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Comment by einpoklum | Hacker News Reader

It looks like reinventing the wheel which is the world-wide-web: Documents of different kinds with links between them. I guess the graph view is semi-novel - the idea is not new, but you usually don't see browsers or website editors presenting these graphs.

Perhaps I'm missing something?

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The key value of Obsidian is that your “website” (linked documents) is a WYSIWYG text editor (and even has native vim keybindings)

It may not be “new” but it’s extremely useful, and better than any existing alternatives that I’ve personally come across

And the fact that a “vault” is just your existing directory is also extremely convenient; nothing is hidden or obfuscated

Interlinked heterogenous documents aren’t unique to Obsidian, but somewhat uncommon among local-first note systems that sit beyond the confines of browser chrome (though this is changing, for example Apple Notes in macOS 14 and iOS 17 support interlinked notes).

Agreed on the doc-linking tech existing elsewhere. Obsidian just packages it in a really great format and UX. I really enjoy the local, note-writing experience here. Not sure if anyone uses Obsidian to publish a website, or if it’s even possible.

They offer Obsidian Publish for $8/mo: https://obsidian.md/publish

I’ve found that obsidian and Jekyll play pretty nice together. Not perfect but not bad

Of course it is :). It's a bunch of Markdown, something that dozens of static site generators happily ingest and turn into a website. I am using 11ty (https://mikka.is), a sprinkle of git to get things into production, Obsidian Git to simply push everything I write, as I write, and my website is done.

The concepts are not new. The innovation is in the UI and UX that makes it easy (almost seamless) to build documents like that.

As I said in another comment, you could get all of this functionality with any Markdown-based static site generator. But it would be a lot more work to achieve the same result.

Technically, yes. You could even do this using MS Word, and wikis, of course, can do all of these. The only difference is that this is practically the first local-first app that maintains links automatically.

Wikidpad I used a while back did this automatically as well.

Well it would have been nice if the www had turned into a people's network of editable, interconnected documents.

At this point it's about as far from that as we can get. It's a giant dystopian shopping mall.

Could we activate the editable people's web?

Could we resurrect the original Web 2.0 (before the meaning of "sharing" got mangled into "forward this corporate media post to another customer")?

Yes, we could. We probably should. But we can barely get the Fediverse into the mainstream. Nobody blogs anymore. Attention spans are close to 0.

It's harder to build your own note-taking system based on existing web features than to use an app that does it. Even just programmers, and we're talking about everybody. For every human who can and would do the former, there are perhaps millions who can and would do the latter. That's a pretty big difference, to put it lightly.

It is similar, but the idea is the files are closer to plain text and reable with a regular text editor if needed.

The WWW doesn't treat searching your own knowledge graph as enough of a first-class citizen.

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