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Dynalist enters the "hobby work" phase
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Posted by Paul Korm
Feb 26, 2021 at 03:09 PM
Interesting post from Erica Xu, who with her husband created Dynalist and now Obsidian. Nothing surprising about this—Obsidian is clearly far more successful—from a user-base perspective—than Dynalist. The suggestion that it might go open source has upsides and downsides.
https://talk.dynalist.io/t/no-monthly-blog-update-since-november-are-the-team-ok/7497/7/
Erica Xu wrote:
>To be completely honest, Dynalist is my hobby work. Not in the sense that I don’t love it, but in the sense that I had very limited experience when building in 5 years ago (I was still in university and had no experience with production level product design and development before). So although there was love, the skill was not there.
>After almost 6 years, a lot of what we lacked started showing – it feels like working on shaky ground sometimes. Not in terms of stability – Dynalist is very well battle tested by now – but in terms of my dissatisfaction with the design decisions we made back then. I also wished we had a beta testing program – any small bug would annoy many people at this stage, which is additional friction of developing new features.
Posted by satis
Feb 26, 2021 at 03:21 PM
I wouldn’t be surprised if Obsidian absorbed more outlining features and Dynalist users were offered a migration path. In addition to direct competitors like Workflowy and Checkvist new app-services like Craft, with similar features plus a lot more at half Dynalist’s price, are probably putting a big dent into Dynalist’s subscriber numbers.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Feb 26, 2021 at 05:56 PM
This is a bit disappointing, but not surprising. I have been expecting Obsidian to absorb more of the developers’ efforts—in fact, I’m sure we’ve seen that in the slowed pace of Dynalist improvement. An announcement like this sort of spells the doom for Dynalist, I think, because everyone is going to start looking for an alternative.
I was just looking into Checkvist vs. Dynalist and I have to say that Dynalist seems so much more frictionless. Checkvist has more features, but not enough to have made me want to switch. But this news might make me re-evaluate.
Anyway, thanks for the heads up on this.
Posted by Luhmann
Feb 27, 2021 at 12:10 PM
I like the idea of Dynalist 2.0 and I hope they work on it at some point. I’d love to see what they do. Personally I need something that is built around a basic outliner framework rather than trying to graft outliner features on to plain text files. Switching back and forth between Roam and Obsidian has really driven this home for me. As much as I prefer a lot of things about Obsidian (or NotePlan for that matter), they will never work for me the way I want them to ... but if they ever build it, I’m sure Dynalist 2.0 will.
Posted by jaslar
Feb 27, 2021 at 09:05 PM
I don’t see this as an “announcement.” It’s an update of the thoughts of a developer, assessing a way forward, and being refreshingly honest about her interests and options.
Dynalist is my favorite tool. I like the “frictionless” comment—it’s easy to learn, easy to use, reliable, and powerful. I’ve been a Pro user for a few years now. I use it all day long in a variety of contexts.
My hope: it will have some kind of life for a few years, and maybe a convergence of Dynalist and Obsidian feature sets.
But I’ve been putting a little more time into emacs org-mode. Emacs is a pretty good argument for open source. It began development in 1976. It is under rich further development 45 years later. Amazingly, just a month or so after Roam, we got org-roam (https://www.orgroam.com/), which is local, can be encrypted, and has a community of thoughtful coders. There’s an org-OPML app (https://github.com/org-opml/org-opml).
So as usual, it’s yes/and. I use Dynalist and hope it lasts a long time. And I also lean into a multiplatform tool (esp. with http://www.orgzly.com/) that offers all the outlining prowess I cannot imagine living without.