I really liked Evernote but they raised the price too much for me.
I used it mostly as an archive for long term storage where I could find things easily and it was pleasant to use. When it was $36 / year it made sense for me. I probably only used it a dozen or two times every year so it cost me roughly $1 / session.
Then they quadrupled the price for me and paying $4 to dig out my TSA known traveler number was too much. I loaded it all into another application (Obsidian which is going downhill as well).
Like Evernote, they keep adding more and more features and functionality to the core product. The original idea of it being a great notes application over a directory of markdown files (and attachments) was simple and brilliant.
I think they jumped the shark with the canvas feature. They had to add a non-markdown file to the directory system and signaled that they were okay moving on from the original idea. Obsidian has only gotten fatter since then.
Canvas and the other big changes are all interesting ideas, but they should be a separate product or products. IMHO, Obsidian should be recognized as complete and go into a maintenance mode where stability, security, and performance are the development goals.
I think they worry that if they slow down, their paying customers (of which I am one) will jump ship. For some of us, it's the opposite.
Canvas can be disabled in Core Plugins, like most other features.
In general I mostly see the opposite criticism: that Obsidian out of the box is too barebones and that it requires plugins to be useful.
I tend to be more on your side though. I prefer Obsidian to be as streamlined as possible and hate bloat. Last year I asked the community "what should we remove from the app?" And I mostly got feature requests :(
It's a hard thing to balance, but what makes me hopeful that Obsidian won't become bloatware is:
1. We're only seven people, we don't have investors, and we plan to stay a small team so we don't have the same growth pressure that Evernote faced. We simply don't have that much bandwidth.
2. The file-over-app approach makes it easier to build opt-in interoperable tools like you describe. We've explicitly focused on shipping things like Obsidian API, URI, and CLI instead of building everything into the app (most other teams in our space seem busy stuffing a bunch of AI junk in their apps). One example is Obsidian Web Clipper, a separate tool we made that has matured into a great separate product.
3. Plugins (both core and community) mean you can make the app as streamlined as you want.
> Obsidian out of the box is too barebones and that it requires plugins to be useful.
From my perspective, it's absolutely not. I have a couple of vaults, and only one of them has one community plugin installed, and that's edit history. I'm pretty happy with what it provides out of the box.
I have a couple of friends who uses bigger/heavier plugins like media manager to basically transform Obsidian to other tools, but as a note taking tool and wiki/digital garden publishing platform, it does a great job out of the box.
I currently trust it to keep my most valuable notes, to be honest.
Please keep it up that way. I really feel sad when the tools I like go haywire and I'm forced to stop supporting the people behind that because I can't use the tool anymore.
Hi! Not the OP but I've used Obsidian since before 2020 till about 2022 when I switched to org-mode and Emacs.
I like the new Obsidian features like the CLI a lot but I still feel Obsidian inherently is incredibly similar to org-mode and Emacs (guess that's why I was drawn to both) in the sense that both work with local data and file formats that usually can be opened in any text editor but both of them bolt so much stuff on top that the files themselves (markdown or org) become incredibly coupled and hard to use by themselves.
Now of course in Obsidian's case you're not forced to install a lot of plugins that lead to this issue but I don't know a lot of people that have the diligence to keep their notes "light". Though if I remember from your blog post showcasing how you do note-taking you might qualify.
And then it's also the fact that you've got a powerful piece of kit and now you're not supposed to mold it to your needs and preferences and avoid driving it hard, instead you're forced to practice discipline. Sure, there's something to be said for that too but that's besides the point.
If I understood correctly Obsidian is readying for a plugin marketplace akin to the Unity Asset Store and I'm personally thinking this might drive you to monetize Obsidian harder even though you've shown throughout the years you're a great steward of it.
To get to the point finally I guess people are worried that because Obsidian itself is not open source at some point it might evolve in a way that becomes incompatible with most peoples' preferences and for me that's where something like org-mode and Emacs inch ahead because it's FOSS.
That said thank you for Obsidian. It was my entry point towards clearer thinking and brought a semblance of structure when I needed it most. I don't use it anymore but I watch enthusiastically from the sidelines.
tl;dr the chance of a paid plugin marketplace might signal a shift in the community
My bad! I've mixed up some parts from this official blog post[0] and some talk in the community.
I thought the "What does it mean for a plugin to be Paid or have Optional Payments?" part from the FAQ was hinting towards the chance for people to sell plugins on https://community.obsidian.md/ and Obsidian itself would facilitate the transaction for a small cut at some point in the future.
I'm glad that's not the case and I apologize again for the confusion though I hope it's clear now why I believed this in the first place.
I really don't understand how one could come to that conclusion. The blog post states that "Obsidian Community is not a store". I wrote that so that the community explicitly knows we are not going in that direction.
The new labels are meant to indicate which plugins have payments, since many plugins connect to paid services. There is no intention for Obsidian to ever become a middleman.
I used it mostly as an archive for long term storage where I could find things easily and it was pleasant to use. When it was $36 / year it made sense for me. I probably only used it a dozen or two times every year so it cost me roughly $1 / session.
Then they quadrupled the price for me and paying $4 to dig out my TSA known traveler number was too much. I loaded it all into another application (Obsidian which is going downhill as well).