I sometimes feel that no person in the world spends as much time as me searching for product photos. It sometimes takes me over an hour to find a single image that will be used for, like, 2 seconds in a video...
I'm writing a longer (as it seems) article on the lock-in effect of solutions like #Obsidian that are using open formats like #Markdown for storage. The file format is not the only thing that might lock you in.
I did already start with a list of arguments but also want to collect your ideas so that I don't forget a good argument.
Please, no emotions, just facts and objective arguments.
Reply here in this thread and I'll collect ideas from it. 🙇
@publicvoit my personal conspiracy is this cult-like following is actually a marketing astroturfing made look like grassroots movement
For person in wiki-pkm-notes space it's unlikely to advocate for a single product THAT much. While there's not actually much of a substance to advocate for:
Yes, files are local, there are plugins and... so what? All use cases are covered by other products. Why be so insecure about some app you're using? 🤔
Dying Light 2, Civilization 6, Super Meat Boy Forever, and more have joined the free games this week for your #SteamDeck and other handhelds! Here are the ones we found for this week:
> #obsidian works with plain .md files
No, it doesn't. Not only those files aren't following any of the stardard markdown flavours, but also obsidian doesn't even have official export to markdown.
That means, the moment this proprietary tool gets enshittified you might lose all your internal links and attachments.
Don't believe it? try to move to other note taker and prove me wrong
@macberg be my guest, try it and post your experience.
Many folks don't believe that they can be locked into #obsidian just because of ending of .md in their vault.
@kepano That's pretty much exactly the point I was making in the previous post. There's no export, and there's no way to change your existing links to markdown flavour. Ain't it convenient that default link format leading user into this trap?
So the past links and attachments do need to be converted manually or via command line tools such as pandoc.
With such attitude might as well use .enex or even .xml given user needs to convert that afterwards
@balterwenjamin42@andricheli@macberg #enshittification usually comes overnight. One day #obsidian Wikilinks might not open in #Loqseq, APIs get paywalled, dotfiles get converted to obfuscated format for "your privacy and security" and you're one announcement away from being tied to a pole. But enthusiasts will keep saying that .md is an open format.
By default #Obsidian pushes new users into using their wikilinks which cannot be converted back into markdown without using command line tools. Therefore, when time comes to export their data most of the users will be uncomfortable to do that.
Doesn't it look like a trap with carefully laid down plausible deniability?
@kepano do you know what's more open and widely adopted? Letters of alphabet.
But it doesn't mean such openness and adoption is relevant when this "syntax" is used to strip people from ability to escape from corporate greed and lies. I'm infuriated by choices of your company, not tech you use
In any case you're an affiliated accomplice and by definition cannot be critical of these choices
@kepano Art. 20 GDPR Right to data portability
Destruction of internal links and links to attachments or failure to provide the data originally submitted by user is a breach of user's rights.
Right now #obsidian relying on #openSource "free labour" to do that. So, it's not only in violation of GDPR but also exploiting the community.
Do better than that
@kepano Obsidian claims that it wants to be funded by users, but leaves the backdoor to get acquired. It's reasonable to assume the company wants to lock the users, isn't it?
I, for one, discovered a way to do that.
If #obsidian never intended to sell out and enshittify the app, why didn't it open source the code? Would be hard to sell it, wouldn't it?
Yet, all this time the company was larping on its open nature and for the standard it had no contribution to.
@sylumer The main point of this discussion is that #Obsidian uses Wikilinks as a way of linking by default. It's deviation from Markdown standard and there's no way (provided by Obsidian) either converting them to markdown internally or exporting user data
Link, user created in obsidian (piece of user's data) which can no longer be used or recovered / transferred outside of obsidian = data being lost to user
@sylumer variation of "poor people's problem" i.e. "victim blaming"
If you have expertise / time or money to hire someone to configure consumer software "just right", you can avoid losing your data
You and I both know that 90% of users would never change default configuration
Here, #obsidian can blame users for "failing their duty" (not having skills to config stuff just right) and get away with misleading users in the first place
"it's not a big deal" aka "deny problem exists 🙈" — your files are stored locally, their usability is irrelevant
"poor people problem" aka "victim blaming" — if you have expertise&time or money to hire someone to do that, you can avoid losing your data
2.1 "nah, bro, it works for me" — been using the software for ages, never had any problem
"everyone doing it" — whataboutism and comparing oneselves with the worst players
When replying please check your rebuttal against the list. Upvoting/boosting such counter arguement is as good as typing 500 characters 👀 #PKM#obsidian
@balterwenjamin42 fair point. Just thought that such things should be publicly known. I'm not a journalist, so this thread is the best I can do in terms of public scrutiny.
As of yesterday, I didn't know this stuff and I'm glad I do now. Hope other people do too
@Techaltar arguably when people were saying noone would buy >1000$ phone, the definition of the "phone" was very different.
In that time, "phone" could afford a single chat app and a single banking app: more than that and the phone would have become unusable.
Modern phone can do emails, programming, open spreadsheets, record 4K, have more native apps than desktops + able to run webapps, realtime video filters, basic AR, etc etc.
Instead laptops and PCs software support got worse...
Jack Gruber has just started working on an impressive plugin to improve the note list. It can include additional information such as the date, and a summary of the note, as well as a thumbnail. More info on the forum thread!
