Why I switched from Notion to Obsidian as an Iranian
When I had first started learning the small things about obsidian, I did not know how fascinating it was to use it. With more than a month of experience using Obsidian, I am fully committed to it and everyday I’m finding useful plugins and tricks to do something in the best way possible in Obsidian.
The idea of switching to this app first occurred to me when I first saw a video of this Iranian dude who lives in Germany and makes content about productivity apps like notion. I had also came to know notion through this dude. I’ve used notion for more than a year and a half and I was pretty satisfied by it. I had done many things in notion such as project management, note taking for my classes, and daily journals. It was a great tool and the fact that it was web based and fast was a really good point. But things changed, especially for people like me who live in Iran.
In the September of 2022 in Iran, protests were ignited in Iran after the death of a 22 year old girl “Mahsa Amini” in Police’s custody. Now that I write this it’s been two months since the protests started. Since then the government has either slowed down or blocked the internet traffic completely. At the beginning I was getting frustrated at notion because it had now gotten slow thanks to the disruptions of Internet in Iran. So I’m really grateful that I came across Obsidian. Because Obsidian has two features that I think is really beneficial for me. And it’s the feature of being offline and open source.
Because Obsidian is offline, I can access my notes even if I don’t have an internet connection. Also because Obsidian is open source, I can make changes to its styles and even improve its functionality by installing plugins or changing the codes myself. It’s easy for me to make these changes because I am a web developer.
Since I’ve switched to Obsidian my productivity and writing has increased a lot and I’m having lots of fun connecting notes and ideas and I’m relieved that I will always have access to my notes no matter what. However, since Obsidian is primarily an offline program, I will still make use of online features of programs such as Notion to collaborate with others and share my knowledge about programming, productivity, and design.
