Hello! I maintain the Longform plugin, and I'd like to find someone else to maintain it going forward. That is the core ask of this post—everything else that follows is why+background.
I built the first version of Longform during a fallow period in my writing life. Historically when I'm not writing I'm making little tools for myself that largely orient around the acts of reading and writing. I wanted to write where I took notes, I made Longform, it got a lot of stars on github (relatively speaking, for me) and I heard from lots of people who used it. I wrote a couple little things using it, had a kid, life went on.
Eventually my fallow period ended and I found myself avoiding writing purely because I didn't want to do it in Obsidian. I realized how absurd this avoidance was and I reinstalled Scrivener and I banged out a short story.
Open source work is deeply unforgiving. In my experience I can only sustain the will to work on something if I use it myself or if I'm compensated for my time. I no longer use Longform myself, and I've never really been compensated for my time. I've had a scattering of donations on github for which I am deeply thankful, but it only ever amounted to a few bags of coffee beans from the shop down the street.
At the same time the slop economy has reached Obsidian plugins. I avoid new plugins because I simply can't trust them. I wrote a whole blog post on the value of code untouched by LLMs. The Obsidian plugin review team seems deeply underwater. I'm not sure where Obsidian goes from here, but the current situation seems untenable. I thus recognize the value of something like Longform continuing to exist, at least until stable "competitors" emerge.
All of this is to say that I no longer have the time or ability to maintain Longform, and that its users would be better served by someone who does. If you're interested, please comment on this issue to let me know. I'd be happy to write a guide for how to navigate the codebase. Nothing herein is precious, and I tried to be as idiomatic as possible anyway.
Thanks for your patience and for using Longform. The Obsidian community is something quite special.
Hello! I maintain the Longform plugin, and I'd like to find someone else to maintain it going forward. That is the core ask of this post—everything else that follows is why+background.
I built the first version of Longform during a fallow period in my writing life. Historically when I'm not writing I'm making little tools for myself that largely orient around the acts of reading and writing. I wanted to write where I took notes, I made Longform, it got a lot of stars on github (relatively speaking, for me) and I heard from lots of people who used it. I wrote a couple little things using it, had a kid, life went on.
Eventually my fallow period ended and I found myself avoiding writing purely because I didn't want to do it in Obsidian. I realized how absurd this avoidance was and I reinstalled Scrivener and I banged out a short story.
Open source work is deeply unforgiving. In my experience I can only sustain the will to work on something if I use it myself or if I'm compensated for my time. I no longer use Longform myself, and I've never really been compensated for my time. I've had a scattering of donations on github for which I am deeply thankful, but it only ever amounted to a few bags of coffee beans from the shop down the street.
At the same time the slop economy has reached Obsidian plugins. I avoid new plugins because I simply can't trust them. I wrote a whole blog post on the value of code untouched by LLMs. The Obsidian plugin review team seems deeply underwater. I'm not sure where Obsidian goes from here, but the current situation seems untenable. I thus recognize the value of something like Longform continuing to exist, at least until stable "competitors" emerge.
All of this is to say that I no longer have the time or ability to maintain Longform, and that its users would be better served by someone who does. If you're interested, please comment on this issue to let me know. I'd be happy to write a guide for how to navigate the codebase. Nothing herein is precious, and I tried to be as idiomatic as possible anyway.
Thanks for your patience and for using Longform. The Obsidian community is something quite special.