The cult of Obsidian: Why people are obsessed with the note-taking app

IbnLemmy@feddit.uk to Technology@beehaw.org – 115 points –
fastcompany.com
105

You are viewing a single comment

Joplin user here. What does obsidian have that I might want? I remember briefly trying it years ago and disliking it.

Joplin stores its files inside a database. Obsidian stores all notes as individual plaintext Markdown files.

In the first instance, that's clearly more future-proof and robust - your notes are immediately available in any application without a layer of abstraction. You can't have a single file corrupt and destroy all your notes.

I vastly prefer it for that reason. I want to know these notes are still going to work fine in 10 years, and be easily accessible.

I use Joplin for a simple notes app mostly for my phone but I do have it on my desktop and sync. What I do not use it for is my desktop notes collection which is a several thousand notes pages some quite big. I use Zim for that. It is a desktop Wiki.

I do not use Obsidian but it seems like knowledge base and linking is what people rave about. These are the ways in which I use Zim for example.

Write 4000 notes

Get a new device

Sync

Die waiting

I do miss joplin, but not cuz it looked good or cuz it was good at syncing

Looks like Obsidian's sync is $8/mo and is a bit messy to sync otherwise, if sharing between Android and Windows. Not a fan of that at all. Joplin sync just works.