Obsidian review after 4 years

[@DannyHatcherTech]

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[@scotts1326]

I have been in Obsidian for almost three years. I started out trying to tweak and make it fit my needs based on the videos I had been watching (including yours 🙂). Through all of that tweaking I discovered that what I really needed was a more simplified system to support my ongoing research efforts. I have downsized from pretty complex set up with over 20 plugins to just six, and a very simple folder structure. Basically, one for resource notes , and one just called notes. Resource notes contain materials from journals and textbooks, and the notes folder contains the notes, in my own words, summarizing what I have pulled out of the resource notes (i guess these would be considered Atomic notes in Z-speak). I have been in this new structure for almost a year, and have been far happier with the set up.

[@wongsimon2387]

I love Obsidian very much. It's advantage is definitely for personal use and not collaboration.

[@ctw-home]

The graph is useless for me since it doesn't create links among the files embedded in canvases, which are my main files to create indexes around topics. A big shame.

[@timbushell8640]

Whole vault maps... meer fluff like many fractals were years ago... Graph - local ones at least, coloured and emphasised via say tags for the file/note on screen can be useful.

[@neronjp9909]

May I know how do u file yr notes ? No file or Folder frame?

[@aivy-aigeneratedmusic6370]

Without seeing your video yet, I want to share my experiences from my 3 years of using it. - Overall, it's just fantastic and the best program I found in a long time. I use it daily and it's so multipurpose. It's my daily journal. help for all of my projects. I have all of my book notes here, all of my personal ideas or summaries of KZbin videos. Basically every information I want to save goes into obsidian. - There are not many downsides but I think the biggest downside is the phone app. It is buggy and the functionality which makes it on the laptop a great app makes it on the phone a bit hard to use. There are complex ribbon menus, workspaces, stuff like this which I'm using on the laptop, just doesn't really work on the phone. Overall it's a real second brain😊🎉

[@neronjp9909]

I am thinking , to become the role of 2nd brain, must need to be on the phone to become handy when u need that piece of info

[@aivy-aigeneratedmusic6370]

@@neronjp9909 yes you are right, and obsidian is. It's just not as comfortable to use as on the laptop

[@defaultarmy1559]

What does an organism enviroment relationship mean and what does it mean to become attuned to it and improve it over time?

[@DannyHatcherTech]

It is how Ecological Psychology discuss human behaviour. I did a video essay introducing Ecological Psychology on my other KZbin channel if you are interested.

[@tinypace]

Regarding your point, as I understand it, about Obsidian's use, described by certain KZbinrs, being reduced to a particular set of 'Second Brain' philosophies which prescribe it. 1. Given that Obsidian's organisational affordances are precisely the opposite -- highly unprescriptive, unless you're going deep and critiquing something like the fact that forgetting (unintentionally), an essential part of human minds, isn't built into Obsidian, it makes sense that in the absence of any wholly prescriptive way of using it, 'best interpretations for use' are going to abound on the internet (and those that sound sexiest will undoubtably spread the most). This is mainly, I would think, because it takes a lot of effort to work out how it might be sculpted to suit one best (and that's presupposing one has a legitimate reason to use its generous 'number' of affordances), and so people quite like to be told how. 2. Hence, I think the problematisation of this 'mapping X to Y' is misguided, and at very least counts as stating the obvious. The latter might be because I think about this quite a lot though -- not sure here. On second thought, I think you might be misconstruing these Second Brain people. I think they'd probably agree with you in that Obsidian is just a set of affordances which happen to match a set of behaviours which allow for a certain output. So what if people put the emphasis on it being an 'App for X', rather than 'You want to do X, this App allows for it'. I would say that you do this anyway, but surely then the more important effort is to direct others towards alternative ways of using it, or, to point out what exactly it is about the application which promotes people to say, 'Hey, this is a Zettelkasten App!', and so perhaps help reveal those affordances which make it so, and then to think about what this might mean in general (e.g., why are people so interested in having a 'Second Brain', anyway? Information Overload, the desire to collect and curate over authoring in a world of endless authoring, something something...).

[@DotaTuna]

Why are you putting so many commas in every sentence. This reads like you are trying to finish an assignment and you haven't hit the word count.

[@tinypace]

@ Is your first sentence a question?

[@VeryStrangeweather]

10:42 Danny SPITTING FACTS !!

[@carolinemathieson]

I never use the graph views as I find them of no value. I also never use dialy notes or the calendar. Some of the community plugins are quite poor I find. The most useful for me was the templater plugin which I use all the time. I gave up on the mindmap related plugins as they just didn't work well for me and instead use a simple TOC plugin. The editing toolbar plugin is also excellent and i often wonder why this wasn't a fundamental part of the core obsidian. You find toolbars in many other editors so why not in obsidian? I've never found a use for the excalibrain plugin but do use excalidraw. I tend to use the mermaid plugins for diagrams though except that it looks like it's not being supported much and the later diagram types look really bad.

[@lmao01]

I like obsidian mostly because it's fast for simple notes with linking functionality at its base and has canvases. Yet there are so many things that piss me off about it. 1. Allowing external plugins often seems like a massive misplay on the obsidian part. -Sooner or later you will find that one of the plugins is causing an issue, whether performance or other. -Those plugins often don't work with each other. Therefore sometimes you want to use behaviour from one but it gets completely emitted from the other plugin. Also leads to data duplication, too much complexity, and confusion in finding information. As a personal rule if sometimes takes a long to take a note or the speed of finding info about a specific note is not obvious, the problem is the organization method. -The developers most likely will skip implementing some of the features that plugins are providing. This means that the performance gap will never be improved and the features will never work natively/nicely in unison. -It makes developing new things difficult because it's easier to break things for other users and it paralyzes often the teams. 2. Obsidian framework Obsidian is an electron app and there isn't a good track record with developers (not only those) highly improving the performance. Performance is nice for simple notes but holy... canvas performance is sooo garbage. The app can be so much faster. 3. Uncompleted features and bugs. Some of the features still need that extra polish. Searching for text in canvases is still not fully supported you have to go around it and add extra notes for later reference. Tags should be like tag page plugins, yet both are not fully integrated properly together and there are a lot of cases where it is more irritating to use both. Headings and outlines could work together on canvases if someone cared about it. Canvas share feature? (those online available lack functionality). There are several bugs that I still have months after it was reported on forums but still broken;/ 4. Markdown first. I'd like to point out that markdown linking vs system linking files together in software (research-like) are related although a bit different. Formating of linking in markdown file is taken from markdown format but without markdown format, it's also possible to implement note linking. Why do I say this? It forces all files to be .md extension and you are stuck at it. When you would like to write in a different format than markdown you just can't do this easily. Let's say you don't want >>> to be markdown formatted you don't really have a choice to change that other than just switching the entire file to raw. The files don't actually need a .md extension to be still read by software. It is used for things like file association but for obsidian-like software, it serves no purpose when it is text files without custom byte format (like . PSD). Instead of this, it would be possible to have a 'formatted as' feature in the application that lets you customize it. At the same time, it would not change much for the novice user because you would be able to set the format to md by default. Notepad++ has this feature partially and other software have this feature in other ways partially also. Unfortunately, it is impossible at this point to see Markdown doing this as this would be part of the very core feature. If any software comes out with any of those features it might convince me to switch this instant. Yet it takes a lot of work to do similar software while most of the new software like this is just having a hype train about AI... The day AI will stop being a focus point is the moment I will have a good day because the new developers will focus back on making software that can beat obsidian and notion at its core.

[@realgouravverma]

Correct Obsidian is a tool that lets our philosophy of second brain implement to a certain extent. It is still not good at capturing things faster if we are outside of obsidian app and there are other problems as well. For example we can mention our notes just anywhere online with a link just like Google docs. But overall it is working for me. It has provided so much power to my philosophy of second brain. It is the most flexible (not perfect) tool I have come up to which just let me implement any kind of new ideas with the help of plugins which is not possible in other apps. Not only it made the note taking part easier but it allows us to build our own custom systems to do any kind of things.

[@bc4198]

Two years for me, but I lost a year's worth the other day. Turns out backups matter, kids... And PSA, don't trust new phone data transfers: Obsidian goes as an empty app 💀. It's my fault, so this isn't trauma dumping, I just wanted other obsidian users to not make my mistake. 😬

[@forBubol]

Don't worry too much about it, I've had a similar experience too.

[@ZergIsUnderpowered]

Everytime I hear "Second Brain" or "ZetteIkasten" I roll my eyes. It's like Coke making a soda with less sugar, nobody cares.

[@aivy-aigeneratedmusic6370]

Maybe it's overused, but second brain is overall good description for Obsidian

[@pjpodx]

long way to VIM or Emacs :)

[@wilf1312]

I was thinking about that! I learned VIM a while ago, and got into Emacs in the last months. For people coming from Obsidian, Emacs Writing Studio by Peter Prevos is really nice. It comes with Denote which is perfect for a Zettelkasten system. I added Evil and I can see myself using Emacs long term!

[@garolstipock]

BUT... It has Vim mode. Well..."kinda" Vim emulation mode..