For me, the nice part about Obsidian is that they're just markdown files. So even if something happens to Obsidian, the notes still exist and are still easily transferrable to something else.
Fairly easily transferrable to something else. I assume that many of the plugins that power users use involve added non-standard stuff to the files. Like if you're adding a bunch of metadata to be consumed by the Dataview plugin, all that metadata might be worthless on a new app unless someone creates an equivalent plugin elsewhere.
It's open source, so they can. But people who want forward-compatibility should probably think about what their raw markdown files look like, and how useful they'd be in another program.
Personally I do avoid add-ons that create special syntax in the md files so that if Obsidian ever goes shitty I’ll have an easier time migrating to whatever alternative.
If it ever comes to needing an Obsidian replacement I'd hope it can aim for compatibility with the plug-in ecosystem, at least initially. No idea how difficult a target that would be. Either way, I certainly worry about my data in Obsidian less than I worry about Evernote, OneNote, or Apple Notes, even with a couple of non-standard markdown additions.
Since it's not VC backed I'm hopeful about Obsidian building a long-term sustainable business without having to turn shitty, but who knows. I should sign up for Sync and give them some money.
> I assume that many of the plugins that power users use involve added non-standard stuff to the files. Like if you're adding a bunch of metadata to be consumed by the Dataview plugin, all that metadata might be worthless on a new app ...
The metadata is YAML frontmatter. Works with any frontmatter aware tools, which includes, for example, most static site generators.
It's all just markdown, the plugins layer on top of Markdown.
Your site basically works if you shove it in GitHub pages. With a touch of config matching, you can open an Obsidian "vault" in the VSCode plugin called Foam (like Roam but for a local folder structure of Markdown files).
Most add ons, like, say, Excalidraw for charting, are themselves tools with plugins in GitHub Pages, Hugo, MkDocs, etc., so are portable for static site gen (SSG).
The only thing it seems to be "missing" is the CRDT style multiplayer live editing of tools like Notion or Craft.
That's the theory, but it's not like they use strict markdown. Markdown in the first place is a very simple and limited format, so everyone has their own syntax-extensions and tweaks, and obsidian is no exception. So even if you lose the data themselves, you could lose a significant amount of ability to work with them, if somehow obsidian becomes unusable.
And if you build on plugins, this sometimes happens even now here and there. Plugins becoming unusable because of an update is still not uncommon. Their developing stopping for whatever reason is also a bit of a problem.
Markdown isn’t immune to deprecation in the Obsidian ecosystem - I have files with random junk in the headers leftover from failed attempts to integrate some data management plugin or regime.
How does that change the point being made? Front matter is supported essentially as a bucket of metadata. Front matter has varying degrees of usefulness without supporting tooling.
Front matter is still a simple text based format that can easily be parsed by other programs, and there is already quite a bit of tooling to process it. Even without tooling, it’s human readable. The degree of usefulness just increases the more sophisticated the tool is that you’re using to read it.
Compare this with the painful migration away from Evernote, which left me with a folder full of giant .enex files that I can technically use elsewhere, but at this point are realistically just an archive I’ll never touch unless I really need something.
If you've invested time into adding metadata and app-specific markdown to your setup, you lose that when you move to another tool. Has happened to me before. It's about vendor lock-in when you go too deep into their ecosystem.
Obsidian is free to use, and they make their money from offering additional sync-service and good will of the users. I don't think open source would impact it much. Though, it would bear the risk of a hostile fork, maybe to include a free to sync or something. I mean the obsidian-devs have some bad history on that front.
But at least they should give some guarantee to Open Source it if there were no significant update in a while, similar to how Qt and KDE have their agreement. Or at least they should make the source available, so people can contribute or move away easier in case of problems.
