Obsidian — Notion of a Free Man
Notion announcedwho are leaving Russia and blocking user accounts on September 9.
It is not yet entirely clear whether this also applies to users who use free functionality.
For Noushen fans this is a big problem, for Obsidian fans this is an opportunity to say “We told you so” and start bragging about their custom obsidians.
I myself have been using NoShen for a long time. The first acquaintance was mind-blowing, exciting. What are my notes with football tactics worth, where I converted videos from matches and trainings into gifs, and then added them to the notes.
A year ago I transferred all my notes to Obsidian. The reason is simple: Obsidian can do much more things than Notion.
Read the article to find out why you shouldn’t get upset and, on the contrary, why you should open up a big, new world of possibilities.
What is this?
Obsidian is an application (windows, mac, ios, android) essentially a notepad/reader that allows you to link files together. You can add formatted text, images, tables, formulas, video, audio, code and much more to the files.
For studying, preparing for a report, writing an article, this is simply a godsend.
Steve Jobs said that a computer is like a bicycle for the brain. On a software level, with the same analogy, Obsidian is a bicycle frame on which you can hang wheels, a saddle, choose a color… Even attach an engine with a gas tank from Riga. No one can forbid you from doing this.
What remote workers are capable of
It happens that during quarantine people come up with something worthwhile. So in the 17th century, Newton was sitting remotely from the plague epidemic and came up with a system of laws that changed physics before and after. At the same time, he invented differential calculus.
This time, during the coronavirus pandemic, a couple of students wrote a note-taking app called Obsidian. I have no idea if they thought it would grow into something. But the result is its own little revolution. Why?
Bourgeois Notion and proletarian Obsidian
They took the bourgeois Notion and implemented all its functionality, but with a philosophy of openness. If Notion stores notes in some format of its own, which you can convert to PDF or HTML, then Obsidian stores everything in Markdown files. These files are stored directly on the user's computer. If necessary, they can simply be opened as a text file and read.
What does this mean? Why are open format files so important?
A Scary Campfire Story for Little Communists
When I wrote a draft for this post half a year ago, the section sounded like a horror story for children: “Notion will leave, block everyone, delete spaces, or even worse… it will become paid. By subscription!” But now it is the bitter truth. Notion is leaving and on September 9th it will start deleting our storages.
It would seem that this will not happen with Obsidian. He is good, Notion is bad. But don't be idealists naive. Obsidian is still a company that can do the same. The only question is how hard it is to do.
And it was in the implementation of Obsidian with its local storage, markdown and huge set of plugins that a big step was made towards independent tools.
The community does more than one company
The developers have written an excellent documentation and APIs that allowed the community to churn out 1600 plugins.
Among them are ideas that have been in the air for a long time, but there simply was no platform where they could be easily integrated with little effort.
Just look at what you can do with them:
Leave comments on videos by time stamps. Watch the report, leave your notes, quotes, link to other notes.
Add links to articles or videos to view/read them later.
Maintain a task board for your projects. Each task is a separate md page.
Spaced repetition. All new words are marked with a special symbol, and then the plugin collects them from notes and gives them to you according to its algorithm. You can keep in mind even the most obscure foreign words that you simply do not use in everyday speech.
Importing quotes from books. I read through Zotero. It’s convenient to mark important places in books, write comments, and then sync between devices. All comments and quotes can be uploaded to Obsidian and used to create notes.
When you see a thought, you can easily get to the place where you once picked it up.
And that's what I use. Everyone has their own Obsidian, their own favorite set of plugins. And there are hundreds of them.
How can such rapid growth be explained? I believe that this is one of those examples where workers are not alienated from the results of their labor. And that is why after work they are able, with enthusiasm alone, to build a tool for free for the same workers as themselves.
When I see things like this, it seems to me that not all is lost. Sooner or later we will build a future where we perceive a house, a street, a city, a country as part of ourselves. Where the results of our labor belong to us:
I sweep this sidewalk every week, my neighbor and I painted this bench, and my friend planted that bush over there.
The bench can be taken away or a chain with a monthly subscription can be hung on it. Such situations have been, are and will be. The task of any worker is to prevent this.
Quick start
Lessons
Plugins
ReadItLater – a way to quickly add articles and videos to notes;
Timestamp Notes – watch videos and take notes on time;
Templater – fill in a blank note using the template;
Various complement – word suggestions when writing a note;
Kanban – kanban board;
Dataview – you can combine tables from scattered notes;
Advanced tables – convenient work with markdown tables;
Tracker – data visualization;
Quick Add – automation of processes;
Homepage – plugin for creating home pages;
Spaced Repetition– interval memorization.
Tools
Peerdraft – joint work on notes;
Qartz – share your obsidian on the web;
Obsidian Publish – the same Quartz, but it doesn’t need to be hosted, it runs on Obsidian servers (paid).
Other People's Obsidians
Quartz allows you to make your Markdown pages available to other people through a website.
There is even a whole concept of learn in public, when people open their unfinished work to the audience for the purpose of effective learning. Cunningham's Law states:
The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, but to post a false answer.
Here are some engineers' obsidians:
By the way, the articles I write for my telegram channel also written in Obsidian and published through Quartz.
To make them easy to read without leaving the app, I wrote a template for telegram instant view.
All?
Of course not! That's just the tip of the iceberg. Have you ever heard of Luhmann's Zettelkasten?
