Can your notes be read on a 60-year-old computer?

At our technology and tools continue to improve, we’re increasingly losing our ability to own what we create. Not from a legal standpoint, necessarily, but a technical one.

If Squarespace doesn’t agree with your platform, they can delete your site.

If you ever posted on Myspace back in the day, that content is long gone.

Even things like Google Drive, which I use quite a lot, could someday disappear and take all of my files with it.

I try to mitigate some of that risk by using tools such as WordPress and Obsidian, but a recent article caught my eye. Earlier this year, Steph Ango wrote a post called “ File over app “, where he argued that we should be more focused on technology that lets us use files versus technology that buries our content in their custom app. The challenge, as he sees it:

Today, we are creating innumerable digital artifacts, but most of these artifacts are out of our control. They are stored on servers, in databases, gated behind an internet connection, and login to a cloud service. Even the files on your hard drive use proprietary formats that make them incompatible with older systems and other tools.

One of his solutions, that I use as well, is Obsidian (for note-taking). It’s a powerful bit of software, but all…