Ditching Obsidian and building my own

Summary

"You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been." - Maya Angelou. The age-old mission to capture and make sense of our knowledge and experiences echoes through history, from Thomas Jefferson's Commonplace book detailing his ideas on government to Marcus Aurelius's Meditations saturated with quotations and personal reflections.However, this pursuit to preserve knowledge isn't without its own set of fears. Are our deepest thoughts private? Are we spending a disproportionate time customizing our notes system than benefiting from it? Will our preferred notes system last the sands of time? These were the questions that motivated me to step outside conventional offerings and build my own solution. I'm sharing my story here not to prescribe, but to demonstrate it's okay to color outside the lines. Perhaps my journey to create a simple, secure, and lasting 'note vault' will spark ideas for how you can better cultivate your own knowledge garden.Conventional knowledge gardens A personal knowledge management systems (PKMS), also known as "second brain" is are central repositories for actively collecting one's meaningful insights, ideas and inspirations encountered throughout life. The benefit of decades of notes accruing and reinforcing knowledge is immense. That is why critically analyzing what you need your PKMS to achieve is crucial. The most commonly used PKMS or note-taking apps today are Notion, Obsidian, Evernote and Logseq. The problem is that PKMS come and go. Could you see yourself using your note-taking app you use today in 30 years? Probably not. Do you ever have concerns around the privacy of your notes? Are you spending more time setting up your notes system rather than managing your notes? What does an effective and timeless PKMS even look like?Pulling at a thread My PKMS journey started with Obsidian. For those unfamiliar with Obsidian, it's a digital notebook that lives only on your computer. Its special feature is letting you int...