Just to clarify - it is possible to create custom apps that will ‘push’ data to external sources, but this manifests as external actions available in automations.
There is no automatic mechanism for always updating the external data when data is changed in Fibery, AFAIK
4 Likes
There is something used for Jira. I don’t believe it’s using external actions but some-kind of triggers instead.
External actions can be a potential solution combined with rules to update certain things in Obsidian but it’s quite a clunky solution TBH.
3 Likes
I do not have anyone on my side besides me who is interested at this time. However it may well be something that I would recommend to people if it became available, strengthening the use cases for either Obsidian or Fibery respectively (both of which I recommend but both of which also have concerns come up from users due to various limitations that would be partly or wholly solved by syncing them).
Funding is not wholly determined at this point, we’re still gathering a sense of who will contribute and how much. Until a formal effort is launched, e.g. on OpenCollective, it’s hard to say how much might be available. But to be fair it will likely not be a huge amount.
What are your specific concerns about the licensing?
Yes, absolutely!
For me the minimum useful capability would be sync of Rich Text/Document content (including from Entities). For me this provides backup of a reasonable amount of my content, though far from all, and also allows me to do fast, local, offline search, local LLM AI operations for privacy/cost savings, etc.
That said the initial milestone/MVP of this is open to discussion and should be planned by all interested parties who would use the plugin, IMO.
Thanks, that’s good to know! That 2nd tool seems particularly interesting just for my own use as well.
My assumption was that it could be a simple periodic sync like most others Fibery currently has, but do it bi-directionally. Is that possible given current options?
Maybe there is a misunderstanding here. Let me elaborate on our current business model.
Taking for example the Toggl integration.
It’s code is open source and even hosted by Reify Academy. Can be used by anyone free of charge. However, that is basic version of toggl integration only.
For advanced version with extra features we will be charging monthly subscription fee AND source code won’t be published.
For custom integration for our clients we use similar model - however as client is essentially sponsoring initial stage of development they are given X months to use the premium version for free.
For custom integration open source version extracted from premium.
A client(in case of open collective - clients) receives support and pro-rated usage of premium version NOT the source code for integration.
How does that sound ?
2 Likes
I understand your approach, yes; it’s a fairly common one in my experience and can certainly work well. But I wanted to understand your objection to/concern with a fully open source approach (all features open/free). Are you just saying that you feel some ongoing revenue is needed to sustain development and make it a long-term viable project? And in that case that you suggest this “hybrid” open/premium model as a way to do that?
Spot on. The main cost of software is not in development, maintenance overtime adds up to a lot more.
OSS projects in general are notoriously bad in getting any level of funding, even popular ones. One famous recent example was a log4j bug.
So yes I’m thinking about what happens after the initial version.
Either we will continue to extend it with growing interests from clients willing to use it
OR
Community can continue extending it given it becomes popular.
Both of those things could happen in theory which would mean win-win for both parties.
The last thing I want is to create something and abandon it cause it takes too much time and energy to maintain for free.
I did find this interesting example of paid plugin in obsidian. Very similar idea.
3 Likes
Yes, just as I thought. I would say I’m open to the possibility of OS + premium (paid) features, especially if an interested dev is inclined to go this route. However a majority of successful Obsidian plugins are not commercialized this way, so I would be concerned about compatibility with the general Obsidian community ethos. These concerns - longevity/maintainability and reception by the respective communities - need to be balanced.
It’s my hope as well that a more direct integration between Obsidian and a true database tool like Fibery would perhaps start to make that tool the de facto choice for those who want additional DB capability. Currently I think this is mostly Notion due, I think, to its higher profile and ease of use. I think Fibery has a stronger case for being a good Obsidian companion, even without a direct sync, but especially so if that can be developed. So it would be my hope that a smaller group of enthusiastic users kick-start the dev of this, which then helps prove its value to Obsidian people, which gains more users, and thus helps create long-term support for the project through dev contributions, ongoing voluntary funding, etc.
Note that Open Collective specifically has ongoing (e.g. monthly) contribution options precisely to try to address the kind of long-term maintenance concerns you have. E.g. someone can pledge $1200, but as $100/mo for a year rather than in a lump sum.
1 Like
i wrote a workflow in n8n to sync obsidian files from Google Drive to Fibery, extracting YAML and putting all in the corresponding fields, and the whole document as MD in a rich text field.
its not a two way sync, but a one way from Obsidian to Fibery. it probably works with other file storage systems as well
the javascript that picks apart the Markdown can be adapted to work on a button inside fibery too i guess? it looks like this
var mdData = $json.data;
// Split the markdown content into sections
const sections = mdData.split(/(?:\n---\n|> \[!Meta\]\n)/);
// Initialize variables for extracted data
const extractedData = {};
// Check if a frontmatter section exists
if (sections.length > 1) {
// Extract data from frontmatter section
const frontmatterLines = sections[0].split('\n');
frontmatterLines.forEach(line => {
const match = line.match(/^\s*([^:]+):\s*(.*)$/);
if (match) {
const key = match[1].trim();
const value = match[2].trim();
extractedData[key] = value;
}
});
}
// Extract data from body section
const bodyLines = sections[sections.length > 2 ? 2 : 1].split('\n');
bodyLines.forEach(line => {
const match = line.match(/^\s*([^:]+)::\s*(.*)$/);
if (match) {
const key = match[1].trim();
const value = match[2].trim();
extractedData[key] = value;
}
});
// Extract data from meta section
if (sections.length > 2) {
const metaLines = sections[sections.length > 2 ? 3 : 2].split('\n');
metaLines.forEach(line => {
const match = line.match(/^\s*([^:]+):\s*(.*)$/);
if (match) {
const key = match[1].trim();
const value = match[2].trim();
extractedData[key] = value;
}
});
}
return(extractedData);
the file is a bit more complex than it would need if data is kept the same throughout the vault. but mine are a mix of frontmatter YAML and “postmatter” callouts
3 Likes
Hi Oshyan,
I previously used Obsidian and I had one of my teams develop custom plugins for me. It was a love/hate relationship for me and while ultimately it was a good learning experience but a significant drain on my brain (and I’m recovering from a brain injury, lol).
I got to a point of mastery - though not mastery of all the programming.
I’ve found that Fibery is so much more intuitive and amazing, and while the are some shortcomings, I do miss the development community.
What is it you would want to use both for versus just Fibery? Is it a privacy thing? I know the majority of Obsidian users are highly focused on that.
If there is a development community, or if not and one can be started, I will volunteer time, money, and resources. I’ve only just start bringing over some team members, but right off the bat this tool is illuminating for me unlike any other I’ve used and I have used everything.
1 Like
for me some reasons to use obsidian:
- local and offline (this really improves speed and also mobile use. nothing is more of a kill than having no access to a note when wanting to add an idea. one of the main reasons i will quit the clickup journey, as i lost hours of work with a lack of reliable offline access ((editing documents messing stuff up)))
- keyboard speed (its unbelieavable fast to edit documents with just keyboard never to click anywhere. )
- linking (having the ability to create links to documents with cmd+L … this should work in fibery too, but as its in the browser cmd+L activates the brwoser bar)
- task management. its so easy to create inline tasks and have these accumulate at other places.
- document first; dataview later (obsidian has all the related information in the document. there is no framework in how i need to lay out the info on the page. it can be structured or unstructured. no sidebars and hidden options - all in plain sight. but when i need a table view, i have the option to get it all with dataview later on. this is perfect to work with my thought process)
resons to use fibery (over obsidian):
- online, team capable (obsidian is not usable for teams at all. because of the unstructured way of things and the easyness of editing and destroying anything)
- structured data (as much as i dont like to be in a corset, in a team its important that everything follows rules
so using them both can give me an offline experience that is fast. i can setup my templates and go about my day as I did the past three years. then it syncs to fibery and those informations that need to be in the team pop up at the right place in the right format.
of course - a fibery offline mode and mobile mode would solve a lot of these hickups and would probably lead me to adopt fibery a lot more. currently its still clickup (becuase of their mobile tool and team sharing capabilities)
1 Like
Something to add here:
As a very new plugin for Obsidian just came about there is yet another reason to really dig into the sync options:
khoj uses LLM or chatGPT to query and talk to your whole second brain. start a conversation with your vault is mindblowing. it would be amazing if fibery would also allow to access the whole information accross all DB and documents to write new documents, forms, pitches etc. but for now khoj is a way of doing this. still very early dev but really amazing already
2 Likes
I’m pretty confident that it will at some point be possible to chat with AI in Fibery where the information available to the AI includes the content of the workspace.
It’s a natural progression from semantic search I guess.
3 Likes
First an apology for going silent in this thread for a while. I’ve had a lot going on in my personal life, including some family health issues (everyone is OK, just things to work through!). But I remain very interested in this idea and hopeful that an actual sync/integration plugin could be developed in time.
For me this would be one of the principle reasons to integrate with Obsidian. I think it’s clear at this point that Fibery will probably never have the vibrancy of development community that Obsidian does, and that’s OK. It would be even more “OK” though if we could have at least some access to all the capability in those plugins, while also taking advantage of what Fibery has to offer (which I agree is generally better than Obsidian in many respects).
- Offline and local access to my core data (text, markdown, hopefully structured data too, i.e. databases, although this seems much harder to sync properly)
- Use of Obsidian’s advanced text editing environment, customizable hotkeys, etc.
- Alternate and powerful views and UI affordances for working with text, e.g. Tabs, flexible Panes, Themes, and perhaps one of my biggest motivators: Canvas view
- Since this one is important enough, I’ll repeat it as its own point: Canvas View. Because of its importance to me, and what I think it represents, I’ll elaborate further on it separately below.
- Ability to leverage local tools to operate on my content/data (making an Obsidian sync inherently creates a local archive of markdown files that can be manipulated by any local or even cloud tool, provided it connects to Obsidian, and which then syncs legibly back into Obsidian)
- Ability to utilize any number of mobile markdown/Obsidian apps for a far superior mobile experience, especially for the kind of quick note-taking, list management (e.g. shopping list), etc. that I mostly want for mobile (and which is fairly horrible with Fibery at the moment)
- Access to the development community and all Obsidian plugins (since almost all Obsidian plugins fundamentally operate on markdown content, their manipulations/functions are mostly codified in a way that could be synced into Fibery legibly)
So about Canvas View: to me this is an (unfortunately) far superior “Whiteboard” function that sprang from nowhere in Obsidian and already does the most important knowledge organization things better than Fibery (for the most part), including embedding full contents of notes/docs, better and smoother visual connections, frames, embedding active websites, and more. Honestly this one feature was one of the most motivating things for me to want a sync and I started using Obsidian exclusively for tracking my personal therapy work due to the ability to create visual maps of my “Parts” (IFS therapy model), but it is equally if not more powerful and applicable to many business cases.
I’ve tried to use the Fibery whiteboard for similar things in the past and it’s just too buggy, inconsistent, and inadequate. And unfortunately it does not appear to be getting much development focus for the moment, understandably given the many competing priorities, but this just gets right back to the main point: Fibery team can’t and won’t “do it all”, but what if they don’t have to? What if we can reliably sync and in general operate compatibly on the same content with another tool that massively expands Fibery’s accessible functionality? Then the Fibery devs don’t have to do everything.
Imagine if the Obsidian ↔ Fibery sync plugin had existed already a year ago. Then all of the cool AI tools that immediately sprung up (some within days or a mere week of ChatGPT API availability) could have been usable on Fibery content from the moment that plugin became available. Likewise as soon as Canvas became available I could start my IFS mapping, but those docs/pages that I created in Obsidian would also be available in Fibery right away, and I could link to and search on them for other purposes for which Fibery is better, while still maintaining the advantages of Obsidian’s Canvas.
I also hope that such a direct and well-developed sync could actually make Fibery the de facto/default “other” tool that Obsidian users turn to and become comfortable with when Obsidian alone doesn’t do all they need. Right now this is Notion mostly, and a few others. What if it were Fibery? The massive and popular Obsidian community could actually help popularize Fibery for individual PKM use cases, which could in turn make Fibery more popular overall (just as personal Notion use seems to have translated heavily into organizational use).
In short, this whole idea is - to me - fairly significant in its potential impact, and I think to a degree it should be considered with a little distance from the fact that it would be syncing with one specific tool (Obsidian). If you think of it more like a local backup and interop system which allows you to reliably operate on Fibery content with any number of other Markdown-compatible tools, both offline and online, then it gets closer to the hoped-for reality and potential impact. It just happens to be enabled by working through Obsidian, which makes sense because it’s a mature, robust, and popular tool, with a good API, and strong development community. So while a true stand-alone local markdown sync tool for Fibery could be made, I think it makes more sense to leverage the Obsidian advantages (given it is free anyway), speeding up development and popularity/reach with minimal downsides. Even if the only reason to make it sync with Obsidian was to be able to access that community, it’s reason enough: a Fibery-only local sync would only be of real interest to existing Fibery customers, whereas an Obsidian plugin that syncs directly and reliably with a powerful, collaborative cloud dev/proj management and database tool would potentially be of great interest to many Obsidians, i.e. expanding Fibery’s market. We just need a developer or two to take on the creation of the plugin…
Fantastic, thank you! Because of your interest and that of a few others (including myself), I am strongly considering setting up an OpenCollective for this project. That would allow us to safely contribute money to it in a way that is quantifiable and can be clearly and reliably demonstrated to any potentially interested developer(s) (as opposed to the more nebulous - though greatly appreciated - pledges of support here). Is that something you would consider supporting, even with just an initial contribution of say $100 or something?
You’re probably right, but why wait? 
In a distant future I’m hopeful that Fibery will encompass everything I need/want Obsidian for right now, and implement it all in a superior way. But realistically that’s probably not going to happen, and even if it does, in the meantime I have to make do with a lot of limitations vs. my needs. An Obsidian sync plugin could, I think, solve a lot of challenges in the short-medium term. Maybe we can even get Fibery team itself to contribute a little toward the effort? 
1 Like
Sorry for the double-reply, but I forgot this one…
That’s quite cool, and goes a long way toward what I am hoping for from this plugin! Although relying on a 3rd party tool/platform with non-trivial costs/less accessible self-host requirements (cost/complexity vs. a simple Obsidian plugin). Nonetheless it’s very cool and something of a proof of concept.
Is there a major (technical) reason it’s not two-way? Or you just didn’t need/want to develop that?
i setup the n8n with the (indirect) help of @Chr1sG in a few hours. i wanted to proof that i can get my obsidian files into fibery with all data extracted into fields and the markdown as a rich text. that worked and is for now where i need to be.
it can be for sure expanded to a two way sync. although then there needs to be some kind of check so that it does not create endless loops.
true, having to rely on yet another external tool is something i also dont really like about this setup. although n8n can be hosted on your own machine for free and the setup in a dockers is of managable compexity. also something that took me less than an hour and i really have no idea what i am doing. probably a security risk though. but compared to pipedream, zapier and make (i tried them all), n8n is by far more superior (a bit harder to setup, but with if/else splits better than pipedream in that regard. and with being free way cheaper than make and zapier)
1 Like
I see what you’re saying and I get it. I have about 5,000 notes on a topic and I have no need to put them in fibery. No desire to do anything with them other than search, and a homegrown LLM+vectors is superior to whatever Fibery can do in that regard.
I see your point.
Regarding this: * task management. its so easy to create inline tasks and have these accumulate at other places.
I’ve crafted a pretty efficient way to do this in Fibery (at least for me).
Oshyan,
I see what you’re saying. And one point in particular make some want to cry 
:
- Alternate and powerful views and UI affordances for working with text, e.g. Tabs, flexible Panes, Themes, and perhaps one of my biggest motivators: Canvas view
- Since this one is important enough, I’ll repeat it as its own point: Canvas View. Because of its importance to me, and what I think it represents, I’ll elaborate further on it separately below.
I could not agree more. In fact, I was so excited to see it, and only superficially tested it in Fibery, and ultimately went in this direction. Then, I have run into significant useability problems. I wrote a post about it but somehow deleted it.
I read a blog page form the CEO where he shows a Fibery whiteboard and it’s look really good, and I though why doesn’t mine work that way??? Perhaps because I’m on PC it is mostly useable, so I’m just using Miro and considering having my team do more Pipedream (like N8N, which we also use) work to integrated Fibery and Clickup JUST for a WORKABLE whiteboard.
What happens for me??? Well, when I zoom in or out and goes too far, either by 25% or 50% and the appearance (again on the PC) when it gets smaller, is unreadable because they do something weird (that looks like they’re rendering is a blurry image).
So - the beauty of canvases/whiteboards is the ability to zoom in and work on a particular node, but moreso (at least for me), the ability to zoom out and recognized and appreciate the relationships and the flow of things. I cannot do that in Fibery and I’m bummed about it. So I’m with you 1,000 % on that.
And I think the one thing fibery does better (potentially) than anyone is provide a visual learning/building experience - seeing the relations the way they’re shown in Fibery, incorporating a whiteboard that does entities (at least in theory) is very intuitive for me and would be AMAZING if it worked, though it’s still good for me even though it seems like I have to do a lot of hacks.
The local tools, I totally agree with. For instance, I have a very powerful dual 4090 setup specifically for LLM training and all you can do with that. Now that you mention it, the wheels are spinning, and I’m seeing just how powerful that could be if one could use both.
Yes I’ll contribute $100. I’ve already got some team members building things for me (not the Obsidian/Fibery integration), and I’m going to share those as well. For instance, I made this post - Automatic icon for every entity in a table - Get Help - Fibery Community - assuming that was pretty easy to do, apparently it’s not.
So I have a team member putting that together in Pipedream. We use Pipedream, Albato, Zapier, and N8N. If you guys have a preference for N8N, let me know and I’ll them emulate stuff there.
You know that N8N has a white labeling component. Maybe we could make a Fibery-N8N suite of plugins!? Is that what you have in mind? You’re obviously way ahead of me and much more technically-capable, so I’m still catching up.
One last thing: A while ago I was pretty heavily into Obsidian and making that work for me. (In the end I think it nearly drove me insane, lol.) During that time we developed a private plugin that 2-way synced with Google Docs and Google Sheets. So I already have some experience there.
That said, I think we should put our heads together to either (1) persuade the Fibery team to fix their whiteboard and/or (2) figure out a solution to improve that, which might be the Fibery/Obsidian thing you’re talking about.
1 Like
I used that. In fact, I think I was his earliest tester!
Do you prefer N8N over Pipedream? I’ve noticed that N8N has the ability to white label an app and incorporate all its integrations. I mentioned (to the wrong person) that I had done Obsidian to Google Docs 2-way sync and Obsidian to Google Sheets 2-way sync previously. I have rebelled against Obsidian so don’t use that (it was just a private plugin) but we also use a lot iSaaS and that N8N white labeling thing looks interesting.
i tried pipedream and it is great. but if you want to realise more complex things (if else splits for example) you can not do that in pipedream.
also the fact that i can host it on my machine and its free is a killer argument. especially in usecases where i dont need uptime.
i tried make, zapier, pipedream and they all had their ups and downs in integrations. n8n is the only one where i have a functioning google contacts update with all fields - something i tried to get with the pipedream AI but was not successful.
also the super easy integration of http requests with cURL makes it a blast to work with fibery. also their community is really active and you get answers on their forum nearly as fast as here 
so n8n is the winner for me
1 Like
I wasn’t aware of that white labeling option, that’s interesting. I’m not opposed to going that route, as long as it’s long-term maintainable. Complexity would be my concern there. My hope would be for as turnkey of an end result application/plugin as possible. I was originally thinking it would just be an Obsidian plugin.
Why not both? I think Fibery team definitely needs to improve the whiteboard, while I see the Fibery ↔ Obsidian sync as separately worthwhile. I want to make clear something clear though: The Canvas Obsidian feature is what I consider to be a very good implementation of a PKM-focused “Whiteboard” (as opposed to a more design or sketch or “brainstorming” focused one like Miro or even the Excalidraw plugin for Obsidian). But it is at least as important if not more so as an example of the benefits of syncing with a tool that has a robust feature set and plugin ecosystem.
In other words yes, Canvas is an advantage right now for Obsidian, but I don’t want anyone to think that the solution - instead of syncing with Obsidian - is just to make Fibery whiteboard better. Yes, that would solve that one problem, but Obsidian meanwhile solves dozens if not hundreds more that Fibery does not now solve, and perhaps never will. Some things are outside the scope of what they even want to focus on or have time for, but there are people like me (and perhaps you) who still want and would benefit from those features that Fibery team will likely never implement. An Obsidian sync has advantages for Fibery’s core market, but also for many, many more uses besides.
So I continue to think this is a good idea. I don’t quite have time to lead this project though, to reach out to potential devs, etc. I was hoping that some discussion here might connect with a dev in the Fibery community who might want to tackle at least a proof of concept (and to some degree that already exists with e.g. N8N stuff, etc.). The other prong of this approach here in the discussion is to perhaps generate enough pledged funding to attract a dev who is needing some payment to dedicate the time to it. And ultimately I’d hope for some ongoing funding for support/update for it anyway. Still just trying to build support/momentum here for the idea. We’re getting there…