On the Durability of Plain Text
My blog is 16 years old. I've rotated through several blogging engines in that time (Bloxsom, YAWT 1.0/2.0, Pelican and finally Eleventy) but they all have one thing in common: they all process blog entries stored as plain text files.
The fact that all my blog entries are stored as plain text files on my computer is, I believe, one of the main reasons my blog has lasted this long. Text files are trivial to back up. Text files don't really crash and rarely get corrupted. Text files are readable and writable on any computer manufactured since the 1980's - hell, the 1960's if I let punch cards into this conversation. When you contrast this simple durability with, for example, a MySQL data store (used by several blogging engines, including one of the most popular ones, WordPress), with all of its attendant version compatibility and data corruption issues, the superiority of plain text becomes undeniable if you're trying to write something that lasts.
I've written before about the longevity of paper over e-books. Real books obviously don't use software. They don't have bugs (well...maybe literal ones). They don't require updates and they don't have a file format. You'll be able to read a paper book 100 years from now, something I'm pretty sure you'd be hard pressed to do with a Kindle.
Plain text isn't paper, but it's as close as you're going to get to it in a digital format. The standard is over 60 years old and odds are good it will still be around 100 years from now. You obviously need software to read it, but it's standard, simple, ubiquitous software, available on every computer platform imaginable. The tools to read it and, perhaps more importantly, manipulate it, are universal.
I'm mentioning the manipulation aspect of text files because that also plays a role in their longevity. Yes, text files are easier to back up and harder to lose then abstract rows in a database, but they are also very easy to convert between one kind of text format and another. My blog entries are all written in Markdown but there's nothing stopping me from converting them to AsciDoc or Restructured Text or even org-mode if I wanted to double down on my Emacs use.
Longevity is also the reason I avoid solutions like Obsidian or Roam Research for my notes or my GTD lists. I don't know how these pieces of software store your notes behind the scenes, but I do know that if they suddenly up and disappeared, I'd be in a bind. At the risk of beating a dead horse, it's safer, in my mind, to have actual text files that I can back up and move around. For what it's worth, if anyone's curious, I've so far settled on an org-mode based solution in this regard.
It's really a matter of how long I want my writing to last. Do I use plain text for literally everything? Of course not, but the likelihood of me using something else is directly proportional to how disposable I consider my writing to be. I'll use Google Keep or Todoist for things like grocery lists, for example, but I won't use them for my blog entries, or my GTD lists or anything meant to last longer than a week.
At the end of the day, I struggle too much with writing to lose it to ravages of changing fashions.
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Comments and Mentions
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@pointlessone @desmondrivet Thanks. I was wary with Obsidian not being open source but found it easier to use than logseq while appearing very similar, superficially at least. I'm a big fan of Dynalist by the same people so was inclined towards Obsidian. Will keep an eye on logseq progress too before committing too much.
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@lippyduck @desmondrivet
Like from the get go you're encouraged to use wiki-style links. That wouldn't work with any generic Markdown lib. The overall shape of the format is similar but you can't just drop it into Jekyll or something and expect it to work.You have to be extremely disciplined to write proper Markdown to avoid lock-in but then you lose all the advantages of Obsidian apart from Search, graph and a bit nicer UI than VS Code.
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@lippyduck @desmondrivet Obsidian and its plugins add a lot of interactivity on top of text. And there are a lot of custom extension to the basic Markdown.
So while the underlaying format is text it closer to YAML/JSON than actual plain text. It's easy to get it out of Obsidian but you'll probably lose at leas a tiny bit of functionality if you'd try using anything else with the files.
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@lippyduck @desmondrivet It depends on how you define "interoperate".
If it's "can read from and write to a text file" then yes.
I don't know much about logseq but it probably doesn't implement Dataview (https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview), or dynamic templates like in Templater (https://silentvoid13.github.io/Templater/), or TikZ diagrams (https://github.com/artisticat1/obsidian-tikzjax), or—I dunno—a whole TTRPG manager (https://github.com/carlonicora/obsidian-rpg-manager). Even built-in callouts (https://help.obsidian.md/Editing+and+formatting/Callouts) are probably not supported.
GitHub - blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview: A high-performance data index and query language over Markdown files, for https://obsidian.md/. -
@pointlessone @desmondrivet l've been trialling Obsidian and understood it was based on simple text files (and could interoperate with logseq). Am I missing something?
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Yeah I may have judged too quickly with regard to Obsidian. Do you use or recommend it?
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Please don't use literal ASCII but sth like UTF-8 ????
> Longevity is also the reason I avoid solutions like Obsidian or Roam Research for my notes or my GTD lists. I don't know how these pieces of software store your notes behind the scenes, but I do know that if they suddenly up and disappeared, I'd be in a bind.
At least Obsidian literally does use plain text files, markdown and [[wiki-style links]] which should be compatible with a lot of other software.
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