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Comment by throwaway180118 | Hacker News Reader

I've seen a lot of recent posts about Obsidian in the past week. If it's a marketing tactic then it might be working on me. I hope it's a decent product and not just some PR stunt.

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It recently got 1.0 version.

But before that it was already really popular, there are tons of YouTube videos with people describing how they use it, houdreds of opensource plugins, people even sell paid courses about it. It's amazing to me how popular it got is such a short time.

So I was actually quite surprised how little before v1.0 it appeared on HN, especially when most of plugins are on github and have many stars, so clearly developers were using it.

For me this is the first "notes" app that I enjoy using. I can totally recommend it. Before it was just a text file or OneNote (for which i found some migration tool to Obsidian) . To me Obsidian still has many annoying isuues but much more advantages, and I see it's only improving with each version.

Gotta admit i also checked out obsidian and the top review for the app on the play store gave me pause. Seems the app cannot sync with your local server so you'd need the sync subscription if you wanted to use app and desktop together to maintain one set of notes.

Can someone confirm this?

On iOS/macOS you can use iCloud Drive to synchronize without the subscription. It doesn’t work flawlessly but it’s „ok“.

I use Syncthing to sync between my android phone and my computer without a subscription, and everything has been working perfectly.

I use the sync feature, but its not required. There are several tutorials for using got with a community plugin or an alternative like syncthing.

Its just text after all. Which is the point of using Obsidian.

Paying for sync is like paying to support the software development. Which is worth doing for Obsidian. Plus I find it useful. I am on the older lower rate.

Obsidian saves to a bunch of openly accessible markdown files. You can sync them however you want.

Cross system / OS landscapes can make it nearly impossible without Obsidian Sync. It's okay for Android & Windows, but if you throw an iPad into the mix, you can't really find a local/cloud sync for them all. iOS especially has some limitations on how apps can access files, so your only options are iCloud or Obsidian Sync.

For more info see here: https://help.obsidian.md/Getting+started/Sync+your+notes+acr...

This is untrue, I use iOS Working Copy connected to my git repo which contains my Obsidian vault. It's also on on my android pixel phone and I have it on my windows machine. Everything syncs just fine using a private github repo.

Do you use end to end encryption? I don't want 3rd party companies to see my data.

Of course obsidian is not open source so I can't guarantee their e2e sync service doesn't sneakily send the data to their servers, but it's still less risky than having it easily available to the company employees.

I use a community plugin that saves to a Hetzner storage box, which support webdav off the shelf. Works flawlessly across all the platforms you mention and Linux too.

I used the git plugin for this on my iPad. This uses a JS based git version.

There's a plugin called "Remotely Save". I use it to sync to nextcloud (webdav), but there's also another plugin for syncing to a git repo.

And worst case, you can use any 3rd party file syncing tool like nextcloud, dropbox, syncthing, etc since it's just a directory of files.

I have it synced in a git repo, and I use their apps on windows and macos. I lazily use the git plugin to commit and push changes, but you can do at all in the command line if you wanted. Reminder, it's a bunch of plain text markdown files so commit away.

But why, it's a free product. I used it for some time but then switched to Logseq.

Switched to it from Bear Notes, Apple Notes.

Not affiliated with Obsidian. Can recommend it wholeheartedly.

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