Migrating from DokuWiki to Obsidian

Obsidian's business model might be genius. Open file formats; closed source.

By making a great product, they attract users. Usually the main argument against software like this is vendor lock-in. But by using open formats, there's always an escape hatch. If they decided to squeeze their users, I suspect a decent open source alternative would pop up very quickly. In the meantime, casual open source alternatives are very unlikely to catch up in terms of quality and features, because they don't have a funded team working on them full time.

On the flipside, Obsidian is incentivized to keep their customers happy, because their moat isn't so large as to allow complete complacency.

Overall some of the best aligned incentives I've seen. Though it does make me sad because I feel like we almost never see this good of balance in open source software.

I decided to migrate from DokuWiki to Markdown some time ago too. I write a python script for the conversion if anyone is interested https://github.com/michalmiddleton/Dokuwiki2Markdown

I have used and loved both DokuWiki and Obsidian (although I use Joplin these days). As the author noted, DokuWiki is best with collaborators and when public facing. However I've found a Git repo with Markdown files that link to eachother makes a killer decentralized collaborative KB. Add to that forges like GitHub/GitLab/Codeberg which render the markdown and list the files in your browser and it's truly great.

It's possible to basically avoid the second step ("Convert all text files from DokuWiki Syntax to proper Markdown") by only ever writing Markdown in Dokuwiki to begin with.

To write Markdown in DokuWiki, the "DokuWiki Commonmark Plugin" [0] is pretty great.

To use it, tips are:

- REQUIRED: On the top line of each page, put `<!DOCTYPE markdown>` (using the new toolbar button or typing it in). So that Dokuwiki knows the page is in markdown.

- STRONGLY SUGGESTED: In the Dokuwiki Config, set the `maxseclevel` to 0. Since the Commonmark markdown plugin currently unfortunately sort of messes up edit-section.)

That's basically it. Makes the Dokuwiki files that much more immediately-portable, in theory.

[0] https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:commonmark

I use obsidian daily and while I love it, I do feel it’s got lots of flaws. Mostly I feel the development team is pretty opinionated with some of its choices, especially regarding its tab management. I find myself annoyed by a lot of the basic functionality and am constantly having to add custom css or plugins. I’m grateful that the plugin community is pretty large, but it sucks needing so many plugins just to make the program useable in the way I want to use it, rather than obsidian having more options and toggles built in.

I've been using foam instead of obsidian for my personal knowledge base. It works rather well. And it's completely free and ultimately just markdown. While I might wish it was djot, I don't wish hard enough to make that so myself

https://foambubble.github.io/foam/

I haven't tried Obsidian, but I'm pretty happy with NextCloud Notes which saves all my notes as either plain text or markdown and keeps them in sync across my phone, and various computers.

FWIW, Pandoc can convert from dokuwiki to markdown.

This website is a good test of who actually clicked the link, not able to read a thing, coming back to the comments to report the bad experience, and who didn't click the link/is a bot, talking about the article as if nothing happened.

Thanks everyone for the feedback regarding the issue with readability in light mode. I completely missed it!

I've just gotten interested in Dokuwiki for use in a small association I've joined which is slowly realising that just having a free Slack account is not going to cut it for all our shared knowledge needs.

And since we have a WordPress site, Dokuwiki is about a 30-second installation away.

Looking into the project governance/maintenance it looks sturdy- while seemingly one person does a lot of the work, there's a community there. It appears to me, a newcomer, like a project that could last a very long time while being boring and doing exactly what it needs to, no more and no less.

As for the subject of the post itself; for a single person personal wiki, I'd also use Obsidian. I love that I can sync it to my phone with Syncthing, which is a mild pain but free!

It took me a while to realize that there wasn’t an obsidian git repository to check out the source

Regarding note-taking, an Obsidian plugin that generates Loci's palaces where you get to add all sort of things, using stable diffusion & other new technology (rotable 3D => better spatial memory) would be great.

I started migrating from OneNote to BookStack wiki. Loving it so far, but am not sure how backups and data exports work.

It's nice to be able to have it publicly available and accessible from any internet connection.

Site is nearly unreadable on an iPhone or Firefox on Windows, showing up with a dark background and dark text. Something broken in the CSS?

This site is borderline unreadable, maybe a little tiny bit of CSS testing in order before sharing stuff here... ouch, my eyes.

Nice! I've been resisting Obsidian because I prefer the multimedia capabilities of OneNote, but since I have an old dokuwiki install that has floated around for a long time, I may just use this to finally kick the obsidian tires.

Current Obsidian user having migrated from Apple's Notes.app.

I used to use DokuWiki about 15 years ago (~2008) to document the IT systems at a biomedical informatics department.

I wonder if migrating to tiddlywiki would be a better option. Mostly writing in Markdown, lightweight, intended for single user, open source & have good mobile web UI.

i couldn't put import various media into Obsidian.

usability test much? effectively unreadable.

Intended color scheme? https://i.ibb.co/741mzfh/image.png