I'm so f***ing tired of Obsidian.

Notion’s sudden outage during a live filming day—topics and calendar becoming inaccessible—has turned a long-running debate into a blunt, personal case against the reflex to “just switch to Obsidian.” The core claim isn’t that Obsidian is bad at writing markdown; it’s that the common advice ignores how Theo’s team actually runs a collaborative, multi-person content pipeline where Notion’s online, relational structure is doing the heavy lifting.

Theo runs most of his channel operations through Notion: content calendar, topic planning, research, assignments, brand and sponsor tracking, and the metadata that makes each video “a specific video.” The system is built around relationships between a Kanban board, a calendar, and additional brand-linked tables. Each topic doc includes structured fields (like release date and owner) plus a flexible body for unstructured material—embedded images, screenshots, link dumps, and rough notes that don’t fit neatly into properties. Collaboration is central: six people edit the same database simultaneously, with automations that assign ownership when items move between workflow stages. A drag-and-drop action can automatically assign the editor (e.g., “phase”) and set recording dates so files land in the right labeled folders later.

That workflow, Theo argues, would require significant custom engineering to replicate in Obsidian. Obsidian’s “local-first” promise—markdown files stored on a device—doesn’t match the operational need for shared, real-time collaboration and relational views across a team. Theo also pushes back on the idea that Obsidian is a straightforward upgrade path: Obsidian Sync is described as unreliable across devices and especially problematic when multiple people collaborate. He mocks the suggestion that the team could use GitHub diffs and commits to manage changes, calling it impractical for a mixed team of developers and non-developers.

The critique extends beyond collaboration to licensing and openness. Theo says Obsidian is widely misunderstood as open source; he claims a poll found over 70% of his audience didn’t realize it’s closed source. He argues that many people adopt Obsidian less because it solves their specific workflow and more because it signals “cool and righteous” preferences.

Still, Theo gives Obsidian credit where it fits: it’s useful for managing markdown knowledge and linking notes, and it can be a better match for personal note-taking than for running a business pipeline. His broader point is that “just use Obsidian” answers a question he didn’t ask. If Notion works for his team’s constraints—relationships, automation, and shared views—then replacing it isn’t a simple swap; it means building and maintaining an alternative system. The outage and the fragility of Notion’s online infrastructure are real, but the operational cost of switching, he says, is higher than the internet’s one-size-fits-all advice.

By the end, the frustration is explicit: the demand to stop recommending Obsidian is framed as a call for better critical thinking about context, not a denial that other tools can be good for other people.