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Comment by ericax | Hacker News Reader

Notion is great, I used to want to build my knowledge base in it, but figured it's not future-proof enough for my needs.

And that's part of the reason we went on to build Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/), the local-first knowledge base app. Everything is in plain text Markdown.

Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/zof4zCj.png

Just released 0.6.0 and here's a video for anyone interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAkJMHg-dGw

The private beta community has built cool stuff already: https://github.com/kmaasrud/awesome-obsidian

In private beta right now, looking to launch soon.

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I like the idea of Notion, but one of things keeping me is that it seems like it'd be a pain to export one's data if Notion ever went out of business.

But just keeping folders of Markdown notes is also inflexible, but on the opposite side of the scale.

Obsidian looks like a great balance! I've requested beta access as well.

Edit: Obsidian seems to make it easy to create a Zettelkasten, sort of like https://github.com/alefore/weblog/blob/master/zettelkasten.m... but with automation baked in.

Notion has HTML as well as CSV+Md. I export once a month and it appears to work ok.

I switched from OneNote to Notion a while a go, one major reason being the possibility to easily export notes in Markdown format. I think it's working pretty well, or am I overlooking something?

Notion's export used to dump it all in one opaque blob of files with no structure aside from some CSV files that roughly described where things went. Maybe they haven't used it since Notion changed it to use folders.

Sounds like org-mode or vim-wiki would be up your alley. This appears to be quite similar but with a modern interface and probably better prebaked configs.

I've been using Obsidian. It's obviously still a work in progress, but it's pretty good already. The killer feature for me is that I don't need to put my data in someone else's cloud. Hoping for basic outlining features. That would make it a superapp.

I've been using Obsidian since 0.4.x and I absolutely love it. You can see the love and passion from the developers and I really want to see what it transforms into. Thanks for your commitment.

Nifty!

I just placed in a beta request.

A business partner and I heavily prefer to utilize markdown for note taking (we generally use Typora) but this poses problems when we are trying to colaborate on a document together.

Does Obsidian support real time collaborative editing?

Thanks for the interest!

Not yet, currently most of our users bring their own sync (Dropbox etc.), so if you edit the same document in real time that might create conflict copies.

We're working on a sync service with end-to-end encryption (for convenience, completely optional), and we might improve it to support real-time collaboration in the future.

Will there also be an option for client-side encryption without using your sync service?

We might provide a plugin in the future to achieve this.

Right now I think the closet thing is to use set up an encrypted folder with a third party app to use with Obsidian.

I just tried the beta. Beautifully done @erica

I signed up for the private beta, it looks really cool! Looking forward to it.

Writing my things in markdown is something I always wanted to do but found sorta difficult to manage in day to day scenarios. Obsidian got me crazy excited, just placed an request for beta access!

Hey, I signed up for the beta a few days ago. Can you tell me how long should I wait before I can try it??

We should have cleared everyone from a few days ago, could you check your spam folder?

This looks exactly like what I've been looking for for ages. Does it support MathJax of some sort?

Yep! Block math is already supported and inline math is coming very soon.

That's perfect. I've applied for the waitlist. Looking forward to trying it.

Other than being local-first, how is this different than roam?

Obsidian uses Markdown, and is not an outliner.

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