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Off the top of my head, all PKMs make trade-offs on discoverability, portability, maintainability, …

Off the top of my head, all PKMs make trade-offs on discoverability, portability, maintainability, and ease of recall. Broadly, "discoverability" is how likely you are to stumble on something you'd forgotten (just recently, I found a file in my "taxes" directory listing all the documents I needed last year, which was a big help, and which I did not remember writing), "portability" is how resistant the system is to a company shutting down/project being abandoned, "maintainability" is how easy to keep your system consistent with its principles (including inserting a new note), and "ease of recall" is how easy it is to find something if you know you're looking for it. When thinking about a lifelong PKM, I feel like I value portability more than most; something highly tied to a particular company like Notion is right out for me, and I'm leery of stuff like Obsidian or even org-roam, since even if the entries in those systems are just text, I just know that someday the logic that ties them together will stop being developed/maintained and I'll have to migrate. …

Original discussionJohnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life291 source comments · at import
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DI

You and I are in the same boat! I keep everything in a single folder, as plaintext Markdown files. Even if my own software breaks someday, I can always ingest these into a flavor-of-the-month indexer (though I think sqlite + fts plugin goes a long way) and carry on.

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> trade-offs on discoverability, portability, maintainability, and ease of recall Good insight. Thx. I feel fairly confident in Obsidian as a portable system, since its basic concept (markdown docs with tags and links between) can be found in many other apps [^1]. I'm currently using Bear, but I've made experiments migrating to Obsidian without issues. [^1]: Bear Notes, IA Writer, Ulysses, Craft (kinda), NotePlan, ...

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