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Comment by saxelsen | Hacker News Reader

Shout out to Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/), which I use on a daily basis.

It does most of what Obsidian does but has a free sync version where you just use your cloud drive as the storage.

The main thing missing, from what I've found, is that it does do the "notes mind map". But I never really found that useful.

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For folks interested, Obsidian also has a free sync option that just uses your cloud drive, you just have to set it up yourself.

It's pretty simple. Just get Google Drive Desktop to mount your Google Drive to your filesystem, then point obsidian to work within that mounted directory.

Google Drive Desktop will only help if you're on macOS or Windows. I know it's technically possible to mount GDrive on Linux but it's neither pretty nor user-friendly.

You can also use Dropbox.

There's also obsidian livesync which is really great. A bit overcomplex but when you get the hang of it it works great. You can even see yourself typing from another connected client. Very impressive.

People always warn that this setup can corrupt your stuff, which I understand you definitely wouldn't want to try to share Git via Google Drive.

Obsidian shows a warning about this. But the only issue it's pointing out is that mixing Obsidian's built-in sync with something that syncs your files is likely to cause problems. Otherwise it's a perfectly safe and normal way to sync.

I ended up just paying the $4/mo for syncing my personal vault, mostly to support the project but also because it's nice to not have to think about it.

At work, we just have what we call "brain" repos where we all just dump notes and commit straight to the main branch. They are just collections of markdown files that we use Obsidian to view/edit.

Joplin looks great, and is open source, but it appears to have one problem: the primary data store is SQLite, not files, and in this AI infected era having plain text files on the local filesystem is really important.

So if I am correct the "cloud drive as the storage" option is syncing with a the local SQLite db and to get local files one would need to be syncing the local db with both the cloud drive and the local filesystem.

With Obsidian I sync from local files direct to a cloud drive.

Does joplin cloud have a merge algorithm for multi-user edits or does it just punt and do conflict files?

no merging, they just show as sync conflicts

Isn't it also missing nested folders? I tried Joplin, but no nested folders was a huge disappointment for me.

It has nested folders. But it will continue to have the problem of not being exactly whatever you are using now.

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