This app deals with very critical, personal, and intimate data – personal notes and professional/work-related notes, but proudly has an Electron app. This alone has seemed like a massive red flag to me.
There are better alternatives. It's just that people have convinced themselves they need the features Obsidian offers - because it makes them feel smart and important.
At the end of the day, you're just taking notes. If you write a journal, don't put it in something like Obsidian. Even Apple Notes is better (in security, privacy, etc) in this regards.
Well I’m pretty convinced I need obsidian because it’s just the best way to manage stuffs and I hate overcomplicated stuffs.
I use it to remember stuffs and classify important informations, for instance I had issue fo years with my government to end my enterprise. I made a note in obsidian « enterprise closure » and every time there was a mail, I would save it as pdf and import it into the note. Same for every letter, scan -> import. I could put out my thoughts, next step, … on the note.
Because it doesn’t crypt notes or attachments, spotlight can index my notes and I can still search for the attachments.
And the back links are just a bonus because you always end up having multiple side note linked to a main note.
I have yet to see another software that allows me to do these kind of things. Apple notes absolutely sucks on attachments.
Putting attachments in folder with notes at the top is hard to search, things always get lost or duplicated.
I believe there are companies tools for that kind of things like « SERM » but then obsidian just works and it’s free.
Not much different from naming the PDF and the TXT file with the same title (but different extension) and writing your thoughts inside the TXT file. Also searchable in spotlight.
Point is, you don't need Obsidian (or all of its plugin). People have been making do with Dropbox and plain text (.txt) files perfectly fine for years.
Wow I never knew I "can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem".
Plain-text folder on a cloud sharing service. Edit with notepad.exe or whatever editor you prefer. Others have been doing it with .doc files forever, or .rtf.
