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Comment by gavinhoward | Hacker News Reader

I have heard of Obsidian before; is it some kind of documentation/notes thing?

The stuff in the blog post sound great, so as long as the code is open and modifiable by users, I might take a look.

It is not open source. But because you are just editing markdown, you should not get locked in (however it does have some features and plugins that will not work anywhere else...)

Even when they step away from Markdown, like for example the canvas feature (https://obsidian.md/canvas), they make sure to build it on top of JSON files instead of inventing a more proprietary format.

Does any of the competition use it? Not that I'm aware of. If Obsidian disappeared tomorrow, could anyone reasonably replicate it? Yes.

If you don't want to pay for sync, you have other options. If you want to publish your notes, you have other options. Technically you need a subscription to use it for commercial purposes, but they have no way of enforcing that, plus there's a carve out for freelancers and for those like me working for NGOs.

The point I'm trying to make is that not only are they user-funded, but all of their revenue comes from the most optional subscriptions you're gonna find in a for-profit product.

Yep, like Notion. The main difference is that it stores all the data in text files on your drive/repo

It's a markdown based notes app. They do have Obsidian Publish which is a static site publishing/hosting tool from the notes that you could use for docs, but honestly I'd suggest something more explicitly designed for multi user for a documentation use case.

You might like Joplin or Logseq, which are open source.

I hope one day the folks at Obsidian will make it FOSS. I don't think it will negatively affect them at all.

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