My Journey to Digital Sovereignty: Why I Switched to Obsidian

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve officially migrated to Obsidian. Unlike platforms like Evernote or Notion, which often feel like they’re holding your notes hostage, Obsidian treats your data with respect.

On other platforms, "exporting" is often a painful departure. You’re left cleaning up proprietary "footprints" just to make your own thoughts readable in a different system. Obsidian solves this by ensuring you own your notes. They are simply Markdown files living in a folder on your computer—a format that has been readable since the 1960s and will remain readable decades from now. It is the ultimate future-proof Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system.

The Great Liberation

I am currently in the process of liberating all my notes, blog posts, and AI chat records. One of the biggest perks? Privacy. By keeping my notes local, I can use a local LLM to "chat" with my data. I no longer have to expose my personal life to external AI systems that use my private thoughts for training data.

Mapping the Vault: A Work in Progress

My Obsidian graph view currently tells the story of my digital life:

• The Left Cluster (21 Years of History): These are my blog posts from Typepad. Since Typepad was discontinued in 2025, I managed to rescue my data just in time. The cleanup was a massive project (shoutout to Google Gemini for the assist!). While the original internal links were lost during the export, I am gradually re-linking these posts to each other and, more importantly, to my current research.

• The Right Cluster (1 Year of AI Chats): This contains my chat history from Perplexity. Because I used their "Spaces" feature, the data was already somewhat organised by domain. I’m currently pruning the "noise"—trivial queries about weather or home repairs—and keeping the high-value insights on Chronodex development, dream interpretation, and the study of time.

• The Core (23 Years of Work): In the centre of my vault lies the heart of my system—over two decades of interlinked work notes. These form dense clusters primed for discovery.

The Big Picture: It is an incredibly rewarding, ever-evolving project to look back at 23 years of productivity and see how ideas from the past inform the projects of today.