Obsidian Dice Roller and the future of Obsidian

This week's video is about Obsidian Dice Roller-- but it's not in the context of gaming this time. I've covered Dice Roller a few times in other videos, but always while talking about using Obsidian for TTRPGs. I love playing with the affordances of things and using them for unintended purposes, so here's a video about how I use Dice Roller to spark creativity in other aspects of my life.

My interview with the Obsidian CEO

Last week, my friend and Dungeon Master Andy Polaine and I interviewed @kepano (Stephan Ango)-- aka the new CEO of Obsidian. Here's the livestream. If you prefer to read, here's the transcript.

10 notable points raised in the video were:

• Stephan thinks the proliferation of tools for thought is a positive thing, in that every new tool that uses Markdown makes the standard more futureproof.
• Obsidian's three major pillars are extensibility, privacy, and longevity. Those are things Obsidian excels at.
• The things Obsidian is bad at are the consequences of those three major pillars (such as fragmentation, difficulty in sharing, and being restricted to Markdown).
• The Obsidian team consists of five full-time people, including founders Licat (Shida, dev) and Silver (Erica, product), Liam (dev of Calendar plugin), and Joethei (plugin reviews and dev ecosystem).
• Upcoming features: better metadata format than YAML (think something like Dataview inline fields), better querying of tasks
• Stephan wants to keep the Obsidian team small, and grow only when absolutely necessary.
• It's difficult to get exact usage figures for Obsidian, but going by downloads of the app bundle, there are about 1 million users.
• The Obsidian team doesn't want to bring on venture capital investors.
• Better sharing in Obsidian is something they're thinking about, but they need to prioritize use cases.
• Artificial intelligence in Obsidian is likely to remain in the realm of community plugins for now.

Have a great week, everyone! :)