you don’t use this feature, I hope that it is indicative of our efforts to support privacy and total data ownership.
If you don’t actually need collaboration and are instead looking for private device sync, then I recommend paying for Obsidian Sync – it is end-to-end encrypted. I use both Relay for real-time collaboration and Obsidian Sync for end-to-end encrypted device sync.
Training on your data: We don’t access user data and will not. That includes for purposes of training AI models. We’d love for you to self-host your data so that we can’t access it even if a court tries to make us. We do want to offer AI products, though we don’t as yet; if we do, we won’t be creeping on your data behind the scenes. One way I can see that working is that if you want AI, you add an AI agent to your relay server in the same way you would add any other user.
Selling the company: We’re not in this to “exit”. Our hope is that this becomes financially sustainable for us and it’s a “lifestyle” business that allows us build cool stuff indefinitely. If that doesn’t work it’ll prob become something we do as a side project. But selling out our users by selling their data would be bad for our souls and I don’t see that happening.
That said, ultimately when you put your data in a company’s hands you are trusting the people behind that company. I would love for you to both:
Get to know us and decide for yourself the degree to which you feel like you can trust us.
Use our on-prem/self-hosting solution so that we can’t access your data even if a court tries to make us.
Incidentally, co-founder Dan and I just did a Q&A video answering some user questions. You can hear our thoughts on selling the company starting at 37:57.
Will test later.
