Thank you @ryanjamurphy – it’s useful to hear the view from the moderators’ dugout. I think the best things about Obsidian are also the worst things. From the beginning, Erica and Shida created an open, communicative environment for the Obsidian community. But then the app shot up the s-curve and adopters flooded in – many of whom migrated from Roamcult. So balancing the work with chatter from the peanut gallery probably became, and remains, a difficulty. I think your post hints at that. The only answer to that kind of success is to eventually put up walls and limit communication.
The main good/bad things though are the open API and appearance structures: resulting in the community plugins and themes. The good part is that we can configure Obsidian to an amazing extent. The bad thing is that as the users flooded in, most of them probably have little understanding of managing the complexity created by the the community add-ons. From watching the two OBS forums, I suspect that most of the issues raised are issues with third-party plugins or themes. My own issues are issues with third party themes. For the most part, core Obsidian, what Erica and Shida control, is pretty solid and reliable. The outer shell, created by community contributions, is often very flakey and conflicts arise. This will only get worse. Unless someone buys the company, or abandons the “always free” philosophy, Obsidian might always lack the resources to tame the contributor cloud.
I don’t think it’s too dramatic to think that Obsidian, the product with all the community around it, is at its final inflection point. The thread above sort of makes the case: Obsidian is wonderful and messy. The people who want to just work and not put up with messy will stop coming. I don’t think OBS will flame out, but I do think the signs point to flat growth and the small part of the market that even cares about OBS getting bored and moving on. The s-curve is probably over.
BTW there are plenty of independent developers that interact openly and effectively with their user base, discussing work in progress, without a gaggle of gate keepers around them. George Browning, Mark Bernstein, Peter Lewis, Greg Pierce, are just a few of them. And they all manage product that are significantly more complex than Obsidian. It can be done.