What’s left when the app is gone
Every piece of software I used in my twenties is gone. Not just the companies, that part is ordinary. The formats too: the libraries, the catalogs, the projects. I still have folders I can no longer open, and I know what is in them only because I remember, not because I can read them.
That is what reorganized the way I build things. It comes down to three words, borrowed from Steph Ango: file over app.
What Obsidian made me understand
Obsidian is an editor that opens a folder of markdown files. No database, no proprietary format, no account. The first time, I found it poor. I had used more impressive tools.
Then I saw what it meant: if I delete Obsidian, I lose an interface, not my work. My notes open in TextEdit. They can be searched with grep and versioned with git. The app became a lens. The file is the thing.
Then I wanted to publish
Publishing means a server, a database, a service: exactly what I had just run away from.
Standard Garden is my answer, and it rests on one rule. Your notes live on your computer. The garden receives a copy when you publish. If the service closed tomorrow morning, you would lose a storefront, not an archive.
It is a hosted service, with accounts and a subscription, and I know the irony. The difference is not in the architecture. It is in what happens when it disappears. A service that holds your only copy holds you. A service that publishes a copy of what you already own does not.
Typography as a grammar
I spent fifteen years composing images where every element serves the whole, and seven years in an agency applying one identity everywhere.
On my own site, technical notes sit next to the story of an ice-climbing weekend. Dressing them the same is lying to one of them. So the structure is shared (the width of the column, the navigation, the margins) and the character belongs to the note: the typeface, the weight, the temperature of the palette. An identity is not a uniform. It is a grammar in which several voices can speak.
What it costs, honestly
- You need a free account to publish. Without one, you can still paste text on the site and get a page that lasts seven days.
- It is a hosted service. You cannot run your own copy today, and the service itself is not open source. The Obsidian plugin is.
- Free means unlimited notes and 1 GB of storage. A paid tier (80 USD a year) is for custom domains, private notes and 25 GB: it is meant for people with a lot of photos, not for using the service.
- Everything can leave: one command exports your whole garden as a zip of markdown files and attachments.
- If you let it, an assistant called Hyphe can search your published notes. It runs on Cloudflare’s own AI, only turns your notes into vectors, and never reads your private notes unless you switch that on.
Come in
Two gardens, so you can see what you get:
If you use Obsidian, the plugin is in the community directory: Standard Garden. Tell me what is missing.