The Story of Dynalist

šŸ’¬General
#1

Sometimes there are stories about why things are made. A Youtube or article or something. Dynalist is such a well-done app, and I never knew why it was made? How many people made it? And what year around was itā€™s creation? Was the end goal to make it into something like logseq?

I saw in one of the threads here that some of the makers of dynalist are also making obsidian? How many key/main devs are there making obsidian? Who is the ceo of Dynalist Inc?

Iā€™m really confused why obsidian was made. Itā€™s so different in so many ways from dynalist. I find dynalist to be a whole lot better.

#2

It is way older than logseq. Dynalist has been around a while. Even older is workflowy, the first popular web outliner, but didnā€™t support basic features like hyperlinks. Story is here https://dynalist.io/d/7sqNLEzEwiMjR_xg5Prkx1o5

The story of Obsidian is here https://obsidian.md/about

Obsidian and Dynalist are very different, yes. Obsidian already has many more users, though, despite being much newer. Dynalistā€™s main selling points are the Pro features, so itā€™s more of a ā€œbetter workflowyā€ for people who already spent years on workflowy, wrapping their minds around the big outline paradigm. On the other hand, Obsidianā€™s main selling points are free, and by being more documents oriented, itā€™s easier for new users to ā€œget itā€. The vast majority of Obsidian users donā€™t use Dynalist at all. They cover two different styles (or paradigms) of thinking about oneā€™s notes.

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#3

Dang this superhero person knows so much, and seems like the only person that knows the story, but only joined in 2018ā€¦ This is like the historian of all this. Good answer.

vast majority of Obsidian users donā€™t use Dynalist at all

Itā€™s weird why they would say this since they donā€™t know every users of obsidian though. Maybe they do use dynalist =) which is overall a whole lot better ofc

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#4

+1

Same here, though I havenā€™t tested Obsidian yet. ā€” Just took a look.

#5

I took a look and for the life of me cannot see how Obsidian differs from many other word processors, text editors, etc. Can anybody explain?

#6

Plugins. Plain text on your computer. Available sync. Lots of tools to help interlink your documents.

#7
  • Itā€™s not a word processor or text editor. It contains one, but isnā€™t one. You canā€™t simply select a file and have Obsidian open it.
  • Obsidian is about PKM (personal knowledge management)
  • It is built around links and backlinks. And embeds.
  • It has fast search, tags etc within a defined set of files.
  • It is one of the very few such programs built around local files rather than a database (and usually a web database).
  • And thatā€™s before we get to the plugins.
#8

Dynalist is an outliner. Obsidian is what used to be called a wiki. (Many current ā€˜enterpriseā€™ wikis are not really wikis in the original sense). Wikis are about the (back)links between pages as much the the pages themselves. This is largely also true of Roam, RemNote, HyperNotes & Legend , but they are more wiki outliner hybrids. The new buzzword for wiki is ā€œnetworked thoughtā€. Personally I find Dynalist - as the by far the best - online outline a far more unique and compelling proposition. Wikis are dime a dozen, but I have said all this before in an earlier incarnation of this thread

Note: I love wikis and Obsidian looks like a very good one, but so are many others.

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#10

Thank you. Explaining that itā€™s a wiki gives me an ā€œah haā€!

#11

I actually donā€™t agree that Obsidian is a wiki. Itā€™s like saying itā€™s a markdown editor because it has one. But itā€™s much more, as most of the recent PKM programs are.
Theyā€™re research and creative platforms.
The various wikis arenā€™t competitors at all, from Tiddly on. You only have to look at the number of users on Reddit or website visitors.

The old generation competitors arenā€™t wikis, theyā€™re OneNote, Evernote etc, and more recently Notion.