[cytzol]

Serious question: how do you square your third paragraph with your first? That is, if you're using Obsidian's features like [[square bracket link syntax]], or #tags, or inline images, aren't you effectively locked in to editors that support the same set of features?

[kemayo]

Not really -- you're only locked in to the extent that Obsidian makes those things easy

If Obsidian went away, I'd still have a bunch of text files that I understood, and I'd know that I could find things tagged with #foo by using grep, that the [[links]] just mean to open links.md, that an image should be opened in a browser, etc.

[ovao]

Additionally, it’s pretty to extend most Markdown parsers with extended syntax. The worst thing that happens is you have to fork a parser to add extended syntax…which isn’t so bad.

[runjake]

It’s still all plain text.

Best practice for tags is just include them in the plain text file, and inline images in Obsidian is like Derek said — just keep them in your folder structures just like your text.

[vertis]

square bracket syntax is fairly well used in wikis. While there are varying degrees of user experience if you step away from Obsidian, it's still readable. You can go and convert the links to []() either inside Obsidian with a plugin or later with a script.

You'll be able to get access to it in 20 years, even if not in a shiny UX friendly way. Which is more than can be said for some of the really old notes I took in proprietary pieces of software.