There's a scene forming around Obsidian and local-first. What's it about?

Obsidian is around the state of the art of a philosophy of software and what it could be.

—Andrej Karpathy, 2024

I have the sense that there is a 'scene' forming around Obsidian and the file-over-app philosophy. I've been trying to understand what it's about.

Who's in it:

• Obsidian users building personal knowledge systems
• Local-first developers (Ink & Switch, CRDTs, sync without central servers)
• Markdown and plain text advocates
• Software developers who have always insisted on data sovereignty and programmatic interfaces

What they seem to share:

• Files over constructed views of your data
• Possession of your data over permission to access it
• Open ecosystems over walled gardens
• Composable systems over monoliths
• Open formats over proprietary ones
• Programmatic interfaces over graphical user interfaces

What it's reacting against:

• Cloud-era shift away from 'personal computing' to thin clients, with software, storage, and compute happening on someone else's servers
• Appification - each app trying to own as much as it can, the individual subordinated to tenant status within platforms
• Enshittification - as lock-in grows, the gap between their interests and yours becomes visible, and they follow theirs

In-the-neighborhood organizing principles:

1. Local-first - but "local" isn't quite it. Your own remote server can be sovereign. Notion's offline mode is local but still a prison.

2. Sovereignty - owning your data and tools, not renting.

3. Composability - small tools that work together, Unix philosophy. Files and text as universal interface.

4. Human augmentation done right - tools that make you better at achieving satisfaction and actualization.

None of these is quite the true center and organizing principle of the movement. The scene, if there is one, doesn't yet have a name and a central metaphor. But I think something is happening. That's what this set of mini-essays will be exploring.

2025-12-10

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