kepano

Obsidian CEO here. There is a major update coming soon for plugin security. I think it will address many of the concerns people have raised in this thread. It's a hard problem but we are working on it.

That said, the headline is misleading. This article is about a social engineering attack that requires the user to actively reject multiple safety warnings in Obsidian. As far as I know this is a proof of concept, I haven't seen any reports of users being affected by this attack.

The text of the license itself reads as AI slop, which is not the most encouraging. One of the first items in the license is an exception for the author's employer(?)

> "Migros Exception: Migros-Genossenschafts-Bund and its Affiliates are exempt from all commercial license requirements regardless of revenue, AI usage, or any other trigger."

The idea may have some merit, but reading the license I find it does not match the stated goals. To my mind, this kind of license should be easy to swap in the place of a permissive license like MIT or Apache, with the goal of protecting against big tech abuses. Legally protecting against slopforks seems almost impossible, but maybe still worth trying to write in.

This seems to be the official description of the changes:

https://www.atlassian.com/trust/ai/data-contribution/faqs

The official Atlassian FAQ on this change:

https://www.atlassian.com/trust/ai/data-contribution/faqs

it's source-available, not open source

https://isitreallyfoss.com/projects/anytype/

Not necessarily. There are dozens of syncing methods aside from Obsidian Sync (Git, SyncThing, etc) and you can create your own plugin to sync.

Make sure to set your Obsidian folder to "Keep downloaded" on iCloud for every device. Otherwise iCloud automatically deletes files locally to save space on your device.

It's a terrible default and Apple doesn't provide any way for developers to detect if it's off.

The main value proposition of Obsidian Sync isn't storage. Obsidian is primarily used with text files which are tiny. My 20 year old collection of notes is only about 1GB for 19,000 files and a few images/pdfs.

I'm biased but I'd say the benefits over Google Drive are: 1. end-to-end encryption, 2. seamless integration with the app (e.g. version history), 3. granular control over what settings and files are synced for each device, 4. shared vaults.

In addition Obsidian Sync helps keep Obsidian 100% user-supported. Obsidian is not subsidized by advertising or any investors. And you can actually contact the team if you need help. See also: https://stephango.com/vcware

What sync method are you using?

What do you mean by "multiple vaults hardly work"?

If it helps Obsidian has a newish command called "Change vault..." that switches vaults without opening a new window.

There's an Obsidian extension for Pandoc so you can convert your Obsidian notes to any other format.

https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/pull/11135

There are a number of basic errors in this report, but since it's LLM-written I suppose I shall put as much effort correcting them as the author put into generating them. Sigh.

Yeah I agree! In the meantime Advanced Canvas plugin might help:

https://github.com/Developer-Mike/obsidian-advanced-canvas

Perhaps the home page is more useful than the spec to explain the purpose of the file format: https://jsoncanvas.org/

See also the original inspiration for the format: https://obsidian.md/canvas

What would make it great in your eyes?

I'm not sure why it popped up today, but it's nice to see it on HN again! A brief timeline with some links to past discussions:

- 2022: The .canvas open format was created for Obsidian Canvas [0].

- 2024: Official 1.0 spec of JSON Canvas [1].

- 2024-2025: A number of apps/libraries built up around conversion, storage, and import/export [2].

- 2026: Obsidian Skills [3] includes support for .canvas (along with .md and .base) to make it easy for LLMs to read/write JSON Canvas, and opens interesting visualization/interaction patterns with agents.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34066824

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39670922

[2]: https://jsoncanvas.org/docs/apps/

[3]: https://github.com/kepano/obsidian-skills

A file node can be a .canvas, so a .canvas can have nested canvases.

Obsidian's implementation of JSON Canvas supports this.

You can see the data it created. Just click "Toggle output" in the bottom right corner.

I've been saying this since 2023

> If your data is stored in a database that a company can freely read and access (i.e. not end-to-end encrypted), the company will eventually update their ToS so they can use your data for AI training — the incentives are too strong to resist

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37124188

- Automate remote backups

- Automate publishing a website

- Sync a shared team vault to a server that feeds other tools

- Give tools like OpenClaw access to a vault without access to your full computer

- Run scheduled automations e.g. aggregate daily notes into weekly summaries, auto-tag, etc

Yes, I'd like to add that.

There's isn't an official one yet, but there are community options, or you could make your own. If you're wondering why this or that feature hasn't been added to Obsidian, remember we only have three full-time developers (and not trying to grow the team).

> Control-N starts a new note not in the folder I’m in, but at the top level

Settings → Default location for new notes → Same folder as current file

> <li> items render well in Evernote but obsidian shows them as markdown

Settings → Editor → Default editing mode → Live Preview

No promises but I hope we can solve that this year. I agree it would be a much better experience.

Obsidian Headless and Obsidian CLI are two separate things. CLI requires running the full app, and lets you do anything Obsidian can do. Headless doesn't require the app but for now it is just a Sync client.

https://help.obsidian.md/headless

https://help.obsidian.md/cli

Depends on the size of the team and your requirements. The Obsidian team uses a shared Sync vault, which works well for us:

https://help.obsidian.md/teams/sync

If your team is more technical Git is an option. If you want completely control over permissions and configuration then a shared drive is probably better.

https://help.obsidian.md/teams/deploy

There are several community plugins for Google Drive. Did you try those?

End-to-end encryption, integrated version history, better mobile support, granular control over which settings and files are synced to each device.

And generally help the continued development of Obsidian so we can stay 100% user-supported.

https://stephango.com/vcware

If that were true Obsidian would not allow third-party sync plugins in the official directory, and wouldn't mention third-party options in the official docs:

https://help.obsidian.md/sync-notes

The goal for Obsidian Sync is to be the best option, not the only option.

The headless Obsidian Sync client works the same way as desktop and mobile clients, see:

https://help.obsidian.md/sync/troubleshoot

- Markdown files: Obsidian Sync merges the changes using Google's diff-match-patch algorithm.

- Other file types: For all other files, including canvases, Obsidian uses a "last modified wins" approach. The most recently modified version replaces earlier versions.

For conflicts in Obsidian settings, such as plugin settings, Obsidian Sync merges the JSON files. It applies keys from the local JSON on top of the remote JSON.