YOyogorenapan·May 18, 2026
And I remember that did happen at one point: https://github.com/acheong08/obi-sync
The mechanism that allowed that was patched as a vulnerability
In Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidianacheong08
obi-sync
Go2023–2026
acheong08 / obi-sync · Archived
obi-sync
Reverse engineering of the native Obsidian sync and publish server
5Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Reverse engineering of the native Obsidian sync and publish server
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year6 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2023-09-01 15:54:25 UTC to 2026-05-18 17:33:43 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
6 sourcesWhat we really need is a community-driven alternative without lock-in.
Many other use cases are covered by great FOSS products, but somehow API clients are abused as a sync cash cow:
- insomnia deliberately broke a 3rd party sync: https://github.com/acheong08/obi-sync
- I could go on
In Postman: Major Outage on Desktop and BrowserI write a lot of random code that have very little economic value so there's really no point in keeping it private.
Sometimes they end up being helpful for other people.
E.g. https://github.com/CopilotC-Nvim/CopilotChat.nvim was written in a single afternoon while sitting at a social event I didn't enjoy and now there's 60 contributors and I've completely handed over ownership/maintenance to the community
I still use an ancient version of obsidian on my phone because it works with my hacks to self host the native sync server https://github.com/acheong08/obi-sync
For other open source contributions, I generally just add features I want or fix random bugs. I use exclusively open source software for everything, no big tech accounts at all. So contributing only helps myself
In What motivates you to contribute to open source projects?> without paying $100 per year
There was a way! https://github.com/acheong08/obi-sync
From what I understand, the author played cat and mouse with them until he gave up. Obsidian repeatedly “patched” the “vulnerabilities” that allowed you to modify the sync server address across 3 different versions.
In Love Letter to ObsidianWhilst the reply from the CEO seems sound, their team promptly closed the path the plugin used to make self-hosted full-featured Sync & Publish work. "For Security" - ignoring the handful of other gaping security holes as less important I guess?
Anyway, I decided to fork and make it work with v1.4.5.
Enjoy https://github.com/acheong08/obi-sync/issues/19#issuecomment...
In Show HN: Open-source obsidian.md sync serverThe patch addresses a security vulnerability.
Obsidian is not stopping people from creating syncing alternatives (there are many that exist already), or reverse engineering the app. See comments in the issue on the repo:
https://github.com/acheong08/obi-sync/issues/19#issuecomment...
In Obsidian intentionally patched OSS sync despite CEO's HN statement of tolerance