(2022-04-04) Pierce Users Are Taking The Internet Back

David Pierce: Users are taking the internet back. One reason Obsidian has recently captured the imagination of so many people in the tech world is that it comes awfully close to turning that model on its head.

why so many productivity geeks end up using pen and paper: There’s nothing digital that’s nearly as adaptable to the way we work.

It has two big selling points: Your Obsidian notebook is just a folder of plain text files, which you can store or save anywhere and are always in your control, and you can link notes together with the Wikipedia-style command that has become popular in lots of productivity tools

developers have built plug-ins that let you create functional tables from text documents, or dynamically pull data from thousands of different notes into a single one. You can manage tasks in Obsidian, create [[mind maps, organize your notes any way you can imagine, sync data with other apps and much more, all through third-party plug-ins. Because they’re all open source, and they all run natively in your app, there’s no risk of them going away.

Obsidian’s growth is part of a bigger trend, a thing we’re starting to see all over the internet: a push to change how we control our data and how we give it away. One of the core pillars of Web3 is that information is permanent and immutable: A developer can stop updating their app, but they can’t pull the rug out from under users.

Most of the best stuff about Obsidian wasn’t made by Obsidian. It was made by an increasingly large and dedicated group of developers who build themes and plug-ins

Matt Mullenweg told me last year he believes that “as more and more of our lives start to be run and dictated by the technology we use, it's a human right to be able to see how that technology works and modify it."

What if the internet wasn’t a set of competing, siloed platforms, each with its own rules and systems and walls? What if it were more fluid, more open, and put users in control of their experience?

That’s a hard thing to pull off in a notes app, where design matters and most users don’t want to spend hours installing plug-ins and tweaking settings.

It’s orders of magnitude harder in social spaces or communication tools, where people need to have some shared understanding and context in order for the system to work

And it will require a set of business models and standards that mostly don’t exist. But the more I talk to people, the more I realize this is what they’re talking about