Hi, new user here. I was looking for a journaling app with a good user experience for a long time and I really like how easy Diarium can be navigated. The inclusion of external data sources is a killer featuer imho.
I've read the various markdown-related threads and timos arguments against using markdown as an editor.
I wanted to explain why I think why markdown is important.
It is not so much about being able to format entries using markdown syntax. That is nice and brings a bit more efficiency when writing, but not essential.
But what I really want to have is full control over my data.
That means first and foremost, being able to control where the data is stored. Diarium is good in that regard as it stores locally and allows cloud sync with various providers including the open WebDAV standard 👍️
But this also extends to being able to easily read my data without a dependency to a specific program. Now and in the (far) future.
Stone posted
and provide protections in case you win the lottery or god forbid, the bus!
Being a non-open source one-person project, it is not unreasonable to expect development to stop eventually (hopefully via the "wins the lottery" pathway, not the "hit by a bus" pathway ;-)) .
Non-maintained apps will inevitably stop to work at some point in the future. The next Android/Window/iOS may change some API that is required; there may be a critical security vulnerability be found in Diarium prevents secure use.
Other scenarios are imaginable where we cannot continue to use the current app 10 or 20 years from now. But the data we put into the app is meant to cover long time periods and remain valuable decades from now (when no one is using any or the current operating systems any more...)
A folder in a file system with text files is very generic. A simple text editor, even command line tools like cat would allow me to read everything. This gives long-term protection against the "diarium app is not maintained and will stop to work eventually" scenarios like the ones Stone posted. Having this type of data storage is a means to maintain the ability to access to the data we put into Diarium.
Storing the text files with markdown syntax will retain formatting hints while still being well readable without a specific tool that renders the formatting. Structured data like the day rating and tags could be stored with YAML Frontmatter syntax in the text files. A format that is also both human readable and machine parsable.
This is the approach that Obsidian is taking and using this approach for data storage would automatically provide nice interoperability with Obsidian as a side effect. While I find Diarium superior for journaling, other types of information collection becomes cumbersome in Diarium - for example project organization, knowledege database,... anything that is not mainly related to the date of an entry. Being able to have a large folder as the "digital brain" with sections being edited with Obsidian and a Diary section being edited with Diarium would be my favored solution.
