Post

New blog post! I give some of my thoughts on Obsidian being proprietary, and why I think it still does a good job of respecting me as a user. I generally prefer open-source, but Obsidian is a rare exception to me, and feels polished compared to some open-source note-taking apps I've tried.

Need to write this as an addendum at some point but for now I'll put it here. I talked a bit about how the format is open and easily portable to other apps, but some have criticized this point with Obsidian before.

I do note that plugin-specific syntax can be an issue if you want to port your data over, but even certain Markdown syntax may not work everywhere since there isn't really one standard. That said, Markdown is still widely understood and it'll probably just be display errors for unrecognized formats.

My bigger issue with this criticism is that it's not really an Obsidian-specific thing. The more you specialize and make use of one app's idiosyncrasies and features, the less portable that data becomes. It's a good thing to keep in mind as a user, and probably a caveat I'll need to note in my post.