I definitely think we’re seeing some interesting thresholds tested, though: We’ll see! I have not seen any signs of growth slowing. And they all manage product that are significantly more complex than Obsidian. George Browning, Mark Bernstein, Peter Lewis, Greg Pierce, are just a few of them. The s-curve is probably over.īTW there are plenty of independent developers that interact openly and effectively with their user base, discussing work in progress, without a gaggle of gate keepers around them. I don’t think OBS will flame out, but I do think the signs point to flat growth and the small part of the market that even cares about OBS getting bored and moving on. The people who want to just work and not put up with messy will stop coming. The thread above sort of makes the case: Obsidian is wonderful and messy. I don’t think it’s too dramatic to think that Obsidian, the product with all the community around it, is at its final inflection point. Unless someone buys the company, or abandons the “always free” philosophy, Obsidian might always lack the resources to tame the contributor cloud. The outer shell, created by community contributions, is often very flakey and conflicts arise. For the most part, core Obsidian, what Erica and Shida control, is pretty solid and reliable. My own issues are issues with third party themes. From watching the two OBS forums, I suspect that most of the issues raised are issues with third-party plugins or themes. The bad thing is that as the users flooded in, most of them probably have little understanding of managing the complexity created by the the community add-ons. The good part is that we can configure Obsidian to an amazing extent. The main good/bad things though are the open API and appearance structures: resulting in the community plugins and themes. The only answer to that kind of success is to eventually put up walls and limit communication. So balancing the work with chatter from the peanut gallery probably became, and remains, a difficulty. But then the app shot up the s-curve and adopters flooded in – many of whom migrated from Roamcult. From the beginning, Erica and Shida created an open, communicative environment for the Obsidian community. I think the best things about Obsidian are also the worst things. Thank you – it’s useful to hear the view from the moderators’ dugout. I personally hate hearing “okay we heard you thanks for the feature request.” So, while there are challenges, I’d like to think we’re doing the best anyone can. Moreover customer service teams become opaque dead-ends. Adding developers to teams rarely speeds things up… In fact, every indie app that “goes mainstream” and starts to add HR seems to slow down. One thing I’ve learned from watching Obsidian and other apps develop over the past year, however, is that there aren’t easy solutions to these kinds of problems. Nonetheless, it is naturally frustrating when a feature you desire is not coming to fruition, or when bugs aren’t getting squashed. If anyone knows of one, I’d love to steal their ideas. I’d like to think we’re best-in-class, though: I don’t know of any other app that provides a similar level of access and transparency in the development process. And keep in mind that we are only doing it for our love of the app-we are not Obsidian staff, just a small team of volunteers. Managing the thousands of feature requests, help questions, and bug reports that flood in has been arduous at times. My experience moderating the Obsidian forum and Discord has been interesting. We therefore try to encourage folks to only reach out directly if there’s something critically wrong-e.g., data loss. If everyone is shouting, you can’t hear anyone. I think parts of this critique are fair, but for what it’s worth, us mods have been discouraging people from the Obsidian developers for as long as I can remember. Unfortunately, hot success can kill an app.) Probably because there are two of them and thousands of customers, they’ve understandably put a mod-wall around themselves. It’s not really possible to address the devs anymore except exchanging techie tidbits in the Discord forum. It’s a bit of a hostile forum, these days. (I would never post this complaint on the Obsidian Discourse forum – I’ve learned from experience that the mods there will either say “not a problem” or delete the post.
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