⚠️ The following post is written by a 40-year-old expressing frustration with the current state of affairs. However, a solution is offered!

We have moved from country to country so frequently that I no longer have the collection of books I used to read as a child. A few very special books remain at my parents’ house. There is also the option to buy books again - most of them are republished, and there’s a second-hand market for used books. So there is still a chance to recover that lost knowledge. Yet situation is different with internet and web…

Thanks to my age, I managed to experience the early internet era. It seemed early for someone from Estonia, as some other countries had it for a while. For a small group of people like me, a lot of consumed content was online. Some years ago, to our great surprise, this little group of my internet friends and I discovered that all of this content is gone. And it’s not on web archive either; Estonian internet culture was probably too niche to be fully archived.

How could I recover this knowledge? It’s not like with books. Could anything be done not to lose this again?

Half-solutions

WebArchive is an awesome project, but its website archiving doesn’t delve deep into website structures. You can probably find how websites from the ’90s looked, but you’re unlikely to retrieve all content if it wasn’t significant enough. Back then, there weren’t many websites, but now the number has exploded. It’s uncertain if Web Archive will be able to keep up with the hugely increasing popularity of the internet.

Web Archive also depends on the goodwill of supporters and volunteers that run it. If you’ve ever tried to dig up anything, it’s painfully slow, and the interface… well, it hasn’t been updated in a while. Can’t blame the volunteers running this project for any of that. I’m really grateful that this project exists. I’ve even contributed a couple of times to keep it running, but there are flaws.

The only real option is maintaining your own archive of web content. Until recently, I did that with pinboard.in. It’s great, but it never felt quite right. Only recently have I come up with a solution that fully satisfies me, and I’d like to tell you all about it…

Second brain

Roam Research kicked off a trend called “second brain apps”. If you completely missed it, this entire trend could be easily explained as a “note-taking super app for everything”. Nowadays, the most popular option is likely Notion.

Everything about Roam is amazing, but data is stored on “somebody’s cloud”. Right now it might not be a problem, but I’ve been bitten by Evernote and other apps in the past. I’m using Evernote as a bad example here just because I went through the process of exporting data from there and got really annoyed by the process. There are Evernote competitors out there that don’t even have a half-baked export functionality, and they do everything possible to stop anyone from copying and pasting entire documents of their own data.

So anything that comes with proprietary formats or centralized clouds owned by some business entity is absolutely not an option, no matter how good it is. But the idea of a second brain app is awesome!

Obsidian

I was so distraught by the options available in note-taking apps that I started writing a console utility called stoic to facilitate my journaling practice. The perfect writing app seemed so simple that nano with a bunch of bells and whistles would do it for me! What really mattered was a local-first experience and plain text files as output. That’s it.

How would notes sync between devices? Well, most people already used Dropbox, Mega, or Sync.com. I used Mega back in the day; I’m not sure why, but I did. It’s still someone’s cloud, but it’s a cloud that didn’t take data hostage - it was possible to copy/paste all notes in one go.

Later, someone pointed me towards Obsidian. I remember seeing it before but not giving it much attention because it was a rough piece of software without a stable version 1 release yet. But now it was stable, local-first, markdown-based, and it had an amazing collection of plugins that fully satisfied my needs for a second brain app!

I’m not afraid to say this, but Obsidian is a complete game-changer. I do everything with it now (I’m even writing this post through it). I still keep using stoic; it integrates so well with Obsidian, which just illustrates how well-aligned this software is with my vision for a great note-taking app.

All web content that I find remotely interesting or useful is now stored in Obsidian as well. Web Clipper helps with that enormously; in some rare cases where it doesn’t work as expected, I store webpage contents manually.

Obsidian Sync is probably a fantastic offering, but it goes against my principles. Syncthing was another discovery that complemented Obsidian perfectly and removed “that cloud” from the equation. It’s a p2p syncing software that syncs files between multiple devices without an intermediary server (or a cloud). I already had an always-connected and always-on media server, so I use it as a node that stores all files.

This is a setup that will hopefully last until the end of the internet or the end of me.