Obsidian and the motivation to publish content

For the past few weeks, I’ve been experimenting with Obsidian’s Publish feature to power the Encyclopaedia section of this website and streamline my writing and publishing process as much as possible.

I’ve been using Obsidian for nearly four years to organise my writing and map the connections that naturally form between ideas. Before that, I worked exclusively in Google Docs, constantly jumping back and forth between distant folders and categories. It was slow, fragmented, and creatively draining. Obsidian changed that.

I began writing in a wiki-like structure, with one twist : everything is hosted locally, on my own devices. I didn’t have to rely on platforms I found clunky or overly complex. And since I care deeply about digital self-sovereignty, this approach simply made sense.

But I digress.

Obsidian is deceptively simple. It runs on Markdown, and more importantly, it removes friction between ideas. Over time, it became something like an extension of my mind. Reading a note often sparks a new idea. Writing a paragraph frequently leads to another thread worth exploring. The problem, of course, is that inserting that new idea directly into the text can derail the flow — or it may deserve to exist as its own topic entirely.

Obsidian allows me to just create a new note - an article - and connect it to the original note it originated from with a link. Et voilà. My flow of thoughts remains uninterrupted, and the two ideas become permanently visually and technically connected.

After years of building what would eventually become Erathia, it felt natural to start publishing it online. However, I was put off by the idea of having to adapt my work from one medium to the other, and in the process having to rewrite for it to fit the new support. Thankfully, in the span of time I used it, Obsidian came up with the Publish feature, allowing a user to host their Obsidian vault online, and make it browsable by anyone having access to it. You can see how that became appealing to me : What I write is what you read.

The experience has been genuinely liberating. It has removed all the barriers preventing me from putting myself out there. In fact, I would argue that it has pushed me toward greater consistency. Knowing that the vault is public encourages me to keep adding to it regularly.

As of today, around twenty-two notes are live — and many more are on the way.

This also means that I can reveal my world in the way I want to, by giving the articles a diegetic twist I find particularly exciting to use - even though I'm still trying to figure out the exact tone to use in the articles.

I'm going to conclude this short post here. I have a note about the Aspects that I’d love to publish tonight.

Thanks for reading folks !

See you online.

Peace,
Erwan