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Comment by andreilys | Hacker News Reader

So many other applications out there that don’t hold your data hostage like Notion.

I learned after spending an hour to transfer notes that they have a “limit” on the number of “blocks” (aka notes) that I can have.

Absolutely terrible user experience and turned me off from ever using Notion.

I ended up going open source with vimwiki (and obsidian as a visualization layer, although as comments pointed out it’s not open source). much more robust and less impervious to scummy growth tactics or companies shutting down due to acquisitions/pivots in strategy.

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> I ended up going open source via Obsidian

Obsidian is not open source. I'm hesitant to dump my stuff into Obsidian because their markdown has plenty of nonstandard features. You can't run a directory of Obsidian notes through Pandoc and copy the output to your website. I think someone did write a partial converter at some point. This is kind of an issue with all the recent notes apps like Dendron, Logseq, and Athens.

Yea I don’t take notes on Obsidian, it’s all through vimwiki.

The main thing I use obsidian for at this point is visualizing connections between my notes

I had the same experience. It started off great, but I was not a fan of the idea of having all my data hostage with Notion. I'm using emacs with org-mode and org-roam right now, but I still don't have good flow with org-roam.

Both Obsidian.md and vimwiki look really cool though. Do you use Obsidian and vimwiki together, or for separate purposes?

I take notes with vimwiki (using tags) and then obsidian is the visualization layer (being able to filter and see what notes are related to one another)

Obsidian isn't as bad as Notion, but it's also proprietary. Unfortunately, there is no good company in this space.

Doesn’t really matter since the underlying data (markdown files) is what obsidian uses (vs hosting the data on their cloud).

So in the event that they don’t survive or enact policies I disagree with, nothing changes for me

Their markdown is not standard, so stuff might still change for you.

It's not standard, but that's not a surprise, as Markdown is a pretty barebones format. Most of what they extended it with is pretty simple, like [[wikilinks]]. There are also other tools being developed that can work with the custom syntaxt extensions.

Also, at the end of the day, it's still just plain text. You won't lose any of your data if you no longer use Obsidian.

> there is no good company in this space

That's a bold statement.

- https://logseq.com/

- https://www.dendron.so/

- https://github.com/athensresearch/athens

- https://foambubble.github.io/foam/

Outline is open source https://getoutline.com

I tried Notion. It was cool in the beginning, but I got overwhelmed by the UI and all the templates they have.

Went with vimwiki. I just store my notes in a private Github repository. It's simple and effective. So far I've been happy with this setup.

The limitation only applies on free accounts, paid accounts for personal usage are extremely cheap, and it has full exportability into markdown and csv. Not sure what you're talking about unless this was a long time ago.

It’s highly unlikely that I’ll continue to use a paid service for 10-20 years, or whether that service is even going to be around. Which is what the whole motivation for having a “second brain” is for me, Having a robust note taking system that I’ll be using for decades to come.

Unlikely that vimwiki or markdown will be going away, can’t say the same thing about Notion.

That's an entirely different problem (one I sympathize with, but am not bothered by due to exportability) than spreading misinformation about how it works. Your post was false in one way and misleading in another. Saying a place where your files can be exported in a standardized format "holds your notes hostage" is hyperbolic and inflammatory.

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