> #obsidian works with plain .md files
No, it doesn't. Not only those files aren't following any of the stardard markdown flavours, but also obsidian doesn't even have official export to markdown.
That means, the moment this proprietary tool gets enshittified you might lose all your internal links and attachments.
Don't believe it? try to move to other note taker and prove me wrong
"it's not a big deal" aka "deny problem exists 🙈" — your files are stored locally, their usability is irrelevant
"poor people problem" aka "victim blaming" — if you have expertise&time or money to hire someone to do that, you can avoid losing your data
2.1 "nah, bro, it works for me" — been using the software for ages, never had any problem
"everyone doing it" — whataboutism and comparing oneselves with the worst players
@graphito I don't think that's an accurate summary of why Wikilink syntax is the default over Markdown links. The main reasons:
it's easier, faster, more user-friendly to type
it offers interoperability with a large number of other apps
it has existed longer
If I understand correctly, your main issue is that there is not a built-in way to convert an existing vault from [[link]] to link? It's not frequently requested, but could be added to the Format Converter at some point.
When replying please check your rebuttal against the list. Upvoting/boosting such counter arguement is as good as typing 500 characters 👀 #PKM#obsidian
@graphito well if you are allergic to any type of proprietary software + find the WikilLinks problematic there are always PKM options for Vim or Orgmode. Though I must say I find the accusations of vendor lock-in in the case of Obsidian a bit dramatic, it’s a database and editor software on top of local md-files with Wiki- or Markdown links options. I will address the “entshittification” if it arrives (as I’ve done in the past with say Evernote), there are different levels to doomsday prep
@balterwenjamin42 fair point. Just thought that such things should be publicly known. I'm not a journalist, so this thread is the best I can do in terms of public scrutiny.
As of yesterday, I didn't know this stuff and I'm glad I do now. Hope other people do too
Pretty sure you’ve come off to most on here as being on a personal crusade against the company, levying accusations that they’ve intentionally done something wrong in an underhanded way to screw their users. You’ve then insulted anyone who doesn’t see this as the issue that you for some reason do.
Sorry, but that’s simply not “hey, just letting folks know about this…” behavior.
@graphito@rscottjones Why are you choosing "yelling" and "blaming" as your mode of communication? There are more effective ways to explain what you'd like to see out of the app.
Obsidian is not a faceless megacorp or a VC-backed ploy. We're a tiny team that is 100% user-supported, and we're building the app based on what we hear from the community.
By default #Obsidian pushes new users into using their wikilinks which cannot be converted back into markdown without using command line tools. Therefore, when time comes to export their data most of the users will be uncomfortable to do that.
Doesn't it look like a trap with carefully laid down plausible deniability?
@graphito@geffrey I appreciate your skeptic lens but you need to do a bit more research. Wikilinks are older than Markdown and widely used across many apps. It's not a syntax Obsidian invented.
Wikilinks are the default syntax in Obsidian because it is concise and widely adopted by other wikis. Furthermore, there are several options out there to convert between formats that don't require the command line.
@kepano do you know what's more open and widely adopted? Letters of alphabet.
But it doesn't mean such openness and adoption is relevant when this "syntax" is used to strip people from ability to escape from corporate greed and lies. I'm infuriated by choices of your company, not tech you use
In any case you're an affiliated accomplice and by definition cannot be critical of these choices
@kepano Obsidian claims that it wants to be funded by users, but leaves the backdoor to get acquired. It's reasonable to assume the company wants to lock the users, isn't it?
I, for one, discovered a way to do that.
If #obsidian never intended to sell out and enshittify the app, why didn't it open source the code? Would be hard to sell it, wouldn't it?
Yet, all this time the company was larping on its open nature and for the standard it had no contribution to.
@graphito Open source doesn't prevent enshittification, nor does it prevent acquisition — many examples of both.
All software is ephemeral because it is built on an ever-evolving substrate. Obsidian will eventually be obsolete, and so will all of the apps you use today.
@kepano Art. 20 GDPR Right to data portability
Destruction of internal links and links to attachments or failure to provide the data originally submitted by user is a breach of user's rights.
Right now #obsidian relying on #openSource "free labour" to do that. So, it's not only in violation of GDPR but also exploiting the community.
Do better than that
@graphito 1. You control the data which is stored in plain text on your hard drive, so portability is built-in. GDPR is not relevant here since it governs data controlled/processed by a third party.
2. Obsidian does not destroy your data, you can type anything you want into plain text and it will not be modified without your intent.
3. Not sure I understand your last point. Virtually all apps rely on OSS. We fund some of the libraries we rely on & opened up our format conversion tool under MIT.
@graphito@kepano
"Destruction of internal links and links to attachments or failure to provide the data originally submitted by user is a breach of user's rights."
Maybe I missed something but have you input links as content that has somehow changed to different content?
I thought you just illustrated with your video that you had entered them as per the details in the app's docs and they stayed the same.
As I say, maybe I missed something in your explanation? 🤷🏻♂️
@sylumer The main point of this discussion is that #Obsidian uses Wikilinks as a way of linking by default. It's deviation from Markdown standard and there's no way (provided by Obsidian) either converting them to markdown internally or exporting user data
Link, user created in obsidian (piece of user's data) which can no longer be used or recovered / transferred outside of obsidian = data being lost to user
@graphito@sylumer so you chose not to configure the applixation to meet your needs (which can be done with a simple option you showed in tour video), saw the data entered was not in a format you liked and then went ahead with it anyway. That isn't bread thing anything I. That sense. There is nk I automation there causing data loss. You are choosing to ignore system config and the data.
@sylumer variation of "poor people's problem" i.e. "victim blaming"
If you have expertise / time or money to hire someone to configure consumer software "just right", you can avoid losing your data
You and I both know that 90% of users would never change default configuration
Here, #obsidian can blame users for "failing their duty" (not having skills to config stuff just right) and get away with misleading users in the first place
@graphito@sylumer I don’t think you understand what obsidian is. Obsidian is just a graphical interface to access your files on your machine. Just like Finder. It provides you with a set of options for editing text files in markdown. You don’t have to use any options. You can type however you want. You don’t have to use Wikilinks, you can use whatever you want. What is your point here? If you don’t want to use obsidian then don’t. But don’t blame obsidian or users.
You won't lose your links and attachments. If you prefer style links to [[links]] you can change that setting easily in Obsidian. And you can also use Pandoc to convert between formats.
Obsidian doesn't edit your files without your intent. The content was already created before you changed those settings. Now when you create new links they will follow the settings you chose.
@kepano That's pretty much exactly the point I was making in the previous post. There's no export, and there's no way to change your existing links to markdown flavour. Ain't it convenient that default link format leading user into this trap?
So the past links and attachments do need to be converted manually or via command line tools such as pandoc.
With such attitude might as well use .enex or even .xml given user needs to convert that afterwards
@graphito There is no export because there is nothing to export out of. The files are already in a folder that is directly readable on your system. If you mean conversion, then yes there are tools you can use to convert between syntax formats, including several Obsidian plugins.
The [[link]] syntax is older than Markdown itself. It's part of the Wikitext syntax that was invented for Wikipedia. It's also widely used by many Markdown apps, e.g. Bear, iA Writer, and others.
@graphito I really don't see how one can think that a proprietary format like .enex is better than plain text files if you're prioritizing portability and long term ownership of your data.
Regardless of the syntax you use, any files created in Obsidian are directly readable by any plain text editor.
@graphito There are many ways to lock oneself into Obsidian, plugins such as dataview comes to mind. However the link type you can change from Wikilinks to Markdown links in the settings?
@macberg be my guest, try it and post your experience.
Many folks don't believe that they can be locked into #obsidian just because of ending of .md in their vault.
@graphito@macberg I’m confused. While, yes, features that involve Obsidian plugins do not work with other programs, the MD formatting and linking works fine. I access my Obsidian notes in another app (Taio) all the time.
@balterwenjamin42@andricheli@macberg #enshittification usually comes overnight. One day #obsidian Wikilinks might not open in #Loqseq, APIs get paywalled, dotfiles get converted to obfuscated format for "your privacy and security" and you're one announcement away from being tied to a pole. But enthusiasts will keep saying that .md is an open format.
As the fathers of the computer era taught us, programs and data are the same thing: programs are stored as files and files are programs that need an interpreter to be run (eventually resulting in their content simply being displayed on the screen) just like Python, JS etc. Even plain text files are interpreted, it just happened that UTF-8 and other encoding standard are widely adopted and interpreted in the same way by everyone.
@alxlg@graphito@balterwenjamin42@andricheli@macberg We shouldn't miss the forest for the trees. The purpose of the piece is to call out that 99% of computing has moved to the cloud and proprietary formats. The battle is over whether we can move to greater data ownership and open formats. There will always be debate over the exact syntax/format, but we shouldn't let that get in the way of the larger problem.
The way I see it, the first milestone of #DigitalSovereignty has been #FOSS licenses, the second has been protocols for decentralized networks. The former enabled software like Mastodon to spread across servers people own and the latter enabled this conversation. Maybe where you are coming from, local MD files to store notes are a step forward, but for me a popular application like Obsidian spreading old myths about FOSS is two steps back
Of course all of these are strawman arguments i.e. have nothing to do with FOSS. Also, since Musk bought Twitter and many Obsidian users moved here, they keep repeating this nonsense because they have never had the opportunity to know what FOSS means.
Now don't tell me a developer doesn't know what FOSS means, because then that means they (including Obsidian team) use FOSS libraries all the time without understanding what they're doing.
@alxlg You're making it sound like I'm on a crusade against open source. On the contrary, most of the projects I built are MIT licensed and I love supporting devs building great open source projects. It's a noble pursuit. I am happy to see how diverse and healthy the ecosystem of wiki software has become, and glad there are great open source options. It's important for the long term viability of plain text that we continue having this diversity. Can you please not put words in my mouth?
@alxlg Personally I think open source is an essential and important force for good in the world. But it isn't a panacea. We're seeing this again today with Notion acquiring Skiff and taking down their open source repos. While the last open source versions of their code will live on, I doubt that anyone will try to maintain or improve it. That's why I don't think anyone should build too much of a reliance on any one specific app, including Obsidian.
The FOSS one is a very general model that spans a broad set of use cases.
One thing is a company with a certain business model that happens to produce MIT-licensed code as a consequence. Another one is releasing e.g. as AGPL and selling support, exceptions, SaaS etc.
I think it is not fair to cherry pick from such a large basket.
Instead, I think if a FOSS product is valuable enough, someone will continue its development one way or another or reuse part of the code.
I didn't blame anything on you. Here there is the fact: there is an army of Obsidian users that everytime someone mentions FOSS e.g. "I like Obsidian but it is not Open Source" they reply with those strawman arguments and sometimes link that forum thread with a reply by an Obsidian dev.
Now, you can release Obdisian with whatever model you want or have any opinion on FOSS. The point is not confusing people, specifically making them believe FOSS is a totally different thing.
@alxlg I mostly agree with what you're saying here but I would replace "is NOT about X" with "doesn't necessarily imply or require X" because individual users bring their own subjective lens about why open source matters to them — whether or not you agree with their perspective.
I don't think anyone in the community is intentionally trying to create confusion about FOSS. It's a complex and technical topic that can be difficult to discuss in the short form social media context.
I'm not suggesting there are malicious intentions.
You probably don't know what FOSS is then: there are specific definitions by Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative, with the latter basically being a rebrand of the former, but Free Software and Open Source are in fact synonyms.
And they list some approved licenses, so FOSS is a technical term that has nothing to do with PRs nor with hobby projects Vs professional ones.
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