[criddell]

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.

[kepano]

(context: I help make Obsidian)

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 :(

https://x.com/kepano/status/1890957031017730335

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.

[bayindirh]

> 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.

Thanks for all the hard work.

[criddell]

I appreciate the response and am glad to hear that my less-is-more preference isn't dismissed.

It's been a while so I went through my plugins settings. About half of the core plugins are enabled and I've never enabled community plugins.

The responses to your post on x are pretty disheartening. So many zero-effort replies along with gems like "make it simple like Notion".