266 karma · joined October 10, 2013
email me: hn@danielgk.com
I've spent 20 years living in the terminal, but with claude code I'm more and more drafting markdown specs, organizing context, building custom views / plugins / etc. Obsidian is a great substrate for developing personal software.
> Multiplayer > > Share notes and edit them collaboratively
Regarding getting sherlocked; Obsidian does have realtime collaboration on their roadmap. There are likely to be important differences in approach, though.
Our offering is available now and we're learning a ton about what customers want.
If anything, I'd actually love to work more closely with them. They are a huge inspiration in how to build a business and are around the state of the art of a philosophy of software.
I'm interested in combining the unix philosophy with native collaboration (with both LLMs and other people).
That vision is inherently collaborative, anti lock-in, and also bigger than Obsidian. The important lasting part is the graph-of-local-files, not the editor (though Obsidian is fantastic).
I work on a plugin that makes Obsidian real-time collaborative (relay.md), so if the migration is smooth I wonder how close we are to Obsidian being a suitable Notion replacement for small teams.
Transclusions (embeds) are very useful also.
I agree that the note graph visualizer is just a gimmick though.
We have a novel architecture where you can optionally register a self-hosted relay server with our control plane for complete privacy for all of your docs and attachments.
We know that people typically prefer to have a unified vault, so you can share individual folders with different groups of people within your vault.
Relay is free for markdown docs up to 3 users, and then we have a hobby plan which includes attachment storage (especially popular with D&D and TTRPG players), as well as per-seat plans for businesses and universities. There are a couple of cloud-only alternatives like peerdraft and screen garden as well.
[0] https://relay.md
Here's the guide:
https://tonies-wiki.revvox.de/
If you're in the US i can send you a list of links for the supplies needed. Email in bio =]
I considered building sometime custom, but the tonie hardware is cute, portable, and lovable in a way that would be hard to replicate.
It has been really fun for my wife and I to listen to our favorite music in the car, and then when my son says "I like this song" I "burn" him a little disk that evening.
He's turned into a little DJ, and has memorized a handful of his songs (and dances and sings along).
One caveat is that finding compatible NFC tags is a little bit complicated. if you buy from RFIDfriend [0] then they take a couple weeks to arrive from Germany.
Highly recommend!
I've been thinking a bit about the "protocol"/features behind "Obsidian Graph Markdown" like frontmatter and link-integrity-on-rename. Have you implemented anything like that? How about embeds?
If you're a satellite operator looking to avoid conjunctions, then buying additional measurements helps reduce uncertainty (which is often needed in order to decide if you should conduct a maneuver).
I messaged @kepano about being able to support paid plugins. Apparently they can't because of Apple App store rules that forbid third party "stores" (and/or require a cut of the payment). IIRC there was a ruling that walked this back a little bit, but only in the US?
One thing I've appreciated about Obsidian is that they have donated to the top plugins as voted on by users each year. It's a small amount (eg. $25), but it is a nice gesture.
Micropayments could also be a nice gesture, but I don't think they could add up to meaningful income for a developer. There are enough developers that are willing to build great open-source plugins for free. IMO the missing tier is having quality (and vetted) plugins that people can work on full-time.
We have a business model that I think is kind of novel (I am biased) -- we split our service into a "global identity layer"/control plane and "Relay Servers" which are open source and self-hostable. Our Obsidian Plugin is also open source.
So while we have a SaaS, we encourage our users to self-host on private networks (eg. tailscale) so that we are totally unable to see their documents and attachments. We don't require any network connection between the Relay Server and our service.
Similar to tailscale, the global identity layer provides value because people want SSO and straightforward permissions management (which are a pain to self-host), but running the Relay Server is dead simple.
So far we are getting some traction with businesses who want a best-in-class writing experience (Obsidian), google-docs-like collaboration, but local-first. This is of particular interest to companies in AI or AI safety (let's not send our docs to our competitors...), or for compliance/security reasons.
[0] https://relay.md
It might not be the most strategic move, but i want to build cool and useful tools, and the Obsidian folks are a big inspiration.
I hope there's a way to collaborate and/or coexist.
One thing that makes our offering unique is the ability to self-host your Relay Server so that your docs are completely private (we can't read them). At the same time you can use our global identity system / control plane to collaborate with anyone in the world.
We have pretty solid growth, a healthy paid consumer base (a lot of students and D&D/TTRPG), and starting to get more traction with businesses and enterprise.
[0] https://relay.md
IMO they should do something like aur on Arch Linux and have a community managed plugin repo and then a smaller, more vetted one. That would help with the plugin review time too.
That's why I've been working Relay [0] - a privacy-preserving local-first collaboration plugin for Obsidian.
Our customers really like being able to self-host Relay Servers for complete document privacy while using our global identity system to do cross-org collaboration with anyone in the world.
[0] https://relay.md
Performance aside, it's crazy that in the age of Claude Code people don't insist on having their docs local, private, and in markdown.
[0] https://relay.md
I was just actively working on that project and i was excited to share it, but i see that i didn't do a good job connecting the dots.
I think we both agree that Obsidian is a best-in-class writing tool, and that Jekyll, Hugo, Astro, etc are also the best way to publish content.
Relay makes this flow really smooth for teams by attaching CRDTs to the editor to enable google-docs-like editing capabilities. The git sync app that i posted turns these merged crdts back into a git repo.
If you aren't writing in a team then it makes sense that it would feel like a bunch of extra steps.
If you *are* working in a collaborative team setting then managing git conflicts is painful overhead. I'm obviously biased, but I think it solves a real problem.
You're also right that Obsidian Sync supports non-real-time collaboration, and Obsidian has collaboration on their roadmap.
They also have a different architecture that would make automatically merging and publishing hard. I imagine you would need to make one person on the team be in charge of pushing periodically instead.
Anyway, thanks for sharing your post.
[0] https://github.com/No-Instructions/relay-git-sync
[1] https://relay.md
Find me on our discord [0] and I'll gift you some free storage.
A .base file is a query written in yaml that aggregates frontmatter values across many .md files into a table view.
You don't need a lot of the plugins to be productive in Obsidian, but I think a superpower people are overlooking is that you can build your own plugins for company specific features/workflows quite cheaply.
Combine that with having everything local, and you can use tools like claude code to actually make use of the knowledge/context that you're creating.
I find it crazy that people are pushing data into locked-in systems like Notion only to be limited by their weak-sauce AI tools.
In contrast, we are all in on file-over-app -- keeping the files locally on your computer so you can actually use them. Many of our customers run their Relay Server on-prem for total document privacy.
[0] https://relay.md
(disclaimer: I'm the dev)
[0] https://relay.md