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kepano

Why @obsidian is 100% user-supported and not backed by VC investors

Why Obsidian is 100% user-supported and not backed by VC investors: 1. We want to stay small, we don't need to hire lots of people 2. We follow strict principles that we do not want compromise 3. Our users are happy to support us, we don't need VC money Obsidian will not exist forever, no app will. However, the files you create in Obsidian are yours, and can hopefully last for generations. VCware is built with a five year horizon, it is not built to live on for decades. Many startup founders raise VC money because they need the upfront capital to build their product, or they see it as a shortcut to growth. For some products the capital truly is necessary, but too often it's fueled by impatience and the inertia of Silicon Valley. In the short term, VCware tends to subsidize pricing to acquire users. It's easier to grow if your product is cheap or free. But this generally comes at the cost of hoarding user data, and locking in customers. Once you're in you can't get out.
To keep raising money, VCware must paint an increasingly enormous vision of their future, which becomes impossible to live up to. This leads to increasingly disparate priorities that gradually make the product worse. What starts off as a useful app become burdened with crap. Eventually all VCware must exit. That means being acquired or going public to pay back investors. It's expected that 9 out 10 startups will fail. That's just part of the math in a VC portfolio. The startups that have big exits pay for the ones that fail. It is now possible for tiny teams to make principled software that millions of people use, unburdened by investors. Principled apps that put people in control of their data, their privacy, their wellbeing. These principles can be irrevocably built into the architecture of the app. Principled people have always been able to make principled software. The difference is that now you need far less money and far fewer employees to reach far more customers. That wave is only just beginning. If you have principles and enough patience, being 100% user-supported is by far the most fun way to build.
11 February at 0:12 | Open on mastodon.social
40 comments
Myke Hurley
kepano
grechaw

@kepano @obsidian

I love obsidian because it seamlessly integrates with my vimwiki writing.

11 February at 1:06 | Open on mastodon.art
Everyday.Human Derek
Billy Smith

@kepano @obsidian

Have you come across Sensorica?

They're using a similar approach for Open-Source HardWare designs.

sensorica.co/ventures

11 February at 3:57 | Open on social.coop
Thor
Dave Lane (FOSSDLE)
nrk
DELETED

@kepano @obsidian
While good principles; lots of note taking and creation software is not VC backed.

I checked out a lot of the "new" and honestly, would prefer not just files on a disk; because without software, it's virtually the same thing as notes going away.

11 February at 9:51 | Open on phpc.social
CodeMacLife

@kepano @obsidian This is the reason why I decided to go with Obsidian.

11 February at 9:51 | Open on allthingstech.social
kahakai
Totally with Ю :questified:

@kepano @obsidian As I rely more and more on canvas, is there a plan to "open-source" canvas rendering? Markdown is there to last. But canvas is not a broad standard. While canvas files are text-based and therefore readable by any software able to, the correct rendering is an Obsidian specific functionality. What can we do to ensure future-proofness of canvas files beyond Obsidian?

EDIT: As it was pointed out, the canvas JSON format seems rather trivial to reimplement.

11 February at 10:15 | Open on nahe.social
Colman Reilly

@yuliyan @kepano @obsidian can't imagine it'd be more than a few days work to render them sensibly with something like GraphViz. Depends how much fidelity to the #obsidian display you needed, I suppose.

11 February at 11:16 | Open on mastodon.ie
Colman Reilly

@yuliyan @kepano @obsidian I mean, this took me twenty minutes: a ruby script to read the JSON and render it into graphviz format. There are editors that can edit from that format.

A simple test obsidian canvas with four nodes and edges between them, showing the contents of the nodes, including one note node, rendered by Graphviz after reformatting into dot format.
11 February at 11:44 | Open on mastodon.ie
Totally with Ю :questified:
Colman Reilly

@yuliyan @kepano @obsidian not really: the canvas format is pretty clear JSON, so translating it is easy. If/when #obsidian goes bad the install base is big enough that tools to translate to whatever replaces it will be available. Dataview is the biggest problem and I believe there’s a stand-alone version of that in the offing.

11 February at 14:50 | Open on mastodon.ie
Totally with Ю :questified:

@Colman @kepano @obsidian I meant "amazing" as in realizing that the canvas JSON is already pretty resilient. Thank you for clarifying.

Regarding Dataview, I am not in the school of thought, that wants to see Obsidian have more database functionality that it does right now. The referencing between notes and folder structure enforce simplicity and resilience. Combined with tags and naming conventions it is already pretty powerful without dependency cost.

11 February at 15:23 | Open on nahe.social
Totally with Ю :questified:

@Colman @kepano @obsidian I believe many things that Dataview does can be done by improving the core search functionality. When it comes to search, I. believe that computers in 50 years should easily be able to display search results based on human language queries. Data should be observable but does it need a technical database implementation other than search indexing?

11 February at 15:27 | Open on nahe.social
happyborg

@kepano
Same with #SafeNetwork: non-VC, your data forever and a level playing field for developers and creatives of all kinds at scale at zero cost to them.
@obsidian

11 February at 10:22 | Open on fosstodon.org
cyocum

@kepano @obsidian I don't want to be annoying or rude but I cannot tell what Obsidian does from the front page of the website. I know about how to get your Discord but not what the app actually does. I am not seeing anything obvious that links to "What is Obsidian?" or "About" or something like that.

11 February at 11:12 | Open on mastodon.social
Maurizio Tatafiore

@26aafa19 @kepano @obsidian

That's probably because the page linked on the profile description is not the main page. If you go to obsidian.md the first thing you'll see is a brief description of the app followed by a few paragraphs of details.

11 February at 11:44 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
Ben

@kepano @obsidian I love these people. I don't even know what this Obsidian thing is. But that is music to my ears.

11 February at 12:12 | Open on aus.social
Mireya Strife

@kepano @obsidian if only it was open source I'm sure I'd be a heavy obsidian user.

11 February at 12:30 | Open on masto.es
Drew Lisp

@strife have you tried logseq? It's a similar app and takes a few notes from obsidian.

11 February at 12:38 | Open on emacs.ch
Mireya Strife

@crmsnbleyd yeah but the fact that every single line was a bullet point made it unusable for me.

11 February at 12:43 | Open on masto.es
Drew Lisp

@strife it was the same for me! Thankfully, as an emacs user, I can just use emacs-native tools like org-roam to cope. Might be worth trying with someone else's configuration, if available.

11 February at 12:48 | Open on emacs.ch
Mireya Strife

@crmsnbleyd I'm in a similar situation with (neo) vim. I have a hacked together conjunction of plugins and configuration files, but it's not the most reliable thing.

11 February at 13:28 | Open on masto.es
Tom

@strife Yeah, I saw some oddities like that, too. I'm trying Anytype (also open source) and I'm happy with it so far. Worth a look.
@crmsnbleyd

11 February at 17:03 | Open on oldbytes.space
Alex L 🕊 🇵🇸

@tjk @strife @crmsnbleyd

AnyType is not Open Source. They promised to release it as Open Source but then they just published the source code with a custom restrictive license. This kind of things are called "source available" while Open Source implies the four freedoms originally listed by Richard Stallman for Free Software. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) made the term popular and lists the approved licenses.

12 February at 18:18 | Open on mastodon.social
EmbraceBecoming

@kepano @obsidian I've been loving obsidian ever since someone on here recommended it to me. And since it's all in markdown it won't be hard to switch if it ever pisses me off. I like that

11 February at 14:22 | Open on kolektiva.social
Tom

@kepano It's hard for me to understand those words in the context of a closed-source app.
@obsidian

11 February at 17:04 | Open on oldbytes.space
Karl Voit :emacs: :orgmode:

@kepano @obsidian That's great.

However, this might as well change any time.

This is why I don't invest money nor effort in lock-in situations, especially with products I want to use for decades, not just months or until the next hype hits the market.

Related:
karl-voit.at/2021/01/18/tool-c karl-voit.at/2024/01/28/logseq

#PIM

11 February at 17:09 | Open on graz.social
retsil

@kepano @obsidian it works very nicely with proton drive. I can read markdown for just about any device. Much clearer organisation which beats SharePoint, google docs. Not sure why this wasn't around like 10 years ago.

11 February at 21:15 | Open on aus.social
Ian Campbell

@kepano @obsidian Keep meaning to grab a Catalyst license and forgetting, so thanks for reminding me with this. Just did the thing.

12 February at 20:24 | Open on masto.deoan.org
Aaron Smitthipong
Alexander Schmitt

@kepano @obsidian What does VC mean here? All those abbreviations are so ambiguous...

13 February at 7:17 | Open on mastodon.social
DeManiak 🇿🇦 🐧
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