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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

And obsidian is not open source either. If you rely on any of the functionality besides just raw text editing, you may lose it one day.

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I recently migrated to Obsidian for personal use and configured it to sync my data to a private git repo that I can access across my devices. The data is all in markdown so I figure if Obsidian ever plays games I can migrate to another app pretty easily and still have my information intact and under my own control.

Sure that's why I said text editing. But if you rely on any of it's extended functionality you are out of luck.

Kind of depends on which plugins you use and how much you depend on them. But in general yeah, local files and whatnot means you have very little risk of losing them if Obsidian shits the bed somehow.

I don't see how "losing it one day" is possible for an offline app. Worst case scenario, I won't be able to update it, but I'm more than happy with what Obsidian offers currently.

It means if it's abandoned then it's not maintained and the longer ago that it stopped being maintained the harder it is to use quite often. I have some old truecrypt volumes and I had a hell of a time figuring out how to decrypt them. It's closed source but local only so exactly the same situation.

I don't understand how the benefits of open source are so easily downplayed.

But everything is stored as .md, which is ubiquitous. You'll still have access to your notes and be able to edit them with your preferred text editor.

This is always the argument but obsidian does a lot on top of these md files. NASA's mission control software stores data in JSON, it's an open format so I guess the NASA software is easily replaceable huh? If obsidian was such a thin layer then why isn't there a good open source alternative? People build their workflows on top of the obsidian functionality, not just the md data.

this is only an issue if you use a ton of plugins

also, it's not unreasonable to think that a compatible alternative would be easier to build compared to a less standard format

> but obsidian does a lot on top of these md files

What do they do besides the frontmatter (which is fairly trivial to process or ignore in a hypothetical future where one wants to stop using obsidian)?

I think the point they were making was obsidian by default does not upload to anyone's server, yes they sell obsidian sync but they also endorse using synthing instead.

My notes, which can include things like my location, appointments, plans, things I don't want a random company viewing never leave my device, which is the only way you can be sure they are not being viewed without an oss app.

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