It's bad news for Obsidian, not me. There's a million note taking applications out there.
effingjoe
Hm. I keep notes in Obsidian, including work notes. I wonder if that violates the license. I might abandon Obsidian over this.
I kind of get what you're saying, but what you might be missing is that we are long past the point where politics is just a disagreement on how to achieve the same general goal. The mainstream GOP is full on pro-bigotry, anti-freedom, and if not openly fascist, they sure do seem to do a lot of fascist-like things. This is not hyperbole.
Additionally, money is (and always has been) the lever to obtain power, so knowingly giving money (directly or indirectly) to a person who will use that money to promote or assist these kind of beliefs becomes a moral question, not a financial one. You may not want to believe it is so, but it is so.
How did that turn out? haha
Do not forget to purchase proper obsidian license - your usecase is not covered by a free version.
Can you elaborate on this? Are you referencing their "Publish" feature?
I understand their rationale. I don't think there was ever a time in history where it worked in practice.
I have two that have stuck with me most my adult life-- and I find that they apply frequently.
I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.
-- Judge Learned Hand, The Spirit of Liberty Speech, 1944
I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
- Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
- Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
- Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
-- Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt, 2002
They did complain a bit when google started pulling the answers to queries out of the sources and displaying them directly in the search results, which is probably what they're concerned with now-- google (et al) is no longer driving traffic to the sites, so the benefit to the sites is no longer there.
However, this still does not magically make it illegal. Intellectual Property laws have, imo, always been of dubious value to society-- especially in the last 100 years or so-- and we shouldn't just roll over when rightsholders make up a new "right" they think they should have.
I don't see what function or feature would be missing from Obsidian that would make it inappropriate to use. There's even a plugin to export html files.
As others have pointed out, this is just a natural-- and arguably desirable-- consequence of federation with a reddit-style format. However, I think the problem it causes could be somewhat mitigated by each platform implementing a feature to allow users to group magazines/communities manually-- and share them between instances and (ideally) platforms. Kind of like how Twitter did with "lists". (I think that's what they called them.)
Yes, there needs to be a glossary somewhere to get people up to speed, or some kind of on-boarding process. It's also plausible that some of the naming conventions are from translation weirdness, and, as you say, backend Activitypub naming conventions that frontend users don't normally see.
I made a magazine (aka a community, aka a sub[reddit]) specifically so I could play around with kbin to figure things out. Right now, trial and error is all we have, as I imagine all the devs are more busy with more technical issues than naming conventions.
Man, now I have to go from championing Obsidian to warning people away from it. That sucks.