Doubling down on Obsidian – thoughts?

Small Business System The water cooler
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As we put the really-honestly-final touches on the SBS, I think I’m going to simplify how we generate your JDex files: the only option will be Obsidian.

I previously had Bear as an option. And you all know I love Bear. But Obsidian is the obvious choice: it’s free; cross-platform; has multi-user sync option; the data remains open and yours; I could develop plugins for it in the future.

And if we just decide on one app, we can focus all of our training on that app. Every video and tutorial and post and whatever we create will just use Obsidian.

Of course it’s just a markdown app, so if you want to use something else, I’m not gonna stop you. But if we steer you towards a thing, I think we can all work better because we’re working the same way.

Because the other option is … build JDex exporters for every app that anyone might want? Eh. That sounds like a rabbit-hole I don’t want to crawl down.

Longer-term, I have visions that the website itself can be your JDex. As in, a space for you to type your own notes. Integrate them with the site-wide search. Why not? But for now, it’s Obsidian. All the way.

Does anyone hate this idea?

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I love Obsidian as a non-Apple user lol. I think a lot of people use it and it is very accessible for the tech-savvy or non-tech-savvy. And this makes it a lot easier for you.

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My 2 cents: think twice before committing.

Even if im a Joplin guy, i reckon Obsidian is a superior app (functionality wise), but please consider:

  1. Is not open source: so if tomorrow they change pricing/licencing policy, or if they go bankrupt or someting (lets hope not), you are blocked inside a 3rd party propietary software, and your business is partially dependant of this 3rd party.
  2. At the moment si free for commercial use, altough they encorage payment for commercial use. This could change any moment, affecting not only you but also your customers that may find that now they need an 3rd party subscription to use a product they already paid/subscriberd for.

If obsidian was open source i’ll 100% second your choise, in the worst case scenario there will be some usable fork in no time.

Maybe im paranoid, but the last years the internet have spiraled down into enshitification in an horrendous way.

In the other hand, i dont have any better idea, so if these possible risks are ok to you, or you have a contingency plan to migrate easily to another app, go for it!

I dont mean discouragement in any way, just think yo should consider the risks.

Bye!

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As long as there is a plan B in case desaster strikes like mentioned by @julian I’m fine with it. Quick question: Would it mean that I would have to acutally use obsidian or would it be used by the site to generate a bunch of files for me?

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I use Obsidian everyday and have done so for nearly 2 years.

Don’t double down on Obsidian. The principles should be transferable between clients. Whether Bear, Obsidian, iA Writer, Tiddlywiki, or a piece of paper that gets scanned and OCR’ed.

I just think that there is no “need” to double down. The organizational principles are either:
a. Universal, and therefore proof of JD’s usefulness.
b. Non-universal, and therefore proof of JD needing to be supplemented or expanded.

I firmly believe in a. but I want you to know that to a complete novice to the JD system, I fear leaning too hard on any one “app” would make them feel like b.

EDIT: Just to be clear I think there’s a line to be toe’d here between “we think Obsidian is great”, and “we’re about to teach you a system, and here at JDHQ we implemented it in Obsidian, but others have had access with Joplin, for example.”

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… I typed a first draft in which, among other things, I compared Obsidian’s custom markdown extensions to the Ring of Power, but as usual, @clappingcactus said it all much more succinctly, saving me the embarrassment.

I fully agree with his point: why is there even a need for this? If it’s based on standard Markdown, the onus is on any app to support it, not on you to choose which apps you will support. As I understand it, Obsidian does an especially good job of sticking to standard Markdown, so it’s an understandable choice if you decide to use them as your point of reference for all your documentation and references. But, they do have a few extensions. Protect yourself from the temptation of ever choosing to rely on current or future proprietary extensions, by just not putting yourself in that position.

Why would you have to do this, and why is this mutually exclusive with using Obsidian for all your examples etc?

What would actually be Obsidian-specific about the JDex export?

Seems to me like there’s a subtle but important difference between standardizing on one platform for the examples, and actually tying your business to one platform. Yes they have sync, but that’s a paid feature and depends on their servers and means I can’t compose my JDex with other files I need to sync. Yes they have a plugin ecosystem, but betting on that invests you psychologically in their world. And likewise there’s a hard-to-put-into-words distinction relating to plugins. It’s one thing if a business supports plugins for some popular apps to streamline the experience there; but if I discover, as a user, that the focus of the business is on functionality that’s only available via those plugins in that app ecosystem, it’s kinda … off-putting?

Even if Obsidian were open source, I would still suggest thinking twice before making this official policy, because proprietary lock-in can bite you even with open source projects. But again, I fail to see why it’s an issue.

P.S. is making custom Markdown outputs as hard as all that, with pandoc or mdast?

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The world would be truly worse if this was never published, you know?

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ok, ok, since I came back to add a few more serious thoughts, I’ll slip this in first:

Obsidian has custom markdown extensions. These are like having the Ring of Power in your pocket, when you think all it does is make you invisible. Gandalf said not to use it, and you want to listen to Gandalf, but sometimes being invisible is really convenient. But, every time you put it on, Sauron can see you a little more clearly.

As I said, it’s not really fair because the Obsidian people are really good about this, but I would say the analogy applies, to a degree, to the temptation of proprietary features in general. Also of course it’s tongue-in-cheek because it’s not like you should never use proprietary features when they give you real value.

Yes. This relates to what I came back to say after a walk. I make some significant modifications to my JD system as I implement it. I’ve refrained from mentioning them to avoid muddying the water, but I realized maybe it would help illuminate the current topic.

It’s not really exciting stuff, just that I use a different ‘coordinate space’ than the double-decimal, four-significant-digit Johnny Decimal one. I have discovered in recent months that it actually makes a big difference if I structure my thinking visually, and so I use nested quadrants to actually lay things out in two dimensions. This means I have four options at each level, and given four ‘levels’ the lowest and highest IDs would be 1111 and 4444. I do plan on writing about this sometime, but it’s not important to understand right now: just that I have a different ‘coordinate space’.

Yet I’m still waiting with bated breath for the Small Business release. How do I plan to use it, then, if I can’t use the downloadable note templates? Add a metadata field jdid: 29.10 indicating which JD ID my internal ID or note relates to. This way I can still consult the documentation and ask for help in the forums, using the JDID.

This, will also, I hope, solve the problem of updates: if I maintain this mapping myself, I don’t have to worry about overwriting data. In fact, a script to just update this mapping would be easier/safer than a system to ‘inherit’ on top of my actual content.

The thing is, all the work Johnny and Lucy are doing, first with figuring out the Johnny Decimal system, and now with applying it to the business world, are incredibly valuable. I remember when I got a preview of what they were doing with the SBS I knew immediately I needed this as a business-manager-by-necessity. The format, though, is at odds with my notekeeping needs, but I’m hoping this solution will solve the tension.

In other words, I would consider the SBS, and supporting its development, worth the money even if I never actually ‘used’ it in the sense of instantiating it on my hard drive.

Just a final perspective: instead of worrying multiple Markdown variations, consider making a Dash docset instead. There’s a compatible Linux app. Your site looks way nicer, but there is something about having your essential documentation offline that really makes a difference. Relevant perhaps, since fighting distraction is also a theme on these forums :wink:

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Having a docset (happy zeal user here) would be awesome. On the other hand there is always wget --mirror :wink:

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Morning all. Thanks for the considered responses.

So for clarity: this isn’t us saying you can’t use something else. Markdown is markdown and any well-behaved app will work. I couldn’t stop you using your app of choice if I wanted to, which I don’t.

Rather, this is us:

  1. Guiding the new user. Bob signs up, has no idea what a JDex is. What does he do?
    • A: downloads Obsidian and his JDex files as per our detailed instructions and potentially videos and etc.
  2. Providing help and support. Bob is confused, what does he do?
    • A: He reads our help articles, all of which specifically say what to do in Obsidian and include screenshots of it.
  3. Providing technical integration.
    • There’s a link at the bottom of every page that ‘opens this page in [app]’. That app will be Obsidian.
    • There’s the link to ‘download your JDex files’ Those files will be an Obsidian vault, complete with .obsidian folder.

I’m trying to balance complexity and user experience here. And I’m weighted towards one of our ideal users, a guy in New Zealand who I have some correspondence with. He doesn’t know what the JDex is or why he might need one: so he really needs guidance.

If we can guide him explicitly, with a cohesive message – download this app using this link then these files and put them here then launch it and do this – that will be a better experience for him, and others like him.

Y’all who have the first clue what pandoc is and can wget yourself some files will be okay. :wink:

Because the complexity when I add a new app isn’t n. It’s at least n^2 and it’s probably log(n) or whatever, you get the idea.

Now I have additional settings screens. Have to create and maintain the JDex-downloader code. Have to support opening multiple apps’ URL schemes. Their subtly different markdown file formats. Users’ subtly different preferences (do you want a H1 in the document or will you just let the app display it for you based on the filename?).

No individual piece of this is hard. But it all adds up to complexity.

So here’s what I think I’ll do.

  1. Focus on Obsidian. At launch, it will be the only JDex-file-download option.
  2. Keep all messaging 100% Obsidian. It is the recommended, encouraged, supported path.
  3. Provide JDex-download options for other apps on request, and potentially via a hidden page. Keep the site simple, but provide a back-door for those of you who know that you need it.

And potentially with time – i.e. when I have more of it – I can build in the more popular clients as 1st-class citizens. Once I can really consider the user onboarding and flow to make sure that people like my mate in NZ aren’t baffled by choices.

Because this is already going to be a big thing for someone to deal with. Sign up to this system, download all this stuff, learn this JDex concept, move all your files. Oh and keep doing business by the way. So I’m really conscious of making it as simple as possible.

I guess that’s the message. My goal: simplicity, in this case, right now, must win over configurability.

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I’m a huge Obsidian fan.
I completely 100% agree with doubling down on one single cross-platform app for messaging, tutorials, etc.

However, I don’t understand what’s specific to Obsidian about the JDex download? I mean, sure, you could include an .obsidian folder for a default theme and set of plugins. But isn’t the point of the JDex to be plain text (or markdown) and folder structure? What’s the factor that means you have to choose an app? Why can’t the download just be a folder structure of markdown files which you can open in Obsidian, Bear, Joplin, Notepad, emacs, vim…?

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Oh, you can. They are, indeed, just Markdown files.

But it’s more than that, right? It’s our guidance, tutorials, onboarding, advice, screenshots…

Edit: so maybe the lesson for me here is to soften the message. It’s not that we only support Obsidian. It’s, here’s a bunch of Markdown files that we’ve optimised for Obsidian. And we’ll show you how to set them up in Obsidian. And here’s a Markdown tutorial where we use Obsidian.

But use whatever app you like, because they’re just Markdown.

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Not just empty quoting also adding a smiley to mess with you:

:winking_face_with_tongue:

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As you clarify it, I can totally understand it. Except: for someone like your Bob from New Zealand, they also don’t know what it is about Obsidian that is so cool: the phrase ‘all your data is just markdown that you can take with you’ is as meaningless as pandoc and wget. So if they see you ‘doubling down’ on one app, there is the risk they will feel alienated because in general, Apps Mean Walls.

I have seen a lot of people in the forum who have found good tools, even on Windows, that would allow them to interact with plain text files just fine. E.g. various desktop search apps or folder jumpers/bookmarkers. So a plain set of text files might be more understandable for people than you think, and also it can open people’s minds to the idea of plain text in general. A new Obsidian user might happily use Obsidian with Obsidian Sync for years and never realize that their data is … really free?

Yeah, I think that’s it. For me, ‘doubling down’ has a negative connotation only. Maybe I’m the only one?

My perspective is that it’s perfectly fine to standardize on Obsidian for your examples, but avoid making an issue of it beyond just the need for you to simplify your workflow. And point users to the forum and the existing tables of ‘other tools’ for further exploration.

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Yeah. In tutorials and stuff, definitely “We’re using Obsidian for these tutorials, but you can use any app you like, even plain ol’ Notepad”
I’m just not sure about “optimising” the files for Obsidian

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While Markdown is Markdown, apps handle it differently.

This is a valid hashtag to Bear:

#10-19 Business administration/11 The business & its people 🙋

But Obsidian won’t handle the spaces, the ampersand, or the emoji. It requires:

#10-19-Business-administration/11-The-business-and-its-people

So you have to either:

  1. Provide both, or
  2. Just pick one and go with it.

The whole point of this is that, in the beginning, I’m just picking Obsidian and going with it.

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Except this isn’t Markdown syntax. Markdown knows nothing about tags. So fair enough if you standardize this on Obsidian.

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Ah true, yep.

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Those initial instructions will be for people who don’t understand what you are talking about. Anyone who knows what vim or eMacs are, has nothing to worry about with regards to interoperability.

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Exciting times. I love Obsidian.

However, I went with Bear because the layout was much better: the nested folder structure was easier to navigate on bear. Have tried to find a plugin on obsidian to replicate. Hopefully someone might have an idea.