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I have somewhat mixed feelings about Obsidian's plugin ecosystem. It's incredibly good in terms of what people make as plugins, but it sort of highlights an issue with software that feels open source while not being open source.

There's no issue for me with software being closed source or with charging money for software and associated services. But Obsidian is closed source software for which the core user base absolutely depends on community-developed plugins, to the point that I think for most of the serious Obsidian users out there, using the software without plugins would be almost unthinkable.

In an open source app, all the critical plugins that are most commonly used would long since have been folded into the application itself, I think? I dunno, I'm not a software developer. It just feels like a weird situation for the community developers and for the user base.

And, as I keep saying, it is very funny that my text editor has a meta. Like, the fact that we need to talk about which 46 out of the several hundred available plugins are essential, is wild.


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in reply to @kukkurovaca's post:

i am still very much an obsidian novice but i have been a little perplexed about like. one of the main selling points appears to be the freedom to take your files & go elsewhere rather than being locked into this one program forever. but then a lot of ppl seem to have such complex plugin-dependent setups that i don't really see how they could move to a different program without a ton of stuff breaking? idk

Yeah, this is a genuine source of tension for me, and I think it underscores the importance of one particular promised feature that the Obsidian team keeps pushing further down their own roadmap, which is exporting out to a fully standardized Markdown flavor.

Once that's implemented, it will be relatively easy to flatten down some of the crunchier stuff into more portable documents.

In Obsidian's defense, even if you have a highly plugin-driven setup where you leaning heavily on like dataview queries for everything you do, that's still much more portable than something like Scrivener, where even going between versions of Scrivener itself, a surprising amount could go wrong. (Because rich text sucks.)

(Although like the next level of this problem is that I think some of the plugins also have their own deviations from normal markdown flavors, for the folks who are using like custom highlight colors and callouts. The more of that there is, the harder it is to actually export cleanly without basically just shoving HTML through Pandoc and crossing your fingers. I think it would be good if there was a community standard for custom tags, or if folks simply stuck to HTML spans to keep it manageable.)