So much of what makes Obsidian great relies on plugins - but this worries me

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What I’m trying to do

Build a robust, long term knowledgebase, task manager etc

Things I have tried

I’m a new user so not deep into Obsidian yet

I’m tempted to fully adopt obsidian as a KB etc but most of the time, what I want to achieve is done using community plugins.

By doing that comes the risk that the developer stops supporting them etc. So my system would break down.

But realistically… how much of a risk is this? Any experienced Obsidian users able to offer a perspective?

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I’m not to talk about the risk, as that is guesstimating something I don’t really know. Sadly, it do seem like some plugins do become abandoned, so it does happen.

But my question, or take on this concept, is more that of: What happens if a plugin is abandoned? And in most cases, you’ll end up with some code block (or similar) describing what you wanted to happen. But you’ve not actually lost any data related to it, you just loose a nice way to picture the metadata of your vault.

So I’m thinking even if a plugin is left to bit rot, either you can keep using it for quite a while after it was left alone, or you could start investigating in other plugins or alternatives. But the base data is still within your vault as pure text, and it’s not going away…

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That’s a really good point. And I guess one of the advantages of obsidian is the fact that the data remains even though the code and everything else around it might change or go away.

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I’ve already switched my markdown editor a few times during the last decades, and I’m currently using Obsidian with great joy, but I’ve not had any major issues switching from other editors in the past, as long as I’m not using a proprietary format for data related stuff.

Of course, I’m a programmer, so the few cases I had related to different link formats and so on, I’ve been able to solve with a little coding, but in general I feel markdown is superior to most other formats due to it being pure text. (It also has to be said, that I’ve always been more about logical sound markup, than the visually stunning markup… )

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It is a good question and has been brought up multiple times in this forum.

I also have markdown files that I collected in a timeframe of 10 years or so and I switched multiple times from one editor (also latex) to the next. I’m now with obsidian for a couple of years and that says a lot about this software.

  • I only use a few plugins and only the ones that are very popular. The risk that they will be abandoned is relatively low.
  • I only use basic markdown in my notes. I don’t want fancy stuff in my notes that is not accepted by other editors.
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The user base is large enough and there are enough programmers using Obsidian (look at the number of plugins) that folks will write conversion tools you’ll be able to use to move to other apps. And there is a tool that exports you content, including plugins, to HTML, so that you can even get plugin functionality that worked on whenever Obsidian went away.

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