My journey from Joplin to Obsidian is less than ideal.

To be perfectly fair, I was happy with Joplin. It has a clear goal of replacing Evernote with privacy-focused design, and the interface is intuitive. The reason of my migration is simply because of the front-end - their legacy editor introduced too much friction for my workflow and it needs to be refactored or rebuilt from ground up - and I don't have the patience.

On the other hand, Obsidian is modern and responsive - yet the default UX is too smart to the stage of unintuitive for most people. Yes, tagging is more flexible than folder and backlinks can be very useful once the users start linking pieces together. However it introduced a steep (it should actually be flat but why let mathematical pedantry ruins a saying) learning curve unnecessarily and make migration from another note-taking app a hassle.

Bear in mind - outside of Obsidian the files are still stored in folders; and folders and tags can coexist. The design choice of displaying graphs by default and have a flat folder+files structure made the onboarding process cumbersome and heavily relies on users giving up the functions they need.

In the end, a notetaking app exists to take notes; it is great to have comprehensive plugin support to be tinkered with, but that is not the primary purpose.

#Obsidian #Joplin #notetakingapp #notetaking #writing