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Comment by j_maffe | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like Obsidian but with extra steps.

Is one of those extra steps “not pay $50 a year to have access on all your devices”, or maybe it’s “not pay $100 a year to access via the web”?

I have access on all my devices through my email provider WebDAV. I don't pay anything to Obsidian for this (but I do donate to them because it actually is the best notes provider, in my opinion).

So I guess the extra step is “not install and configure a 3rd party WebDAV plugin for all your devices while ensuring you have WebDAV support by your email provider”?

I guess so. I'm personally not getting bogged down in extra steps or not. I simply don't trust GH to keep my personal note data for me, it's much too valuable. It looks like it is possible to backup GH issue data... with some extra steps...

I thought it supports most file storage sync solutions? I’m using with the free iCloud level storage I believe.

Sure, but then you can’t access it on windows or android. Or the web.

I’m responding more to the comment that it’s extra steps. It’s clearly not as good a solution as obsidian, but there are no extra steps for it being accessible over the web or to all your devices - not just those for the devices built in cloud provider.

If windows or android is a must then use something that has a client in them. I use OneDrive because it's the cheapest in my region. It's got terrible support from Microsoft, just lazy and terrible, but there are third party sync solutions for all platforms.

I think GitHub/gitlab issues is totally viable. Obsidian/Logseq too.

Does onedrive work now for syncing obsidian on iOS? I don’t think it did when I last tried a year or so ago.

If it doesn't, you just need to find one that does. I use it because I don't care about iOS. If you need one that supports iOS, macos, windows, Android and Linux and there isn't one, then it's justified to pay for their sync solution.

Or just use GitHub/gitlab issues.

I use Git syncing on GitHub with 0 issues myself. Since when has file syncing been an issue?

I use obsidian on iphone, Mac, Windows and ipad. It syncs using icloud free tier. I don't have to pay. icloud is available on Windows as well.

I gladly pay those fifty bucks. Creating good applications require hard work.

(I wouldn’t say Obsidian is perfect, but so far I haven’t found any note-taking application that I like more.)

I’m not denying that obsidian is a better solution, just pointing out to the parent that there aren’t “extra steps” to the described solution - it is exactly what it is - but you need to add paid features (8$/m) to obsidian in order to get web access.

No you don't. You can use your own web-hosting or web-syncing solutions. I just use Git. There's an excellent (and free) plugin on Obsidian exactly for this reason.

Does this plugin let me export Obsidian notes as a website? Would you happen to remember the name?

that sounds like "extra steps" to me... and you still need somewhere to sync to and serve from...

I never said Obsidian doesn't require extra steps to setup sync without paying. Do you happen to know one that also allows you to save locally and have back-linking features?

Also with Github you can have a private repo for free with which you can host and sync your files.

I thought private repos were the ones that required patment, did that change?

I think there's a limit on the number of private limit. I personally never hit that limit.

They made unlimited private repos available to free accounts with up to 3 collaborators in 2019: https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/new-year-new-...

Then for unlimited collaborators in 2020: https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/learning-about-github...

Obsidian sounds like text files with extra steps, but your point remains, plain text files are great. There's multiple solutions from keeping them available across devices.

Well yeah, Obsidian is basically a markdown editor with some nice extra features. And apparently a quite thriving plugin ecosystem.

The extra step is to open the text file in an editor, except in this case the editor is called Obsidian.

Granted, you do have to install it versus using the default editor that comes with your operating system, so that is an extra step. But most people don't use the builtin editors from their OS anyway.

And unlike Obsidian, online only. Can you even backup GH issues? If not, that's surely got to be a deal-breaker.

Can I host obsidian myself? I would like to use it for work, but I don't want to expose my employer to potential data leak.

I'm thinking, host it locally and just let one drive act as back up for the mark down files it produces?

With Syncthing you don't need hosting. I use it for everything I can.

It’s just a bunch of markdown files. You can sync with anything. I just use a git plugin.

As others have pointed out you don't "host" Obsidian - it's just a local collection of markdown files. But if you're asking about a self-hosted alternative to "Obsidian Publish" for creating a knowledgebase that others can answer, I'm Quartz[0], a static-site generator designed to turn Obsidian markdown files into a website. I'm building and it and hosting it on Gitlab Pages at work[1].

[0]: https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/

[1]: https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/hosting#gitlab-pages

Thanks, I just need it locally on my own machine, do t need to share. Just need to back it up. I can't install software, but I can run containers, so I thought I'd just run osidians docker image and host on my mavhine

I recently went through this effort and I'd say it's worth it. In particular, I've used the "Self-hosted LiveSync" plug-in + docker.io/oleduc/docker-obsidian-livesync-couchdb, and I setup all my infrastructure within a VPN (with Tailscale, this was pain-free).

I knew about using just git, but having Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS and Android, it was just way easier to use this solution instead of fighting with git-like apps for each OS.

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