Simple, Local, TXT

Steph Ango on Mastodon:

oops I missed the outage, I was too busy writing in Obsidian

The internet broke again. Cloudflare had a wobble, taking down a massive chunk of the web, and everyone panicked. Unless you were working locally. Then you probably didn't even notice until you tried to check social media to see why everyone was screaming.

Matt Birchler posted about this recently, singing the praises of how text files are eternal🔐. He gets it right when he says, "The idea that you should do as much as you can in plain text because those files are small, universal, and future-proofed in ways that no proprietary system ever will be."

I’ve spent years banging on about controlling your online stuff and making sure you actually own what you create. When you rely on a browser tab to get your work done, you are renting your ability to be productive. If the server goes down, or the company decides to pivot to AI, you are stuck.

There is a peace in knowing that my words sit on my device, readable by anything from TextEdit to Ulysses. No login required, no server ping needed. Just text. The best tools get out of the way, and nothing gets out of the way quite like a .txt file.