[HN Gopher] Digital Gardening in Obsidian
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Digital Gardening in Obsidian
Author : brianhicks
Score : 105 points
Date : 2022-12-26 14:07 UTC (8 hours ago)
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| number6 wrote:
| My problem with obsidian is that I need a license to use it if I
| add something work related. I can not realy disentangle both. If
| Ilearn something new here on HN Iwm will propably use it later at
| work.
| moooo99 wrote:
| I am curious, is there any issue with just purchasing the
| license?
|
| I started out using Obsidian just for university related stuff
| but found it incredibly useful, so I ended up purchasing the
| license myself. While I'm not a big fan of subscription
| software, 50$/year is extremely reasonable, especially
| considering that your data isn't trapped in someone's cloud.
| number6 wrote:
| I am extremly cautios with this small fees. They tend to add
| up. If I would use Obsidian, I sure would use it all my live.
| So 50$ * 45 years more to go: 2250$
| chrisco255 wrote:
| All the files are locally hosted, and written in standard
| markdown. You can abandon ship any time you want. It's also
| _ok_ to pay for good software.
| AB1908 wrote:
| $2250 dollars over 45 years sounds pretty good imo but
| that's just me haha
| moooo99 wrote:
| Thats what I thought, thats about half the annual
| operating cost of my personal vehicle. And it does
| provide me with a lot of value. Its for brainstorming,
| maintaining contacts, keeping track of projects, etc.
|
| Just a side observation: Many people on HN do make money
| building software, yet so many users seem completely
| unwilling to pay for software. In some regards I do
| understand that, there are quite a lot of "bad companies"
| out there that you just can't avoid in many
| circumstances, but as far as I'm concerned, Obsidian
| seems like the good guy (for now at least).
| number6 wrote:
| Personally? Iam at odds with the subscription model for
| apps but may be better than paying for every major
| release. I recently started to think about buying
| software instead of doing a half good job programming
| something
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| If it was just $2250 for 45 years, maybe. That's not a
| payment option. The price will probably go up with
| inflation. It's probably closer to $4000-8000 after
| inflation, as $50 will become $100 after a decade or two.
| eternityforest wrote:
| Currently that's 10% of a month's income, not exactly
| trivial. They make an excellent products, but I probably will
| move to a FOSS solution if I find one so I can use it for
| work.
| groby_b wrote:
| An Obsidian license is $50. That'd mean a monthly income of
| $500. There's a good chance that means you're working by
| yourself, so I'll flag that Obsidian only requires a
| commercial license if the company has two or more people.
|
| Paragraph 1 in the EULA - https://obsidian.md/eula - say
| "You need to pay for Obsidian if and only if you use it to
| contribute, directly or indirectly, to revenue-generating,
| work-related activities in a company that has two or more
| people"
| eternityforest wrote:
| Nope, I'm an on call remote consultant without a lot of
| hours at the moment, because I just moved somewhere
| without many opportunities for those who can't drive, and
| I don't have any income at all that isn't tied to a 5+
| person company.
| larve wrote:
| I would consider reaching out to see if you can get a
| special pricing. The team is very inclusive and
| communicative!
| [deleted]
| miobrien wrote:
| Cool post. Definitely impressed with Obsidian. Not a huge fan of
| the UI on iOS. For some reason I keep getting drawn back to iOS
| Notes for ease of use.
| 0xCMP wrote:
| iOS Notes should be enough for anyone, but I hate that you
| can't link between notes in any reasonable way (sharing the
| note to myself sucks and forcing the system to give you the
| note id and creating your own internal notes link is tedious).
|
| I basically use iOS Notes as a dumping ground and then
| occasionally clean it out like an Inbox. Mostly deleting
| things, but sometimes moving it into my Obsidian vault.
|
| In theory Drafts is even better for this because it supports
| Markdown and is designed to be a dumping ground and rapid
| processing of the notes.
| inferense wrote:
| if you're using calendar and tasks i recommend checking out
| https://acreom.com/.
|
| (disclaimer: i'm one of the makers)
| phartenfeller wrote:
| If you want something self-hosted look into Foam[0]. You write
| your notes in VS Code with Markdown. Many web frameworks can then
| generate interactive sites from it.
|
| [0] https://foambubble.github.io/foam/
| stonepresto wrote:
| Finally something FOSS I can get behind. Really dislike
| Obsidians business model; it's going to breed anti-user
| features.
|
| This looks very hackable too (in the good way).
| mpalmer wrote:
| Obsidian has been around for years at this point. It's
| completely free to use without limitations on functionality.
| They make money by charging for sync, but are happy to point
| out that there are free options to sync data.
|
| So where are these anti-user features? Why does the business
| model lead to them? "Not open source" doesn't count.
| dunham wrote:
| I have no idea what features are "anti-user", but I would
| note that it is not free for commercial use. I'm paying for
| Obsidian sync and still can't use Obsidian for work. (At
| the moment, I'm using logseq there.)
|
| https://obsidian.md/eula
| stonepresto wrote:
| An example of an anti-user feature I think Obsidian might
| fall into is making the end-user the product for the free
| tier. That's just how those business models work, they are
| inherently anti-user because the user is the product.
|
| FOSS allows you to choose to be free tier or pay for their
| services. The difference is in the free tier: you can do
| the leg work and hack together your own systems to match
| their paid services (namely public hosting). Its sort of a
| promise that you can use, audit, help improve, and love the
| free product without having to be concerned about
| forfeiting your privacy or security.
|
| Additionally, FOSS projects always benefit from community
| auditing of the code, increasing the reliability and
| security of the software instead of relying on a few
| individuals to catch bugs.
|
| Anyways all this to say "not FOSS" might not count itself,
| but implies there are other anti-user features at play.
| sofixa wrote:
| What do you have against Obsidian's business model and what
| better one do you imagine?
| stonepresto wrote:
| Its not FOSS, and they rely on subscriptions. Call me a
| hardliner, but that's two non-negotiable things when it
| comes to nice-to-have software for me personally.
|
| If they created an open source version I could self-host, I
| would happily adopt it. Frankly it looks beautiful and is
| only missing easy file integration. But they don't because
| it would cause them to lose a vast source of value they
| provide to their customers (providing proxies and servers
| for people to access their data remotely).
| sofixa wrote:
| Obsidian is also self-hosted, so i don't understand your point.
| It's just a _very_ fancy Markdown editor of local files.
| wrycoder wrote:
| The idea is to be able to hit the server from all your
| devices, and to have that server and all the software under
| your control.
| scubbo wrote:
| You can very simply host your own server providing and
| syncing markdown files with rsync!
|
| (/s, referencing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)
| stonepresto wrote:
| Open source
| rhtgrg wrote:
| I've documented some of my improvements to Foam and my workflow
| [0], brings it very close to endgame for me.
|
| [0] https://csh.rit.edu/~rg/productivity/20221109203834/
| whichdan wrote:
| Tiny suggestion - instead of .map(g => { return {
| key: g.key, rows: g.rows.map(r => r[1]) }})
|
| you can write .map(g => ({ key: g.key, rows:
| g.rows.map(r => r[1]) }))
| rcarr wrote:
| You could also destructure g to end up with:
|
| .map(({ key, rows }) => ({ key, rows: rows.map(r => r[1]) }))
| Sakos wrote:
| One of his references seems to have gone under and I want to
| point it out because I want other people to also suffer from
| reading every single linked note, all of which are great sources
| for ideas:
| https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z36iMKLe4CDAXdtLSJD4Z6qPPFUS...
|
| Sorry.
| brianhicks wrote:
| gone under? Do I have a broken link someplace?
| Sakos wrote:
| Sorry, I just meant that people shouldn't miss it, because
| there's great stuff there too.
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| Anyone looked at Tana? I'm really liking the concept they call
| super tags. Makes it easy to extract structure from what is just
| a giant document of nested lists.
| gardenfelder wrote:
| https://help.tana.inc/getting-started-and-overview/introduct...
| dangoor wrote:
| I've been using Tana the past few weeks (after more than 2
| years in Obsidian). I quite like it in general, but it's really
| a big step up for tracking the details of the fiction I'm
| working on right now.
| s3000 wrote:
| I hope that Obsidian extends the social network beyond Discord
| integration. Those digital gardens only grow on their own when
| others can enrich notes and annotate ideas.
| cube2222 wrote:
| If you like that, I also recommend taking a look at Logseq[0].
|
| I've previously been using Obsidian, and Bear before that, but
| always structured my notes as increasingly nested lists of bullet
| points.
|
| Logseq is basically built around that abstraction, to make it
| very ergonomic (with each bullet point being a "block" - the
| smallest unit of text on which Logseq operates).
|
| It also has querying built-in and the core is fully open source.
| So far very happy with it, and the new sync is great.
|
| Besides, it's also written in ClojureScript, which makes my inner
| lisp nerd happy.
|
| [0]: https://logseq.com/
| anon2022dot00 wrote:
| Also, some cool new outliner/mindmap tools are flowchart.fun[0]
| and obsidian markmind plug-in[1].
|
| Personally, I find it easier to initially think visually and
| then just later convert it to nested-bullet points.
|
| [0] https://flowchart.fun/ [1]
| https://github.com/MarkMindCkm/obsidian-markmind
| koch wrote:
| See also: https://markwhen.com
|
| In a similar vein except for plotting events that I've been
| working on
| malnourish wrote:
| Agreed, Logseq has worked for me where no other note-taking
| system has (and I've tried a _lot_).
|
| I believe it has spaced repetition cards built in, too.
|
| It took me a day to grok the "structured" lack of structure,
| but once I did, it has become an invaluable tool. I just throw
| notes on my daily journal and add tags/links (same thing)
| liberally. The knowledge network is practically automatic and I
| don't fall into the trap of prescribing a hierarchical system.
| A massive boon for someone with clinically significant ADHD.
|
| The only extensions I use are for cosmetics, all functionality
| I need is included out of the box.
|
| My biggest complaints are the querying language (a form of
| datalog) and that macros don't replace the text but are
| rendered dynamically instead (limiting referential utility).
| cube2222 wrote:
| > I just throw notes on my daily journal and add tags/links
| (same thing) liberally. The knowledge network is practically
| automatic and I don't fall into the trap of prescribing a
| hierarchical system.
|
| This is what I've started doing as well, and can confirm it's
| been working well so far. Logseq will automatically create
| pages made out of backlinks showing you all the blocks that
| contain the given tag.
| Sakos wrote:
| I'd be interested in more detail about the journal prompts he
| mentions. That's something I've never done, but I feel like it
| could be a useful practice to add.
| wrycoder wrote:
| "Whas Dataview?"
|
| https://medium.com/os-techblog/how-to-get-started-with-obsid...
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