The plan for Obsidian is to never grow beyond 10-12 people, never take VC funding, never collect personal data or analytics.
Continue building with the assumption that software is ephemeral, files matter more than apps. Use formats that are open and durable.
See our manifesto:
https://obsidian.md/about
From a traditional business perspective the Obsidian approach has many downsides:
we can only focus on 1-2 things at a time, we can't build lots of stuff in parallel like a bigger company can
we have to cover our costs, we can't subsidize pricing — charging a fair price is a disadvantage in the market
we have no lock-in, our users can leave at any time easily
we have less freedom to build fancy features that rely on unencrypted private data (like cloud-based AI) or more sophisticated non-portable data formats
we have limited metrics to inform product decisions, we have to learn directly from what users say
users have the freedom to significantly modify the app via plugins, more things can go wrong or feel less cohesive
... I would not recommend this approach to every business, but these are the tradeoffs we choose knowingly.
A principle is only useful if you can legitimately take the opposite side.
Otherwise it's simply an aspiration that everyone else is also shooting for.
@kepano Well, at least I appreciate it. And I try to spread the word where I can. 😃
I got the insider access to financially support you folks. Have you thought about the case where people don't need the monthly services, but would like to toss some money your way to ensure you folks can keep working on it? I doubt your organisational status allows donations, right?
@kepano I profoundly appreciate the "future-proof" focus—it's part of why I pay for Sync!
So I hope the #Obsidian team realizes the current mouse-dependent editing & reading views aren't future-proof. They're an inaccessible form of interface lock-in.
You have recently done a great job of making Obsidian Publish sites more #accessible. Please bring that same principle to all aspects of the editor itself.
Every element (collapsible headings, tasks in queries, list items, etc) that can be interacted with via mouse needs an built-in, equivalent keyboard interaction.
Because these are your core principles, keyboard #accessibility should be a core behavior, not outsourced to a community plug-in that will eventually stop being maintained.
Here are some key resources for keyboard accessibility:
- https://www.w3.org/WAI/perspective-videos/keyboard/
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/Understanding_WCAG/Keyboard#interactive_elements_must_be_able_to_be_activated_using_a_keyboard
- https://webaim.org/techniques/keyboard/
Here's proof other editors make it work:
- TinyMCE: https://www.tiny.cloud/docs/tinymce/6/keyboard-shortcuts/
- VSCode: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/accessibility#_keyboard-navigation
@kepano I'm thrilled to hear it's a top priority!
In Reading (not Editing) view, what are the keyboard shortcuts for navigating to a Tasks query and checking off a task, or navigating to and collapsing a heading? (I'm on Mac.)
I've trawled the Help site ( https://help.obsidian.md/Home ), searched the Forums, and asked in Discord, and haven't found a way to do it.
> we have limited metrics to inform product decisions, we have to learn directly from what users say
I don't fundamentally object to the idea of anonymized telemetry helping to improve a product, but I suspect such data is often used mainly to figure out how to extract more money from me.
> we have limited metrics to inform product decisions, we have to learn directly from what users say
Obsidian seems like a case study on how collecting & acting on feedback from a passionate user base grows enthusiasm, loyalty, and evangelism.
kepano
Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven
Ryan Randall
Richard Kolasa
ToddZ Ⓥ
nhan
Cito