this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2025
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It stores your data in plaintext, and simply uses the program to parse special formatting characters. There are no attempts at obfuscation or encryption, and it doesn’t lock you into a walled garden that refuses to play nice with other programs. The program itself is closed-source, but anyone could write an open source version to parse the same info… There just hasn’t been a good reason to do so. Even if Obsidian as a company and program ceases to exist overnight, your data is still safe on your machine and can be read by anyone who cares enough to dig into the file. Hell, you can even open it as the plaintext file and dig through it manually.
There in fact are FOSS alternatives like Joplin. Personally, I actually switched from Joplin to Obsidian due to a larger community (and therefore community-driven plugins) and overall a more polished UX. That being said, I have the security of switching back if Obsidian ever becomes evil or unusable.
Another aspect is that the entire source code is technically viewable (partially obfuscated) since it's a web app. Having written plugins for Obsidian, you're very much interacting with the source code itself. Feels like open source with extra steps and I wish one day they will finally make the switch to true FOSS.
That's not so true of the Android app. I do have access to bytecode but changing bytecode to bring feature enhancements is not for the faint of heart.
And storage in their current android app is a major privacy breach.
You're right, I wasn't thinking about the android app when writing this.
I switched from Joplin because Obisidian data is just markdown and I can edit and generate it with external apps
Joplin had a custom database system (at the time)
And the old version you have on the pc still works, since there is no cloud communication needed to run it.
Markdown is also an open format. You aren't forced to use Obsidian for everything, and there are already numerous programs that are capable of displaying the formatted end-file, because it's standard markdown.
It's not some proprietary thing that only Obsidian uses.
Use obsidian enough and your brain also just starts to interpret raw markdown lmfao.
I've definitely caught myself using md to format pen and paper notes before.
That's the whole point of markdown lmfao.
I can see the Matrix, man, I can see the truth behind it all, I can interpret raw markdown and even write bbCode by hand
I don't even see the code. All I see is heading, emphasis, dot-points ...
Like https://silverbullet.md/
True. The other day I uploaded a photo that should be portrait instead of landscape. I opened Nemo ( Linux file explorer), right clicked to edit image, fixed it, and automatically my note picked up the change.
Similar thing when storing a 1000 line json in the notes
Hol up. Are notes stored in files in a directory structure or a single file? Just that you said "the file" so I'm wondering.
If so, that's lock in.
It’s a directory. When you create a new note, it creates a new file inside of that directory. My point was simply that you can always just browse the directory and read the plaintext file for whichever note you want. Obsidian simply adds things like text formatting and automatic links to other notes.
Its a directory, they were just referring to individual files.
I just wish the price of having the publish feature was slightly lower. They’d get much more subscribers, including me.