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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

I was just looking into Checkvist vs. Dynalist and I have to say that
Dynalist seems so much more frictionless.

That's true. Checkvist is a decent outliner service for the price, but interface and backend development has been glacial for years. When Dynalist started getting more traction and mindshare it woke up Workflowy (which Dynalist's developers admit was their target and model, as Workflowy stopped iterating for several years), and they have made Workflowy a better, frictionless product with added features like kanban nodes and 'mirrored' nodes (clones).

As good as Dynalist is for me it is not worth $96/yr, even if one were to snag 50% off for one of those years. I'd much sooner pay $49 for Workflowy, or $45/yr for Craft's pro tier, which offers collaboration, commenting, better text styling and colors, favorites and folders, and more export options. (I know one person who's experimenting with using Craft for writing given its Word export.)

Hi Paul,

I think you misunderstood my post, judging from your title "Dynalist enters the "hobby work" phase".

What I meant was that Dynalist started as a hobby/side project, with no prior experience of the same level (production consumer application), so the quality is not what I wish it could be.

Sorry if I used the wrong word, as English is my native language. Maybe I should replace it with "amateur work".

In any case, it's true that Dynalist has received less attention lately, but I never meant that it is going from a commercial project to a hobby project. If anything, we'll try to bring more updates to Dynalist compared to the past few months.

Good news, Erica – I’m an enthusiastic DynaList supporter!

Thank you for the kind words of encouragement -- means a lot to us!

And I remember posting here more than 5 years ago to promote Dynalist. How times flies!

https://www.outlinersoftware.com/messages/viewm/24070

MadaboutDana wrote:

Good news, Erica – I’m an enthusiastic DynaList supporter!

Erica,

Like Bill (Mad About Dana), I am glad to learn Dynalist will continue to evolve. I use it every day and would like to continue to do so.

Thank you for checking in here.

Steve

Erica, thanks for the clarification! Huge sigh of relief from me!

Dynalist has become increasingly important and valuable to me over the last few years. I wish you well as you continue to work on it.

I am looking forward to learning Obsidian in the near future.

Many thanks.

Daly

Erica wrote:

Hi Paul,

I think you misunderstood my post, judging from your title "Dynalist
enters the "hobby work" phase".

What I meant was that Dynalist started as a hobby/side project, with no
prior experience of the same level (production consumer application), so
the quality is not what I wish it could be.

Sorry if I used the wrong word, as English is my native language. Maybe
I should replace it with "amateur work".

In any case, it's true that Dynalist has received less attention lately,
but I never meant that it is going from a commercial project to a hobby
project. If anything, we'll try to bring more updates to Dynalist
compared to the past few months.

Erica wrote:

If anything, we'll try to bring more updates to Dynalist
compared to the past few months.

I'm also glad to hear this. I'm sure Obsidian is great, but as my needs are for an online and cross-platform solution, Obsidian would be no replacement for Dynalist for me.

At this stage I'm a user of WorkFlowy Pro, Dynalist Pro, and Roam, with WorkFlowy slowly declining to the status of a repository or archive (and it's not impossible that at one point I'll completely move over to Dynalist), as Roam has taken over as my daily todo manager and project tracker.

Dynalist at this point serves as a dedicated Zettelkasten solution for my readings and thoughts, though this could be done in WorkFlowy too, would they ever bother to introduce a tag pane.

I could also force myself to use Roam for everything, but at the moment there are individual features and capabilities that I like in all three.

If, however, there was complete parity between Workflowy and Dynalist, there would be no need for me to use both.

Anyway, just felt like giving some customer feedback :)