> After some mental gymnastics weighing if I should continue with Obsidian, I found solace when asking myself "Can I see myself using this in 20 years?". I couldn't. The thought of cyclically migrating notes from one PKMS to another every 5 years, as I had done from Evernote to Notion to Obsidian, made me feel tired.
In point of fact this is actually an argument IN FAVOR of Obsidian. While the editor might be proprietary - the notes themselves are just standard markdown. If somehow all the copies of Obsidian magically disappeared off the earth tomorrow, I could easily switch over to Emacs org mode, VS Code, or literally anything else.
> Obsidian was a great tool for me personally for a long time. But I felt frustrated when I wanted to access my notes on my phone while on-the-go and saw that I had to pay for this feature.
Again, a little bit odd considering that the author is technically savvy enough to write an entire PKMS but didn't seem to consider that you can just check your markdown notes into a git repository and sync with the native android/iOS Obsidian app on a mobile device. All my notes sync up to Gitea hosted on my VPS and it works relatively seamlessly.
I'm glad the author had fun. Personally, I'm very happy with Obsidian and the plugin architecture has made it easy for me to extend it where necessary.
100% this. The reason I started using Obsidian in the first place is that it's built on the exact directory structure and file formats that I was already using to manage my writing and notes, and if Obsidian goes away for some reason, that won't change.
Also, Obsidian supports free iCloud sync if you are a Mac and iOS user. I know that's only a subset of users, but a nice option to get Obsidian to sync on the phone if you are in the Apple ecosystem.
Also, they have a cheaper Sync plan now that is $4 per month.
I can't really be bothered that Sync would cost up to 1000 in ten years. If you use Obsidian daily, it had an immensive value and it's cheaper than most services out there.
Even simpler, I have mine in a Dropbox folder. Felt very strange for _this_ to be the straw that broke the camel's back for the author.
Nonetheless, very glad for them that they enjoyed and learned from the experience of building a replacement!
I’m pretty sure author just wanted to build PKMS. These types of “oooh, will it be there in 20 years” are standard OCD/procrastination.
I had a very similar thought process about 15 years ago, and went on a quest to write my own notes system - after trying out a lot of ideas and giving up, I washed up in emacs and gave org-mode a try. It's actually good enough, and I can grep through my notes easiy, and sync them with git.
Not really.. This problem runs far deeper than most are willing to see. First, Obsidian is using a personalized flavour of markdown, and seconds, for many heavy features it's leaning strongly on plugins which are prone to break or even die. Obsidian has a vibrant plugin-community, which also seems to die really fast. This becomes even more critical by plugins dying from changes in Obsidian itself. So while Obsidian is in theory a nice open app, it's longevity-aspect is really awful. I already had many features and plugins dying in the last years, and who know how much more will break in the next 20 years. Simply switching to another text-editor will not do, because they won't offer the missing features. So at best, you are just not losing your data, but you still won't have the tooling to use them.
Someone creating their own system, where they have full control over everything, even if they will have to sacrifice some benefit in the short run, just makes sense in a bigger picture.
But mostly I don't. My work notes are on my work laptop and my personal notes are on my PC. I might copy them onto a mobile device if I'm traveling, but I might not bother. Mobile devices don't have the good keyboard and large screen to really be useful for stuff like that. But I have copied them over before just in case I wanted to find something in them.
Currently vetting a way to sync my database files with my markdown files on my laptop, so it functions similar to Obsidian. I enjoy Vim too much to work constrained to Directus' markdown editor!
The biggest life hack I can recommend for a self hoster is to set up a VPN on your local network and then just never expose your services on the public internet unless you're specifically trying to serve people outside your own household.
Before I did this I was constantly worried about the security implications of each app I thought about installing or creating. Now it's not even worth setting up auth on a lot of simple services I build because if someone is able to hit their endpoints I'm already in deep trouble for many other reasons.
It's far easier to set up, is much more reliable (e.g. when devices are behind firewalls), and uses direct (encrypted) connections when possible.
You can get it to do what you want with just a few clicks. Things like exposing a IoT VLAN on your Tailnet or setting up an exit node to tunnel all internet traffic through your home are super easy. You can even share specific devices with friends, which is super useful. If you have anything particularly sensitive (e.g. a notes app that you wouldn't want your children / partner to have access to), you can limit access to specific users / devices on the TS side, without bothering with implementing auth.
I think there's even a way to look up the user and device based on their IP, which is one way to add painless authentication to your apps. There are reverse proxies that do it and inject the info as HTTP headers.
If you aren't comfortable with trusting them with control over your network, you can always host your own Headscale server.
I self-host a lot of services, and without Wireguard (or equivalent), remote access just wouldn't be realistic.
The downsides are that I need to be connected to the VPN at home to use the domain and I currently don't have SSL set up on the domains, so browsers complain when I connect to them. The second problem I could fix, but I'm not sure if there's a solution for the first.
Apps are blocked to the public by default but accessible using a Tailscale client.
It's built on top of NixOS and completely configurable through a single module.
Still in heavy development but I've replaced an entire rack in my closet with an Intel NUC.
With modern tools like Wireguard, you can even set it up relatively easy, either as Wireguard alone or as Tailscale (or ZeroTier, though that's not Wireguard).
Wireguard (and Tailscale) allows you to setup the tunnel so that only local (RFC1918 ie) traffic is routed over it, meaning it won't eat up your battery like when just routing all traffic over it.
I have Wireguard setup like that. It enables on any Wi-Fi network that isn't mine, as well as cellular, and the battery impact is less than 2% over a day.
It's true you're already screwed if they get past the VPN and I also don't set up Auth for stuff that doesn't have any private details. But don't count on just the VPN for sensitive stuff. Like password manager.
When I'm thinking about a hypothetical situation when I need to save the world by hacking into a hypothetical villain, my best hope will be him using your approach to security.
I'm using Syncthing [0] to sync my vault between devices. On my main PC, Syncthing runs constantly in the background. Say, if I made a change, and want to send those changes to my phone, I open the application on my phone and let it fetch the changes. It's not perfectly smooth, like Obsidian's own integration, but I prefer this instead of setting a Git repository. Also, the files don't stay in a remote server.
I myself currently use Google Drive with DriveSync on Android to sync my notes, which works great. Other cloud providers also work well.
I wrote a comparison of different tools to sync here: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/how-to-sync-obsidian
There are also several Obsidian community plugins for sync, I use Remotely Save via WebDAV.
I previously rolled my own notes system and I find Obsidian plus Syncthing is better. Plugins are a big deal.
In my mind and experience, Trilium has a very unique and extensible model that lends itself to "growing with your PKMS": notes is the atom of information, attributes can be used to manage notes as structured and relational data, templates and inheritance provide structure and consistency at scale.
Trilium may not look like much on the surface, but it is incredibly capable while being approachable. Give it a serious try.
¹: https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes/
²: you can use Trilium local-first/only, or cloud-only, or hybrid. It has its own sync protocol, you just point your instance to a server to sync with, and now you have a master-master replication. All my notes are available offline so I can keep working in-flight, notes shared with others are available via web whether I'm online or not, and I can edit my notes on the web where I don't need offline persistence. All of that is built-in/native to Trilium.
I've noticed that trillium has hierarchical notes; is there a view to look at an item higher on the tree and have it also have the contents of all its children?
The everything markdown feature of obsidian is the dominant one. I can edit the files in emacs when I want to and the sync sorts it out just fine. They're stashed in a fossil repo by one of the machines as a backup because I'm paranoid and that also works fine because it's all ascii files.
It will always cost more if you consider your own time for maintenance long term. Obsidian is one of the most consumer friendly business for note taking out of there, they are not VC so the Evernote comparison is unwarranted IMO.
Where is the limit ?
While $100/year maybe doesn't sound like much, it's hardly the only subscription service you have, and they all add up, from your mail provider, office suite, cloud storage, streaming services, phone bills, internet service, etc.
Personally I find $100/year to edit notes on my phone to be a bit much, but then again, I just use iOS Notes.
I am so fed up with everything turning into subscriptions, that I've just completely stopped buying things that are subscription based.
I understand developers need to make a living, but simply throwing a subscription on top of it won't convince me to buy your product. You convince me by making a compelling product, and by continuously updating it, adding new features, which will convince me to buy another version.
It's a non-trivial amount of money to a lot of people (myself included). I spend way more than that on Free Software, but I'm not throwing money to a proprietary program if I can choose.
Other than that it's exactly what it says on the tin, a hacker's digital notebook. While it would take a bit of rolling up your sleeves to make it look as nice as Logseq or Obsidian it's actually closer in form and function to something like org-mode for Emacs (though not quite hitting the mark regarding linking sadly).
I'm also having issues with integrating it with Authentik's header proxy auth, keeps directing me to a note with the outpost path as the name. The only guide is for authelia.
I’d gladly pay $1000 over a decade for a crucial tool. If the concern is open source and true longevity, I get it, you don’t get that here. But cost for value? Holy shit. $1000 over a decade is absolutely worth it for something you depend on.
If you’re a regular at a bar or restaurant, you pay an order of magnitude over $1000 a year for THAT service. This one is probably worth more.
I can, however, relate to the “every five years my system changes” problem. It’s not fun. At the same time, this is a reasonable cadence to re-evaluate things. If you found something perfect for you that works >5 years, holy crap. You are blessed. That honestly should not be the standard for tools these days—ESPECIALLY in a today’s world.
All that said: I don’t knock the author for trying to build software that can work for someone for 20 years or more. I salute that attempt—and I hope they can do it!—even if I think the specific details of how they got there are flawed.
Oh well, time to grab that Uber eats for $20 third time this week.
And I don't think food is a good comparison. Or renting a physical space, depending on what you get out of being a regular.
Still, the basic price of $50 a year for sync is something I wouldn't be very upset with... except my main goal is a collaborative setup with other people and I'm not paying 5x or more to make that work.
Having been unable to find an out-of-the-box app fitting my needs, I built my own personal finances app in 2012 and I'm using it weekly since then.
I'll probably work again on it one day because the technical stack is old, which makes it harder to host, but otherwise it still does exactly what I want, how I want it.
> That honestly should not be the standard for tools these days—ESPECIALLY in a today’s world.
Maybe I'm not interpreting it correctly, but you make it sound like having a perfect system for more than 5 years is unhealthy.
Whereas, I'd say it's quite the opposite.
Back to my finances app, since I'm using it I've been able to focus on improving/mastering other parts of my life. Not having to get back to find another system to manage my personal finances means that I'm able to focus on other stuff.
I have a hard time seeing how that would be a bad thing?
> If you're a regular at a bar or restaurant, you pay an order of magnitude over $1000 a year for THAT service. This one is probably worth more.
An order of magnitude over 1k per year is almost $30 per day, every day.
This highlights one of my personal bugbears. People have a mental barrier when it comes to recurring, low-cost payments; even though the net sum is small in comparison to other things that they wouldn't think twice to pay for.
A $5 latte every workday comes to (260 * 5) $1300 annually. Obsidian sync is $96. Why would you not pay this amount for a tool you use everyday?
It's because they add up. In this specific case, considering OP job and it's heavy use of obsidian, it makes no sense to not pay for the synchro, if only to support the company[1], but if I was paying 8€/month for all software and service I'm using I would be bankrupted immediately.
Ironically this hurt open source and companies proposing generous free tiers the most because the amount of money people have for software will go to the one they cannot get for free.
[1] actually it makes no sense to develop your own tool when alternatives already exists
I don't see it being discussed that widely.
Also another aspect is that many people seems to think Obsidian is open source, while it is not so.
I spend ~€10 on food per day. Paying $5 for a coffee _every day_ sounds like a lavish luxury. Fun fact: global median income is only ~$2500.
> Obsidian sync is $96. Why would you not pay this amount for a tool you use everyday?
If I paid $96 for my notes to sync, I'd still need to set up some synchronisation mechanism for other files (e.g.: photos, documents, music, etc).
I.e.: I would still need something like Syncthing. If I'm going through the effort of setting up Syncthing, including notes notes for it is trivial.
notes()
{
if [ ! -z "$1" ]; then
mkdir -m 00750 -p /Users/User/iCloud/Documents/notes
Now=$(date '+%B %d %Y %H:%M')
echo -en "\n$Now\t$@\n" >> /Users/User/iCloud/Documents/notes/notes.txt
else
echo "${Now}"
cat /Users/User/iCloud/Documents/notes/notes.txt 2>/dev/null
fi
}If you watch the animated gif, he is still using a third party service to store that graph.
I also think people to tend to like Markdown mostly because it’s plain text. The added benefits of that preview view is minimal. Like my gut feeling Markdown is popular 90% because of it’s in an accepted way to do plaintext and only 10% for the added formatting.
In relative terms you may be right... but subjectively, having grown accustomed to Obsidian's live view in editor mode, I'd have a hard time giving it up.
> Markdown is popular 90% because of it’s in an accepted way to do plaintext and only 10% for the added formatting.
For me Markdown allows me to write and format text at the speed of thought. Added bonus is that it's readable with "less xyz.md" or anything which can render text.
Markdown is great because you can easily add structure while typing compared to other format which have a more extensive markup format. I prefer org-mode because what Markdown can do, but also more extensive capabilities if you need so, but there's not a lot of editors for it especially on mobile.
Yes, the file can grow large with many images, but it's a single file containing everything... even scripting!
I recently moved to anytype from logseq as it hit for me all the right notes for personal stuff, shared family stuff and work stuff.
I wanted something like notion but faster and most importantly, private.
One of the first image to hit me when I got there is a button "Start For Free".
And if I want to run it on my own server in "production" it costs money? or at least you have to fill out a form and "Lets chat".
When I go to a page, I click on pricing, and what I get is a form to fill out and "Lets Chat", I am out of there. If they cant show how pricing is structured, No thanks.
""" Chat with our team about your project. We're here as a resource for you. Get clarity on your project, licensing, or enterprise needs. """
It is open sourced they say https://github.com/directus/directus
The first line of the introduction:
"""Directus is a real-time API and App dashboard for managing SQL database content."""
Yeah... that is not what I need for my personal notes system.
"""Manage Pure SQL. Works with new or existing SQL databases, no migration required."""
No
"""Choose your Database. Supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, OracleDB, CockroachDB, MariaDB, and MS-SQL."""
Still going on about that?
I dont see this a good fit for the use case he presents.
Open License $0 for qualifying users
Freely download and self-host Directus for any project without the need for a license. Get Started
If you and your organization have less than $5M in total annual income (revenue and any funding), then you do not need to pay for self-hosting Directus. This applies to all projects, including production and commercial projects.
All in all, I find Obsidian as good as it gets. Also, Obsidian is probably one of the best options in terms of longevity, as all notes are just Markdown files, no proprietary DBs or other BS that could lock you in.
Also, the biggest thing I've appreciated is just how hard it is to tackle a side project while juggling life. Things that would take 2 weeks (80 hours) at work easily ballon into 3 months; things that would take a month end up taking well over a year. Suddenly an idea that is only a few weeks of full time work, is half-way done years later.
It's $4 actually, for the normal plan that works perfectly well for most use cases. It's also end to end encrypted, which is great. And it's not just about syncing for me, it's about a backup solution for the notes.
> I started to have concerns about the longevity of the plugins and app itself. Some of you may remember when Evernote aggressively limited free users to 50 notes, many users migrated their notes elsewhere. I was one of those users.
The great thing about Obsidian (in comparison to Evernote), is that everything is just a plain text markdown file on disk. You can open those files in any app. If Obsidian goes away someday, all your notes can continue to be edited in any plain text editor. Sometimes I open notes in VS Code, because there are certain things I just prefer writing there.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240104200401/https://obsidian....
A gif would help clarify what your tool does. I've used an automated flow with Github Actions and Charm's VHS (https://github.com/charmbracelet/vhs) in my repo here to demo my CLI tool I built a while back (https://github.com/Amber-Williams/yall/blob/main/demo.gif). Might be of interest : )
Locally runnable freeware is the next best thing, but a distant second.
So, no Obsidian for me, no Directus for me, etc, no SaaS; Org mode is good enough so far, and when it becomes inadequate, if ever, I'll start looking.
I used Joplin for years, I even self hosted the Joplin Sync server, but Obsidian + Community addons runs literal miles around it from a performance and user cusomizability standpoint. Yes, I could stick to being a die hard FOSS user and spend twice as long doing the same tasks, or not even be able to due to lack of community extensions that do the same thing on Joplin's side. I could spend a 100 hours learning how to write a Joplin extension to do what I want and that would be a waste because that's 100 hours less that I've spent focusing on growing the skills that I get paid for. Life is too short to reinvent the wheel every single time.
The question I ask myself: is the advantage here so significant that it's worth the hypothetical switching cost at some point (and is export even possible?). If the answer is yes to both, I go for it.
Rolling your own solution is especially limiting in the context of the sheer amount of integrations the popular ones (like Notion for example) support.
You're basically saying you will quickly build something better than the X hundred engineers at PKMS company Y quickly and it will continue to be better than what X hundred engineers will iterate upon.
I think that time is just better spent learning and picking the subset of features that, for example, Notion offers that really improves your learning rate.
One of the things I dislike about moden software is the constant bloat and churn, because there are so many customers and so many different incentives for software companies to keep pushing features ad infinitum. In contrast, home-grown software like this has one customer and they know exactly what they want. It doesn't matter that a theoretical home-grown app doesn't integrate with the 10 social networks the user doesn't use, because it integrates perfectly with the one they do use.
This person isn't rebuilding the entirety of Obsidian, they're rebuilding the subset of parts they actually use and get value from, which is a much smaller project. By intelligently narrowing your scope like this, making stuff yourself is totally viable. Reframe "limiting" as "targeted".
That said I've played around with its API a few years ago and with page elements being block elements you need to loop through n amount of requests to get the content, it didn't make sense for my use case.
It's not perfect, but if I really want better search functionality, I'll just use the SQLite database that stores the notes. I've never needed to roll up my sleeves for that. I get around the limitations.
It's not perfect, but crafting one's own Personal Knowledge Management System sounds like a 5 year journey for 10 to 20 hours per week at least.
My solution was to move to a file-based system — using plain folders, files, symlinks, and relative links. The filesystem is one of the most fundamental and enduring parts of computing infrastructure, which means I can rely on accessing my notes the same way 20+ years from now. It also allows me to plug in containerized tools for viewing or editing notes, without being tied to a specific app. Filesystem APIs are incredibly stable — basic commands like mkdir won’t suddenly be locked behind a subscription.
Plus, there are plenty of options for syncing and real-time collaboration, many of which are self-hostable and vendor-neutral.
https://xenodium.com/journelly-like-tweeting-but-for-your-ey...
While you don't need to know anything about its serialized format, it happens to be powered by Org plain text. For Markdown fans, I am recording Markdown interest. Do reach out: journelly + markdown at xenodium.com.
edit: A user's blog post from today (also a Markdown fan) https://ellanew.com/ptpl/157-2025-05-19-journelly-is-org-for...
Simon Wilson does a great job at explaining this here https://simonwillison.net/2023/Oct/23/embeddings/ see video at 6.30 min to about 10min point.
If people find that rhythm and flow with their own PKMS - don't switch for the next shiny thing!
But their solution is to depend on directus, which can lead to the exact same issues. To my eyes, they just added an extra step...
Obsidian has end to end encryption and is $4 a month. I totally relate to it being fun to build your own tools but acting like it's a practical use of time... idk
$4/month is a lot for something that only sometimes syncs.
I haven't found use for plugins yet since I'm really just searching, updating tasks and archiving. But if I do need extra functionality, Emacs is the most versatile editor out there, and org-mode is native to it.
You can do this with SOPS and age encryption and it's amazing, but can't view/edit notes outside a terminal or on mobile very easily that I've found.
Looking for a new solution like this, or maybe obscure configuration for an existing notes app that can support this workflow.
All of the "end-to-end" solutions seems like they just store your encrypted keys somewhere with the application files, sync them around to different machines, etc, and decrypt key with a password. But web frontends can be compromised and the master password intercepted, so I'd like to require a Yubikey touch for each document decrypt, which would make exfiltrating multiple documents more difficult.
Errm, no? Obsidian sync is optional. I pay for it to support them, but my main vaults are all synced by iCloud, which was auto set-up by Obisidan during initial setup on my iPhone.
On the Android side, any service which can sync files can work, I assume.
Note: Yes, I use Obsidian on my phone without sync, all the time, and it syncs.
Anyway, I hate the fact I'm using closed-source editor, because it kinda is a sensitive thing, but the more I'm using Obsidian, the more unlikely the switch seems. I was kinda stingy with installing new plugins too, but, well, you cannot just ignore the productivity benefits. It doesn't seem feasible to build something like than on my own (for multiple platforms too!), and nobody brave enough seems to have made it so far.
Before going out and building my own software I’d have looked into self hosting the files. To save those couple bucks.
Granted, I am neurodivergent and have memory issues, so it’s hard for me to say what use it’d be to anyone else. But like, if you’re doing research into something deep, experiments, etc , and you have to put it down sometimes, it’s nice to be able to pick up right after you left off.
I sync using git between my two laptops - I have given up on mobile sync as I realize: I rarely need to edit my notes on the go, it's mostly for view only, and most of my deep work is on the laptop anyways. Yes, I have a "3 copies - 2 locations - 1 remote" backup system in place (I upload an encrypted volume once a week to iCloud [I'm already paying for it] for my remote).
I wanted to eliminate a dependency on proprietary tools and I've found a way to manage my notes in the same way I manage everything else - using my filesystem, and common open source tools.
This is exactly the type of thing I want to inspire others to tinker with! Some of the readers feel there's a single optimal solution. Though I'm confident that there's room for a plethora of PKMS solutions
Oh and funny enough I'm in the process of working on an open-source chrome extension for bookmarking things I've read it looks similar to your https://github.com/osmoscraft/osmosmemo project. Picture of the tool in use is here https://notes.holeytriangle.com/admin/files/a969c5f6-fa9c-44...
It would seem to me that it would leave out a whole lot of complexity to just use Google Drive / OneDrive / iCloud Drive to handle the synchronization across devices, and if need be you could then just add encryption on the cloud storage (if desired), which you would need to do anyway for the dedicated sync service. It would also reduce the infrastructure cost a lot, and utilize resources already available.
I'm not confident I understand how it works from the site though. A video of how it works would be helpful.
For context, this is the quote that is "absurd":
> You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been
I feel like that'd be fine in a lot of different contexts.
After using Obsidian for a couple of years I realized use a very limited set of features - editing markdown in a directory structure.
All I needed was really the directory structure view to the left and content to the right.
My main reasons were:
- Straightforward queries. I have a lot of structured data in my notes and lesson plans, and being able to work with SQL was ideal.
- A web app was much more reliable than Obsidian's third-party sync platforms.
- I could extend Directus to do all sorts of other things. I eventually built my wedding planner and website backend on the same Directus instance that holds my notes.
(I also built a set of scripts on my Hackberry Pi that let me write text files on the go that saved to Directus)
And yeah I have the same gripes around the writing experience. I prefer Vim so I've been looking into ways I can use my notes as local markdown which sync on save. Of course, keeping the Directus editor for my mobile device edits.
Because we value our time.
I think this is extreme micro-optimization of something that ultimately matters little (or not at all).
The hard part of PKM isn't finding the perfect tool, it's to take the time to:
-read/experience something and actually take good notes on it -actually retrieve something from your notes and add to it with new knowledge
Those two activities are how you get almost 100% of the benefit of note-taking, whether you're using a self-hosted sync or a folder of txt files.
Of course, a few things make these easier (linking, RAG, daily docs), but most of the common tools now offer this
Either way, like many others, I use SyncThing to sync my vault, and routinely edit it with vim, so Obsidian is just one comfortable shell that can (relatively easily) be replaced.
It's quite easy to sync notes to your mobile device using a free method, or using a cloud service you might already be paying for [4].
The great thing about Obsidian is that the notes itself are just markdown files, so you can use them in any other program. This protects you as a user in case Obsidian enters a enshittification phase. A good alternative is haptic [0], it is very similar to Obsidian but can also be used in the browser. Or LogSeq [1], SilverBullet[2] and just Visual Studio Code also work well. For just editing a single file MarkText[3] is also good.
[0]: https://github.com/chroxify/haptic
[1]: https://logseq.com/
Yes... My note system will last.
> Could you see yourself using your note-taking app you use today in 30 years?
No, I do not trust apps to last. Therefore I use a simple file system hierarchy to categorize everything. Then I use the best avaliable browser and editor.
My setup is Markor on mobile for browse and edit. Syncthing-fork to get it all into my big system where I run customized Neovim and can make scripts to interact with the data as well as syncing any generated output to the phone.
Having been a Obsedian fan, with similar plug-in fascination, I also experienced the negatives the article mention, and I finally settled with a simple file hierarchy and resorting to as few and basic tools as possible. Obsidian is great, but I didn't need all the features. I need a way to categorize, to quickly find, to edit, and to easily sync and my current setup satisfies that and I'm productive with it. (of course it does not reflect Obsidian's second brain feature, but personally I found that concept to require more work than reward and it wasn't intuitive for me to get accustomed to, but I guess the second brain thing is more like a lifestyle).
https://leduccc.medium.com/setup-self-hosted-synchronization...
I built a bare-bones alternative where each "card", e.g. book or paper, is a JSON file. This was motivated by parsing the bloated Trello export file into individual files.
I tinkered with this until I came across Obsidian. I used a version of this tool[0] to parse my Trello export into markdown files. It's still not perfect and continually requires tinkering to do what I need, but my present setup is infinitely better than the prior. r.e. another comment: I can imagine using this setup in twenty years and am happy to pay for Sync.
[0] https://forum.obsidian.md/t/t2md-a-tool-to-migrate-trello-to...
How much does your VPS costs vs Obsidian subscription? I wonder. Is it like 1 5$/month micro machine and you just pray that it will survive for 10 years without data loss?
The best tools are the ones that get things done and get out of the way. When the time comes, you can walk out of Obsidian easily without being a hostage in any format.
The few plugins that I use are the ones I can walk out too and live without it. I love the idea of spending extra time to learn the details, shortcuts, and be able to use a tool natively without the help of plugins or extreme configurations that it takes hours/days to deviate too far away from the original configurations.
I wrote an article for me to remember it in future. https://brajeshwar.com/2025/obsidian/
I mean go nuts and roll your own if you want, but really, what’s not to like?
I like the offline part, but for me Canvas was the best tool. I am also building a P2P synchronization feature for LimanDoc, and having offline LLM support is coming soon too
Ended up building: https://crom.ai/
Here is a little write-up / more details on how it's built: https://notes.rolandpeelen.com/notes-on-building-crom
Joplin uses sqlite as storage but you can export collection to md files and there is backup plugin which does that periodically.
Also you can setup external editor. I am editing notes in neovim and joplin is just for viewing.
One app that is very simple to use had everything I needed and sync'd using Github is https://about.noteshub.app/. I have been using it for around 6 months and found it perfect for my needs.
The second someone says "oh just set up X server and add Y plugin and tweak Z settings" you've lost the whole point of the thing.
The notes being markdown is also very useful, I spend most of my time in a text editor, so I installed a Neovim plugin that works a bit like Obsidian [1]. So, for simple note-taking, I don't have to open Obsidian at all. It comes in useful when I need to use the massive collection of plugins, especially Excalidraw.
I wanted:
- A flexible block editor like Notion.
- That runs natively and FAST (unlike Notion).
- Where the underlying data is always plain text (Markdown formatted).
I wrote about its development on my blog[2].
I think there are two ways:
1. Select an open source app which meet your requirements
2. Select and pay for a commercial app
do not waste your time and resources for it, just use a or some proper tools, and use the time for the most important things.
On Android, I solved this problem quite simply by pointing Obsidian's mobile app at a syncthing folder, which cheerfully communicates with my workstation (and about a dozen other devices I own) and keeps things up to date. Works way better than I expected it to. Honestly the most infuriating part is that Google seems to have decided that apps like syncthing aren't welcome on the Play Store anymore, leaving the maintenance of that particular app up in the air. But the point here is that Obsidian can point to any folder, and the syncing task is totally separate. It's nice to have the convenience of their hosted option, but it's by no means the only solution to that problem.
Would probably work with other similar options too.
Need PKMS > Use existing product > Notice shortcomings > Switch to main alternative > Notice shortcomings > Begin creating bespoke PKMS with the specific functionality you wanted.
If you ever relax these constraints, Tana is a great mix.
I'd call it a mix of Roam + Notion.
Now that it's in GA, easy to recommend too.
Sincerely, not-trolling, from a bare minimum note taker.
That said, I just converged on Apple Notes in the end.
People in a similar position might be interested in Joplin, which is indeed FOSS, and has lots of sync options. I personally use SyncThing, which keeps things free, but you can also use a number of other free cloud providers. You can choose to encrypt your notes to protect your privacy.
but.. i just think that writing markdown (unless its just #headline and ### subheadline) it takes too long.
Uh oh. I wouldn't use those. Of course they come and go - they're made by companies.
> Could you see yourself using your note-taking app you use today in 30 years?
Yes of course. Otherwise I wouldn't be using it.
> Do you ever have concerns around the privacy of your notes?
Not really.
> Are you spending more time setting up your notes system rather than managing your notes?
No.
> What does an effective and timeless PKMS even look like?
I use VimWiki[0]. There's a possibility it will go away, but I doubt it. There's a possibility both vim and neovim will go away, but I doubt it.
It stores everything as Markdown files. Should Markdown ever go away, it's all still very readable plain text files. I use UTF-8. Perhaps that'll go away at some point?
I version everything with git, I doubt git will fully go away, but I'm ok migrating to a different VCS if need be.
I bet the longevity of my setup is way better than the longevity of a backend written in TypeScript, backed by a SQL database, running in Docker, based on a CMS I've never heard of (Directus).
I’m all for doing projects like this as an intellectual exercise. It’s just that the motivation behind doing so in the article is a bit more “huh?”
> But if it's so obvious, why aren't other developers rolling out their own PKMS? Perhaps I'm the first to discover this or perhaps developers aren't writing about their custom PKMS.
Well, because of Standards, of course: https://xkcd.com/927/
I don't mean to shit on the OP's work here, but from what I can tell, the app they built is a multi-platform markdown editor and renderer that has an auth stack. Oh, and it's self hostable.
If I hop on https://awesome-selfhosted.net/ , head down to the note taking section: https://awesome-selfhosted.net/tags/note-taking--editors.htm... , I can see at least 7 that support this feature. Oh, also this category: https://awesome-selfhosted.net/tags/knowledge-management-too... has many more.
So while I think it's fun to do personal projects, I kinda feel like, if you had time to do this, it would probably have been better both for you and just like the world in general if you instead just created a PR with whatever feature you wanted on one of these more fleshed out projects. Bonus: you get a bunch more stuff, for free, since many other people are working on the same project. Bonus bonus: You can put a project with a shitload of github stars and users on your portfolio/resume/whatever and point to your PR.
Anyway as for PKMS thoughts, I've been using org mode since 2016. I've tried Obsidian and Logseq for completedness but in both cases ended up back in org mode for various reasons.
In PKMS, everyone goes on about knowledge graphs, linking etc, but I've realized lately I've never found that useful - I do use org-roam and link notes, but when I want to find links to, say, "machine learning," I'm just as likely to simply do a full-text file search for the term, which leads to the same results. As for the visual knowledge graphs, I've never seen them useful for anything other than showing off at coworking meetups.
What I've come back to is, what I really need my PKMS to do that I haven't really configured org mode to do yet for me is, in situations that happen to me CONSTANTLY when I'm out and about, I need my PKMS very quickly to answer questions for me like, "who was that guy I read recently that said something about modern capitalism causing us all to be alienated," or, "I vaguely remember reading about how social media categorizes us into advertising groups, what was that again?", or, "What was that city in Italy we went to with that crazy good ice cream? Actually on that note what islands did we go to on that trip?" I'm frequently in conversations with people where I want to share information with them, but maybe because I have ADHD brain or just am uniquely deficient and remembering very specific bits of info, I can't recall stuff (a great example of this, and I had to google to write this part: I ALWAYS forget Quentin Tarantino's name despite really liking his movies). Anyway, I tried using an org-roam org-to-html deploy tool to create a searchable, private website of my knowledge graph, and that's... fine I guess. I need to get it automated somehow, but even then I'm sure it won't be great. Of course I'm thinking of some kind of deployed solution that queries an LLM that can search my entire note repo, but that's a project and a half I don't have time to do.
So for now my plan is to just keep plugging away at org mode and org-to-html to see if I can get a really good flow there.
LLMs are the missing piece that everyone has been desperately need to have the knowledge base come to life, instead of as a glorified key word search engine
I use cherrytree currently, by the way.