Digital Gardening in Obsidian | Hacker News Reader

Digital Gardening in Obsidian

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140 pointsbrianhicks51 comments

If you like that, I also recommend taking a look at Logseq[0].

I've previously been using Obsidian, and Bear before that, but always structured my notes as increasingly nested lists of bullet points.

Logseq is basically built around that abstraction, to make it very ergonomic (with each bullet point being a "block" - the smallest unit of text on which Logseq operates).

It also has querying built-in and the core is fully open source. So far very happy with it, and the new sync is great.

Besides, it's also written in ClojureScript, which makes my inner lisp nerd happy.

[0]: https://logseq.com/

Agreed, Logseq has worked for me where no other note-taking system has (and I've tried a _lot_).

I believe it has spaced repetition cards built in, too.

It took me a day to grok the "structured" lack of structure, but once I did, it has become an invaluable tool. I just throw notes on my daily journal and add tags/links (same thing) liberally. The knowledge network is practically automatic and I don't fall into the trap of prescribing a hierarchical system. A massive boon for someone with clinically significant ADHD.

The only extensions I use are for cosmetics, all functionality I need is included out of the box.

My biggest complaints are the querying language (a form of datalog) and that macros don't replace the text but are rendered dynamically instead (limiting referential utility).

> I just throw notes on my daily journal and add tags/links (same thing) liberally. The knowledge network is practically automatic and I don't fall into the trap of prescribing a hierarchical system.

This is what I've started doing as well, and can confirm it's been working well so far. Logseq will automatically create pages made out of backlinks showing you all the blocks that contain the given tag.

Also, some cool new outliner/mindmap tools are flowchart.fun[0] and obsidian markmind plug-in[1].

Personally, I find it easier to initially think visually and then just later convert it to nested-bullet points.

[0] https://flowchart.fun/ [1] https://github.com/MarkMindCkm/obsidian-markmind

See also: https://markwhen.com

In a similar vein except for plotting events that I've been working on

This is a great course on Logseq https://www.logseqmastery.com/ (working my way through it).

Also he has some great intro videos on YouTube for the way he uses Logseq https://youtube.com/@OneStutteringMind

I prefer Logseq because Obsidian gets messy quickly with the structure for me. I end up having to use the OmniSearch plugin to find things quickly.

If you want something self-hosted look into Foam[0]. You write your notes in VS Code with Markdown. Many web frameworks can then generate interactive sites from it.

[0] https://foambubble.github.io/foam/

Obsidian is also self-hosted, so i don't understand your point. It's just a very fancy Markdown editor of local files.

The idea is to be able to hit the server from all your devices, and to have that server and all the software under your control.

You can very simply host your own server providing and syncing markdown files with rsync!

(/s, referencing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)

Open source

I've documented some of my improvements to Foam and my workflow [0], brings it very close to endgame for me.

[0] https://csh.rit.edu/~rg/productivity/20221109203834/

Finally something FOSS I can get behind. Really dislike Obsidians business model; it's going to breed anti-user features.

This looks very hackable too (in the good way).

Obsidian has been around for years at this point. It's completely free to use without limitations on functionality. They make money by charging for sync, but are happy to point out that there are free options to sync data.

So where are these anti-user features? Why does the business model lead to them? "Not open source" doesn't count.

I have no idea what features are "anti-user", but I would note that it is not free for commercial use. I'm paying for Obsidian sync and still can't use Obsidian for work. (At the moment, I'm using logseq there.)

https://obsidian.md/eula

I'm not sure I'd agree that pricing is ipso facto anti-user, but I grant that it's a limitation that can be out of the end user's direct control.

An example of an anti-user feature I think Obsidian might fall into is making the end-user the product for the free tier. That's just how those business models work, they are inherently anti-user because the user is the product.

FOSS allows you to choose to be free tier or pay for their services. The difference is in the free tier: you can do the leg work and hack together your own systems to match their paid services (namely public hosting). Its sort of a promise that you can use, audit, help improve, and love the free product without having to be concerned about forfeiting your privacy or security.

Additionally, FOSS projects always benefit from community auditing of the code, increasing the reliability and security of the software instead of relying on a few individuals to catch bugs.

Anyways all this to say "not FOSS" might not count itself, but implies there are other anti-user features at play.

I'd definitely be worried about that if they had investors, but as far as I know, it's entirely self-owned, and they are happy if they make enough money to support their small staff of (currently) six. Not even sure all of them take a salary , for that matter.

Outside investors seem to me to be the real anti-user signal. Everything else flows from that.

What do you have against Obsidian's business model and what better one do you imagine?

Its not FOSS, and they rely on subscriptions. Call me a hardliner, but that's two non-negotiable things when it comes to nice-to-have software for me personally.

If they created an open source version I could self-host, I would happily adopt it. Frankly it looks beautiful and is only missing easy file integration. But they don't because it would cause them to lose a vast source of value they provide to their customers (providing proxies and servers for people to access their data remotely).

They rely on subscriptions for two very subscriptiony things - storing and syncing files, and hosting a website. Both have ongoing recurring costs, so a subscription is the only thing that makes sense. You don't actually need either of them and could easily use any other third party syncing/static host tool or service, and many people do with Git, Dropbox, etc.

The only part of their business model you can't go around is the fact that they're not FOSS, and for business use you need a business license. I personally find the terms quite acceptable (only apply if you work in a for profit place with more than two employees and more than X revenue), and the price is good value for money for me.

My problem with obsidian is that I need a license to use it if I add something work related. I can not realy disentangle both. If Ilearn something new here on HN Iwm will propably use it later at work.

I am curious, is there any issue with just purchasing the license?

I started out using Obsidian just for university related stuff but found it incredibly useful, so I ended up purchasing the license myself. While I'm not a big fan of subscription software, 50$/year is extremely reasonable, especially considering that your data isn't trapped in someone's cloud.

I am extremly cautios with this small fees. They tend to add up. If I would use Obsidian, I sure would use it all my live. So 50$ * 45 years more to go: 2250$

All the files are locally hosted, and written in standard markdown. You can abandon ship any time you want. It's also ok to pay for good software.

$2250 dollars over 45 years sounds pretty good imo but that's just me haha

Thats what I thought, thats about half the annual operating cost of my personal vehicle. And it does provide me with a lot of value. Its for brainstorming, maintaining contacts, keeping track of projects, etc.

Just a side observation: Many people on HN do make money building software, yet so many users seem completely unwilling to pay for software. In some regards I do understand that, there are quite a lot of "bad companies" out there that you just can't avoid in many circumstances, but as far as I'm concerned, Obsidian seems like the good guy (for now at least).

Personally? Iam at odds with the subscription model for apps but may be better than paying for every major release. I recently started to think about buying software instead of doing a half good job programming something

If it was just $2250 for 45 years, maybe. That's not a payment option. The price will probably go up with inflation. It's probably closer to $4000-8000 after inflation, as $50 will become $100 after a decade or two.

If you go to the extent of including inflation, you should also account for the fact that your income will also likely increase - with raises accounting for inflation and career progression - making the price of a tool that can provide so much value even more negligible.

Currently that's 10% of a month's income, not exactly trivial. They make an excellent products, but I probably will move to a FOSS solution if I find one so I can use it for work.

An Obsidian license is $50. That'd mean a monthly income of $500. There's a good chance that means you're working by yourself, so I'll flag that Obsidian only requires a commercial license if the company has two or more people.

Paragraph 1 in the EULA - https://obsidian.md/eula - say "You need to pay for Obsidian if and only if you use it to contribute, directly or indirectly, to revenue-generating, work-related activities in a company that has two or more people"

Nope, I'm an on call remote consultant without a lot of hours at the moment, because I just moved somewhere without many opportunities for those who can't drive, and I don't have any income at all that isn't tied to a 5+ person company.

I would consider reaching out to see if you can get a special pricing. The team is very inclusive and communicative!

Same here, and honestly I suspect a lot of people probably don't know this and use Obsidian for work or include work-related notes in their free plan without realizing that it technically violates the license.

“Whas Dataview?”

https://medium.com/os-techblog/how-to-get-started-with-obsid...

I hope that Obsidian extends the social network beyond Discord integration. Those digital gardens only grow on their own when others can enrich notes and annotate ideas.

Now, that is interesting direction to take. For the time being, there is Github and PRs.

Anyone looked at Tana? I'm really liking the concept they call super tags. Makes it easy to extract structure from what is just a giant document of nested lists.

I've been using Tana the past few weeks (after more than 2 years in Obsidian). I quite like it in general, but it's really a big step up for tracking the details of the fiction I'm working on right now.

https://help.tana.inc/getting-started-and-overview/introduct...

Cool post. Definitely impressed with Obsidian. Not a huge fan of the UI on iOS. For some reason I keep getting drawn back to iOS Notes for ease of use.

iOS Notes should be enough for anyone, but I hate that you can't link between notes in any reasonable way (sharing the note to myself sucks and forcing the system to give you the note id and creating your own internal notes link is tedious).

I basically use iOS Notes as a dumping ground and then occasionally clean it out like an Inbox. Mostly deleting things, but sometimes moving it into my Obsidian vault.

In theory Drafts is even better for this because it supports Markdown and is designed to be a dumping ground and rapid processing of the notes.

Tiny suggestion - instead of

  .map(g => { return { key: g.key, rows: g.rows.map(r => r[1]) }})

you can write

  .map(g => ({ key: g.key, rows: g.rows.map(r => r[1]) }))

You could also destructure g to end up with:

.map(({ key, rows }) => ({ key, rows: rows.map(r => r[1]) }))

also:

  .map(({ key, rows }) => ({ key, rows: rows.map(([page, link]) => link) }))

and

  .groupBy(p => p[0])

  .groupBy(([link, file]) => link)

One of his references seems to have gone under and I want to point it out because I want other people to also suffer from reading every single linked note, all of which are great sources for ideas: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z36iMKLe4CDAXdtLSJD4Z6qPPFUS...

Sorry.

gone under? Do I have a broken link someplace?

Sorry, I just meant that people shouldn't miss it, because there's great stuff there too.

I'd be interested in more detail about the journal prompts he mentions. That's something I've never done, but I feel like it could be a useful practice to add.

if you’re using calendar and tasks i recommend checking out https://acreom.com/.

(disclaimer: i’m one of the makers)

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