I really don't understand how one could come to that conclusion. The blog post states that "Obsidian Community is not a store". I wrote that so that the community explicitly knows we are not going in that direction.
The new labels are meant to indicate which plugins have payments, since many plugins connect to paid services. There is no intention for Obsidian to ever become a middleman.
Canvas can be disabled in Core Plugins, like most other features.
In general I mostly see the opposite criticism: that Obsidian out of the box is too barebones and that it requires plugins to be useful.
I tend to be more on your side though. I prefer Obsidian to be as streamlined as possible and hate bloat. Last year I asked the community "what should we remove from the app?" And I mostly got feature requests :(
It's a hard thing to balance, but what makes me hopeful that Obsidian won't become bloatware is:
1. We're only seven people, we don't have investors, and we plan to stay a small team so we don't have the same growth pressure that Evernote faced. We simply don't have that much bandwidth.
2. The file-over-app approach makes it easier to build opt-in interoperable tools like you describe. We've explicitly focused on shipping things like Obsidian API, URI, and CLI instead of building everything into the app (most other teams in our space seem busy stuffing a bunch of AI junk in their apps). One example is Obsidian Web Clipper, a separate tool we made that has matured into a great separate product.
3. Plugins (both core and community) mean you can make the app as streamlined as you want.
As far as I can tell, every issue you flagged in this article is now automatically caught in the new plugin review system launched last week. The new system prevents plugin updates from being released/downloaded if any of these issues are present.
The team is also working on adding permissions and more controls, see the recent announcement and HN discussion:
Since last week hundreds of plugins have been updated to patch vulnerabilities. That said there is a lot more to do and we're actively working on it. It's a very high priority.
If there are any other checks you think we should add to the automated review system I'd be happy to look into those. Since the review system is mostly open source you can also contribute to it directly, though perhaps that would be in conflict with the purpose of your company since our approach doesn't use AI for now?
On the other hand, that may be part of the reason why Obsidian has such a rich plugin ecosystem. Perhaps there is less of an incentive to build a good plugin API if you can just tell people to fork instead.
I apologize for being so feisty. I found your initial comment extremely disheartening:
> No permissions system, nothing resolved.
I could not let that comment stand because it's simply not true, and you probably wouldn't say it that way to me in person. We're not some faceless corporation. We're a team of seven sharing a year's work, which is expressly imperfect and in progress. I'm not looking to be showered with praise, like I said in my comment on the post we're listening to everyones gripes, and working on them. But a bit of nuance and congeniality is appreciated.
I'm trying to have a real conversation with you but you seem determined to disagree with me, twist my words, and put up these straw man arguments. Why are you trying to pin me as anti-sandbox/permissions? I'm not.
I don't think these two points should be particularly controversial:
1. Permissions are planned but they're not a panacea. Apps are sandboxed on iOS/Android, browser extensions have permissions, yet both can easily do dangerous things. Permissions suffer the same issue you described: all a user needs to do is press "Yes" to allow danger. If you care about making powerful software you inevitably must have some way for a user to say they "understand and accept the risks". The other option is to simply not let your software be powerful, which is not what I am interested in working on.
2. Analyzing plugin source code must be part of the overall solution not only for security, but also performance, reliability, ease-of-use, etc. How can you be against that? It makes absolutely no sense to me.
48 hours in, the new review system is already working. Hundreds of updates have been published by developers cleaning up their code and making their plugins safer in ways that a permission system would not catch. You can see that for yourself by looking at recent updates from the community: https://community.obsidian.md/search?type=plugin&sort=update...
As I have stated elsewhere many times, I'd be working on Obsidian even if I were the only user. That's why the app is free, we don't have investors, and we're okay staying small. The way plugins work is not motivated by money, it's a reflection of the kind of software we want to use.
It is fulfilling to see many people find value out of the app. People are creating many useful and interesting plugins I would have never imagined. Selfishly, I want to be able to use and trust those plugins just like anyone else. And that's the only motivation I need to work on the problem of plugin safety.
I understand you wish we had sandboxed plugins first, and built on top of it that way. But we didn't. Now we have been cursed with success and a large ecosystem that needs to be managed and transitioned. We will continue to chip away at the problem bit by bit. I don't think there's any other way to do it.
It's not tacit, it's explicit. People should have the freedom to do dangerous things as long they understand and accept the risks. I'm not interested in making software that imposes limits on what a person can do with their own computer.
I completely understand if you disagree, in which case Obsidian is not for you. It's perfectly fine to not recommend it! Obsidian is not trying to be for everyone.
It doesn't say "we don't use AI" but I guess the assumption nowadays is everything uses AI? In my opinion the burden should be to state that something does use LLMs, not that it doesn't.
The post has instructions to reproduce the review results using our open source eslint plugin:
Obsidian doesn't collect any telemetry data but my estimate is that less than 10% of Obsidian users use plugins (might be closer to 1%). Most people don't even activate any of the built-in core plugins that are off by default.
1) Yes. Working on it. (You can already partially do this e.g. ?score=90)
2) Yes. You will see these radically improve over the next few weeks. As stated on the scorecard itself they are a work in progress. You have to consider that overnight we intentionally exposed tens of thousands of warning messages across thousands of plugins, so there will be false positive, false negatives, and severity tweaks as we gather feedback from the community. But I expect these to get sorted out fairly quickly!
As I wrote, yes, a permission system is planned. But 1. we cannot oversimplify the problem of getting from here to there, 2. permissions are not a panacea. If you look at the scorecards for a few plugins you'll immediately see issues that a permission system wouldn't catch.
Millions of people depend on thousands of Obsidian plugins. We cannot just flip a switch and break everyone's workflows overnight. It will be a gradual process. We're working on it, and I hope you'll at least concede that this is better than nothing.
- CEO of Obsidian, https://obsidian.md
Blog:
- https://stephango.com
Elsewhere:
- https://github.com/kepano
- https://twitter.com/kepano
- https://mastodon.social/@kepano
Previously:
- Founded Lumi.com (YC W15)