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Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾

"Even Obsidian’s most dedicated users don’t expect it to take on Notion and other note-taking juggernauts. They see as having a different audience with different values."
What are the values? Freedom and control.
Freedom to use an org system I created, freedom from my data stored by someone else somewhere and freedom from being dependent on one company's decisions.

fastcompany.com/90960653/why-p

Fast Company · The cult of Obsidian: Why people are obsessed with the note-taking appObsidian, the indie darling of notetaking apps, rejects everything you know about modern software. And it's working.

@liztai
You hit the nail on the head here. I switched over from one note to obsidian because i wanted to own my own files and data.
Over time, Obsidian has grown into a much more robust note taking app. I dont see myself changing ship anytime soon

@dranger me too.TBH, I'm using it more as a journal than a notetaking app, but even then, I have speeded up my blogging so much because I could compile my thoughts on the go in Obsidian and then rewrite them into a blog post quickly. Love it!

@liztai I would say that #Obsidian indeed promotes more freedom than Notion but not more than #logseq due to its proprietary software. Obsidian looks amazing, and the huge amount of plugins attracts me a lot, but then I remember it is closed sourced and therefore not trustworthy :(

@moshtodon Files are markdown ones, and you can just sync them to your workstation.

@kepano could probably answers about your doubts.

@moshtodon @liztai I don't know of any app aside from Obsidian that has all the following:

1. stores data in an interoperable plain text data format local to the device
2. does not have VC funding
3. does not include telemetry
4. has a flexible plugin API for both desktop and mobile
5. is actively maintained and improved
6. gets quick security patches, e.g. the recent CVE-2023-4863
7. has end-to-end encryption for sync between devices
8. is free for personal use

@kepano @liztai well, that's kind of the point, we need to trust you when you say there's no telemetry and there's E2E encryption because it is closed source, apart from auditing it with software like wireshark.

On the other hand, I'm thinking on LibreOffice although they work with different kind of files, but it's 100% free and sustainable. Have you explored this kind of methods to fund Obsidian?

@kepano @liztai And I agree with you that Obsidian would be a great piece of software if its code was free.

Hace you considered publishing its source under a license for open source, but not free software? That way, we could see and trust the software but not using it to replicate it to create other programs because that would be illegal.

@moshtodon @liztai you don't need to trust us — network connections can be easily monitored, and we will be publishing a 3rd party audit in the not too distant future

this post shows how to verify E2EE
obsidian.md/blog/verify-obsidi

then again you're only talking about 3 and 7, to me the other freedoms are essential too

I have a ton of respect anyone who is working on FOSS apps in this space, it's extremely hard to do in a viable way — and mostly comes at the cost of other freedoms I listed above

obsidian.mdHow to verify Obsidian Sync's end-to-end encryptionHow can you be sure that your data is end-to-end encrypted? In this guide, we provide step-by-step instructions to trustlessly verify the end-to-end encryption of your data using Obsidian Sync.

@liztai @ellane Obsidian is so far beyond Notion in usefulness. I honestly think that people just use Notion because they get jollies specifically out of configuring and tweaking the thing versus actually *achieving* anything (that couldn’t be achieved way easier with any of a number of other apps out there).

@dhrystone @ellane hah! That's why I avoid Notion. I spend far too much time tinkering than doing things 😂

@liztai I love the flexibility obsidian offers. Although, the freedom you mention, we never know until they make it open-source and fully become transparent.