Launched this week
Caldera
Your Obsidian vault as a living profile and linked garden
238 followers
Your Obsidian vault as a living profile and linked garden
238 followers
Caldera turns your Obsidian vault into a public page that updates itself, and a digital garden of notes you grow in public. Plant a note and it becomes a page marked seedling, budding or evergreen, with a license you choose. Link to a note in a friend's garden and the backlink appears on theirs. Private by default: nothing leaves your vault unless you choose it, and contact details are stripped. Free, open source and self-hostable.
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@handle @mjonesone Self hosting is a big plus for me. I don't love the idea of my notes depending on yet another service staying online.
@handle @raaed_muggo12 Same for me. The hub is open source (AGPL), so you can run your own and point the plugin at it. You can also export your garden as a static folder and host it anywhere. Your notes always stay in your vault.
@handle @mjonesone Per note licensing makes sense when some notes are just for me and others might help someone else. Does the license stay attached when notes get linked across gardens?
@handle @xiang_pan12 Yes. A cross-garden link points to the original note page, which shows its license, and nothing gets copied. So the license always stays with the note.
@handle @mjonesone Mike, the seedling / budding / evergreen labels are such a smart way to make unfinished notes feel okay in public :) What would make me plant notes more is knowing a backlink from a friend's garden still works if I later mark that note private or unpublish it — does the other side keep a stub, or does the link just go away?
@handle @neerajnathany Thank you! Honest answer: today the link just goes dead, there's no stub. A small 'this note was made private' stub is a good idea and it's on the list.
I'd want to try this without rearranging my whole vault. Does it work with an existing Obsidian setup, including custom folders and plugins?
@haozhe_li Yes, no rearranging. Caldera only reads your vault. Your profile is built from what's already there, and only notes you put in a Garden folder (or mark caldera: garden) become public pages. You can rename that folder in settings, and other plugins keep working as normal.
If I unpublish a note, what happens to copies already shared elsewhere?
@bouzadamanuel0934 Unpublishing takes the page off the hub on the next publish. Anything someone already copied or saved can't be pulled back, same as any website. Notes you share privately with a friend are end-to-end encrypted to them, so once delivered they live in their vault.
@bouzadamanuel0934 Good question.
This is the kind of thing I'd use instead of spending a weekend trying to build my own notes site.
@filipe_braiman_carvalho7457 That was me before building this. One prompt and you have a site that keeps itself fresh.
mostly it's knowing nobody's gonna judge the half finished ones, i've got way more unfinished notes than polished ones
@jaewon_seo That's exactly why the stages exist. Seedlings are meant to be rough. Plant the half-finished ones.
Congrats Mike on launching Caldera. Hashing every garden note into a signed manifest is a thoughtful touch, since it gives a public note a verifiable author and date without needing an account. On your question about links between gardens: when I link to [[@handle/Their note]] and they later rewrite it, does my link follow the latest version or point to the hash I saw? I would want the option to pin it, the way a citation does.
@handle @genedai Great question. Links follow the latest version, like a URL. Every version's hash is signed in the manifest, so pinning a link to the version you cited is very doable. I like it as an option, the way a citation works.
The seedling and evergreen labels hit home. My vault is full of notes I keep meaning to revisit but never quite finish.
@shubham_nair12 Same here. Most of mine are seedlings. Labeling them made me OK showing them instead of waiting for perfect.