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Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

Obsidian's problem is Sync + Publish costs way too much, esp. when compared with competitors.

Notesnook provides almost everything Evernote provides, with encryption, better publishing and syncing.

Notion provides more features, incl. publishing and syncing plus the kitchen sink and its factory, yet it doesn't have offline access.

For sync + publish, I have to pay 1.5x what Dropbox wants for 2TB of storage, or what Trello wants for a year, etc.

It makes no sense, at least for me.

BTW, Evernote's .enex format is just well-defined XML. You can parse and convert it into anything you want. It's a modest superset of Markdown.

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>Obsidian's problem is Sync + Publish costs way too much, esp. when compared with competitors.

You can sync for free using Syncthing or OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox free accounts.

Thanks! Does that work with the mobile app, too?

Yes, it does.

On ios you can only do icloud though

I tried using iCloud to sync for a year and went back to Obsidian Sync. I’m not sure exactly what the culprit was, but frequently, I would find my ToDo note (which was used the most) would be stuck and fail to sync for days. Rebooting the stick machine would clear the issue. I was using two Macs and my iPhone at the time.

For me it's fixed by rebooting my mac actually. Had that yesterday for the first time. You can check who's not syncing by checking the "Files" app.

because it uses icloud drive. and that syncs poorly and on its own schedule. it would sometimes take a day or so to get a file from my mac studio to my macbook. it is crazy how bad icloud is.

my wife and I share stuff within icloud and we both HATE IT SO MUCH. It's truly mind boggling how bad it is, and continues to be, in 2023. Photos sometimes sync, sometimes they don't. Cool. Sometimes rebooting the phone makes them sync, other times not. Awesome. Sometimes shared notes get updated, other times they don't. Sometimes shared note invitations just never arrive at all, for no discernible reason. Sweet. It took us 4 attempts to do a shared Home app invitation. The first 3 times it just never showed up.

We HATE HATE HATE icloud so much but our only other option is to switch everything to Android and I hate Google more than I hate Apple, so ....... we just stick with icloud and its absolute shittiness.

Switch to Microsoft? OneNote's entire file format is built to enable live collaboration. Their apps may be a bit clunky but they work.

It blows my mind that Apple can tell you how you're allowed to copy your plain text files from one of your computers to another one of your computers. If you look at the behavior sans the branding, it would not be hard to label it malware.

not sure we have the same definition of 'malware'. the problem isn't copying/syncing the file from one computer to another, that works just fine. but obsidian can't read outside its own app folder IIRC.

i sync files with dropbox to my ios devices all the time.

I define "malware" to mean software that intentionally subverts the desires of the owner of the computer (unintentional subversion is a bug or a miscommunication).

Apple arbitrarily restricts you from using your applications (obsidian) to read and write your data in a way that you can sync, to no fault of its own, your own, or the syncing service.

I strongly encourage you to try associating this kind of behavior with an unfamiliar organization as a mental exercise. How would you feel about that? Someone else restricting your access to your computer such that you cannot use your applications how you want, through no technical fault of their own? I bet that would see that as a problem you would want to fix right away.

It’s not like it’s a dark pattern, hidden under multiple layers of disinformation and redirection. Apps have always been siloed on iOS and it has even got better as some apps can break out of the container model (PDF Viewer is a prime example). I bought an iPhone and an iPad knowing that. If it ever bugs me, I switch to Android (which, BTW, is moving to the container model). Which means Obsidian could have requested permissions for the folder to be placed somewhere else (Textastic can access random folders on the filesystem).

Even though my phone and my tablet is capable of being a general purpose device, it was not the reason I bought them. They have a specific purpose and they are filling it well. I wouldn’t buy a microwave and complain I can’t make cakes with it.

Apple is upfront about it and I knew what I was getting (and not getting). To be honest, i can barely ever use any of my software the way i want it.

Obsidian's sync service for example has dark patterns and is a lot closer to your definition of malware as they are hiding how their sync works (versioning, bugs they know but don't advertise, merge conflicts that destroys data etc).

> I bet that would see that as a problem you would want to fix right away.

No. But I also don't know what "fix" means in this context? Not use Obsidian? As using Android is not an option.

Apple may be upfront, but a couple of years ago they pretty much suddenly destroyed Progressive Web Apps by disallowing a whole bunch of modern, open standard browser capabilities, all in the name of preventing tracking.

A lot of developers were just crushed by that. Imagine having hundreds of thousands of dollars into developing an app when Apple just destroys the ability to do it.

When a big corporation has monopoly power (and Apple is very close to that - only one equally evil competitor in mobile space), they do bad things, often thinking they are doing good.

[caveat - there is so far an unofficial way to get around their "we will blow away your saved browser data" that was discussed by one of the webkit developers on the webkit blog. But since it isn't an official Apple doc - do we trust it?]

I was one developer who was burned. I was developing, as a volunteer, a web app for a very large volunteer organization. Boom... now it may not be possible, or if I use the work-around, it may be possible until it suddenly changes.

You seem to be ignoring the whole voluntary aspect of using Apple devices. Are you being forced to using iOS at gun point? Up vote once for yes, twice for no.

There's a plugin that resolves this (https://github.com/remotely-save/remotely-save) and you can also use pre-launch shortcuts using WorkingCopy if you want to sync via git.

> Notesnook provides almost everything Evernote provides, with encryption, better publishing and syncing.

In the two years I've used Notesnook, my biggest issue is the slow syncing between devices: A change I make on the mobile app takes minutes to update on the desktop app, whereas a similar change on the Obsidian mobile app is nearly instantaneous. Additionally, Notesnook doesn't allow external editors, like vim or emacs, to edit files. Sure, you can extort files to Markdown, but those do not get synced anywhere. Obsidian gives a user the flexibility by editing files directly without the app.

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