Transcript of How To Collaborate In Obsidian 📝 Shared Note-Taking Plugin 👥 Relay

obsidian is one of the greatest note-taking apps of all time i use it for all aspects of my life to improve my nonlinear thinking come up with my best ideas and execute on them effectively but Obsidian has always been single player mode i've tried using Obsidian Sync and that does work but it requires me to set up another vault and with all of my existing notes connections plugins and AI integrations I didn't really want to do that for making my vault multiplayer i wanted something simpler and I finally found the solution the Relay plugin you can think of relay like adding Google Docs to your Obsidian vault but with fine grain control over which folders and files are shared using the incredible technology of conflictfree replicated data types in today's video I'm going to walk through what Relay is how it works how to get it set up and how you can use it to make your Obsidian Vault multiplayer hi my name is Callum also known as Wanderloots and welcome to today's video on the Obsidian Relay plugin how to make your vault multiplayer or collaborative i've been looking for some way not just to share my notes but also to collaborate with people on them for feedback to build out projects together and generally just to share any interesting concepts that I come across the Relay plugin looks like the perfect way to do all of these things so I'm excited to show you how it works and how to get it set up in today's video I'll walk through the Relay website identifying the key features and more importantly the key current limitations then I'll show you how to install the plugin and get it set up before I test out how it works with my fiance Taylor as we build out our travel YouTube channel and need a place to script together finally I'll share some more example use cases that I foresee this plugin being incredibly helpful for i've been very surprised with how effective this plugin is and how easy it was to get set up if you find this video helpful I would love if you would please consider liking and subscribing as your support enables me to continue making these videos so I appreciate it very much now let's dive into multiplayer mode in Obsidian okay so now that you understand a little bit more about why I'm interested in using Relay I thought that I would just quickly walk you through the Relay website and then we'll get into installing it in Obsidian just so you have a bit of a better idea on how it all works before we actually start to use it relay is built by system 3 and their motto here is think together in Obsidian so you can see here's a quick example just showing you how it's going to work when I get it set up where you can have two different people or three different people operating within the same relay server at the same time writing at the same time kind of like how you would normally see Google Docs effectively what we're going to do is we're going to share a folder of our vault and link that folder to someone else so we can add multiple folders to the same relay server and then control who has access to that particular server which then gives them access to the folders so the idea here is that you can share folders not vaults this works in real-time collaboration and based on the CRDT technology conflict free replicated data types we're actually able to operate online or offline and then relay will aggregate all that information in real time so you can either operate asynchronously where you're working for example on your offline mode and someone else is working online and then when you get back into it and you connect to the internet it will update automatically to show all those changes without introducing any conflicts i know I mentioned that this is basically multiplayer for Obsidian but this is actually what they're going for this is what Relay is building it for from the people that I've talked to that have used this they've really been enjoying this real-time collaboration where you can have this asynchronous merging like I just mentioned so it really does make Obsidian multiplayer it makes it collaborative so I'm excited to dive into this and add it to my Obsidian Vault and then show you some use cases that I've been really looking for i want to be able to write everything in Obsidian and Relay is going to enable me to do that okay so they have a few core features here and the idea is that like I mentioned you can share specific folders without having to share your entire vault so this is different than Obsidian Sync where you'd have to just sync your entire vault with another person and usually you end up creating a separate vault this allows you to keep your same vault but then just selectively choose which folders you want to add to a particular relay and then you can choose different folders for different people within different relays and I'll show you how that works in a moment and then you can see here that they're able to edit the same line at the same time so this is just pretty wild this is bringing in that CRDT the conflict free replicated data types so I think that's a really cool feature and I think this will really make Obsidian feel like it is multiplayer because you can both be in there at the same time kind of like Google Docs and this real time comparison to me is a little bit more interesting than what I've been typically seeing with Obsidian Sync i've used that for some projects but I'm potentially looking at switching any of my Obsidian Sync uses to a relay server instead and then like I mentioned before here's just a bit of a graphic here that shows you how you can have these different edits happening at the same time and how the conflict free replicated data type the CRDT is going to aggregate the information and display it in a way that doesn't introduce any conflicts so that's awesome i love that this is a cool graphic here are a few different examples from the website that show you how you can introduce multiplayer to your different styles your different personas so for example you can have a unified vault which is what I was just mentioning where I just have a single vault that has all my information in it and now I can just choose selectively which portions of my vault I share with other people so that just makes it easier for for me to keep all of my information in one place especially when I'm starting to introduce things like artificial intelligence with the smart connections plugin or Obsidian Copilot I create a vector embedding of my entire vault so it's nice for me to be able to continue using the tools and the plugins that I'm always using and just add on this multiplayer mode to it specifically to particular folders here's an example on how you could have two different computers where you have two different vaults you have your personal vault and your work vault and then you use relay to bridge between the two because you can just select specific folders from your work vault that you want to share with your personal or vice versa so this helps you work between different computers or perhaps even work between your phone and your computer if you want to operate with different vaults so this is where really you can use this as an alternative to Obsidian Sync there are some limitations with that though that I'll get into more towards the end so just keep that in mind that this isn't exactly a replacement for Obsidian Sync but it is working to get to that point where I think it could be and then here's another example where you can start to have much more complicated sharing patterns where if you're working with a bunch of different people you can select specific folders and you can start linking relays between particular vaults where you select a few folders to produce that single relay and then you select who you want to share it with and then you could have certain portions of that relay aggregate within your overarching team relay so there's really no limit to how you can start to set this up aside from the number of users which starts to get into the paid version and also the type of files that you can include but I'll explain that more in a moment and then here is the pricing and you can see that for free you can have small team collaboration so you can have up to three people per relay three users per relay server and I believe you can have up to 25 relay servers and it says here 10 megabytes of storage but I saw on the Obsidian plugin itself it says 100 megabytes i think this might be a typo and then with the team you can start to have 10 users per relay uh and that's $10 per month total so if you have 10 people in there that's only a dollar a person to contribute to that particular server so that's actually much more affordable than Obsidian Sync which would typically cost you I believe $5 US per user so if you had 10 users that would be $50 that you're contributing versus $10 for this relay and then you get up to 10 GB of storage for all of your team's work and actually I just saw within the last week or two there's now an update so uh yeah it says two weeks ago that there's now an update to Relay where you can have universal file sync so now we can introduce images videos audio PDFs and more but this is a paid feature as it requires additional storage for the $10 a month you also get 10 gigabytes of storage so that's partially to allow you to include things like images or videos or audio files PDFs as well so that's just one thing to keep in mind that paying doesn't just give you access to more people it also gives you access to more features like introducing this universal file sync otherwise with the free version you're just purely limited to markdown files which honestly for most of what I'm using most of my interests most of my examples that I'm going to walk through in a little bit are for textbased sharing of notes so I'm excited to get started with the free version and then I could see upgrading to $10 per month between a couple different people if I end up expanding my use case to include more images so I just briefly wanted to mention to the company's name they got this from Daniel Conorman from thinking fast and slow where system one thinking is fast and intuitive system two is slow and methodical and system three is your personal digital extension which is the integration of personal computing and artificial intelligence and I just thought that was a really cool name for a company because this is my vision as well now that we're getting more into the digital ecosystem with artificial intelligence which I have a couple videos about how I integrate artificial intelligence locally on my computer to keep my data safe secure and private uh in a free way as well so for me this seems very much aligned with my vision which gives me more confidence that this type of plugin will continue to be developed in the future because we are aligned and on that note I just wanted to quickly bring up the privacy policy too before I start putting any files in here it says that they do not sell or share data with third parties which is great but they do collect your email address name and profile photo from the authentication provider which I'll show you in just a minute they include authentication timestamps relay names and user associations and they only get access to the files that you explicitly choose to share through relay all other files remain private so just on that note it might be worth depending on how you're planning on using this it might be worth noting hyper sensitive information into this type of shared infrastructure at the moment i believe you can host your own server in which case you probably wouldn't be going directly through relay but I'll explore that more in a little bit and they also don't have endtoend encryption so if you do really need end to end encryption that's an example of why you would potentially want to use Obsidian Sync so just from that data security perspective it does say that they don't look at user data but they could be compelled to by law so this is where again if you're dealing with confidential information you might not want to be using this system but for myself I'm planning on collaborating with a few different people for writing planning and just organizing my life so it's not confidential i obviously don't want to necessarily just give it out to the world which is why I'm keeping it within this private relay server in the first place but that's just something to keep in mind okay so now that you have a bit of a better idea on what goes into building this the architecture and how it's structured and what the pricing plans are let's actually get into installing it and setting up the features because once I do that then I'll take a look at the road map and show you where the app is headed okay so here we are in Obsidian so I'm just going to create a new note and I'm going to call this relay plugin i'll just drop some notes here as we go but what we do is we go over to the settings wheel on the side here go to community plugins make sure they're enabled click on browse and then go over to relay by system 3 you can see it's got 33,000 downloads which is a decent amount and it's been updated 13 days ago so this is kind of why I was saying for a system like this I want to ensure that the company is interested in continuing to build this out that they have a long-term vision in mind because I don't want to start using a tool that just gets deprecated right away but it seems like they've been actively updating it and even just a few months ago they had way fewer users so it's clear that what they've been doing has been resonating with people so you can see they talk about again true multiplayer mode for Obsidian collaborate in real time offline and share folders so this is what we already talked about and just as a quick overview on how it actually functions it tracks updates to designated folders using the conflict free replicated data types and then it relays those updates to the server which is why they've got this little satellite and then it echoes out the update to all the collaborators and then integrates those updates when the collaborator receives them so what this means is that this doesn't happen until you actually click on the note that's when the echo occurs and it brings in the information and then integrates the updates but they are working on bringing real-time updating like background updating so here are a few of the limitations that you can only have 25 relay servers three users per server and 100 megabytes markdown edit history storage if you're looking for unlimited markdown edit history storage then you can pay for the updated version and that does give you access to other file types based on their latest update even though it says right now that these are coming soon it is available to the paying users so I'm sure they'll integrate it into the overall plan at some point but again for now I'm just interested in a textbased system they're also open source which is great their login permissions and billing is proprietary but it's cool that the relay server is something that's actually open source so again if this system happens to go down I could fork it and try to construct my own authorization system based on the fork and that's just good to know that someone else could pick up where they left off if anything happens and then like I mentioned you can self-host uh using the on-prem deployment of a relay server so I'm not going to get into this right now but if you're interested they do have instructions on how to host your own systems so that's something to look into if you're concerned about the content that you're uploading to the server for example you're dealing with confidential information you might want to host your own server so that your content is completely private and inaccessible by them but still allows you to use the login and permission checks through their servers so that might be a best of both worlds situation if you're using this for business or you have proprietary information or intellectual property as an intellectual property lawyer and a patent agent keeping ideas secure and private until they're ready to be published is incredibly important as you can shoot yourself in the foot if you're for example sharing patentable ideas out there and just as a lawyer you have to be very careful with confidentiality with the information that your clients are giving you so depending on how you're using this system it might be worth taking a look into self-hosting and if you're interested in learning more about how to self-host then let me know in the comments and I can work on a video that shows you how to get that set up okay enough talking about what it is and how it works i just thought that was important because it is an interesting system so I want you to understand what's happening behind the scenes so that you can use this more effectively safely and keep your information private if you need to so now let's get started with installing Relay okay so we click install enable and then go over to options this is just in my Obsidian settings on the side under community plugins and you can see that the first option here is to sign in with Google so they have mentioned as part of the road map that they're going to be introducing different authentication services but for now Google is what they use so if you want to use relay this is what you're limited to but you could always create an entirely new account with Google if you wanted to keep it separate from everything else that you're doing oh and here you go you can see that they say that they require signin because they want to prevent spam accounts and then they want to ensure that everything is just kept secure so I think that's a good reason to have an authentication service and I'm happy to connect to Google okay so I just clicked sign in and that was it it just took a few seconds and then it just popped up behind the scenes here so that was very easy for me to sign in with Google so you can see the overall structure here it's blank at the moment because I haven't set anything up so now let's take a look at all the features of Relay under the settings section so you can see that you have your account authorization how you're signed in here you could switch between different accounts if you want to and then you can see here there's a section to join the relay server and in order to do that you have to generate a share key i'll explain what a share key is in a second but if we go down here you can see that there's the relay server which coordinates the real-time updates between collaborators you can add collaborators and share folders on the relay server setting page so this is where all of my servers will live and as part of the free version I can have up to 25 servers so I could have 25 different people that I'm sharing with here or have different types of systems depending on the projects that I'm working on and then we see the shared folder section and I'll show you what this is in a moment once we go into the relay so now if we go over to you can see here I have wander loots relay we can click on this so this is just the default relay that got set up it gave my names relay and then you can see here folders on this relay server so right now there's no folders here and I only have one user so what I can do is I can click add a folder and that will bring in a folder from my vault that makes it available to anyone else who has access to this particular server any of the users of the three users and then if we scroll down a little bit you can see here that there's the share key that I talked about so we've got this system here telegraphing uh scant elapsed so basically what this means is if I wanted someone to join this relay what I would have to do is copy this secret key then I would go over here and enter the share key and I could just join someone else's server so in a moment I'll do this with my fiance Taylor because we have a couple projects that we're working on together as part of our travel YouTube channel and I want to show you in real time how this works so what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a new relay here and I'm going to call this one Callum and Taylor because that's the name of our travel channel so this is going to be for everything related to work that I do with my fiance so you can see here right now we've got the name we've got the folders which are none and there's currently zero users so I'm actually going to create a new macro folder within my vault here and I'm going to call this relays and then within this relay I'm going to create a new folder called Callum and Taylor so now if I go back to settings for relay go over to Caluman Taylor relay i am going to click share folder and you can see here that I can go through oh I could have created a folder directly right there but I only want to share this one specifically this will also share all the subfolders but I'll click there oh and you can see that I've now been added to this as the owner so I can add two more people it brought in this particular share folder and now if we go here it shows you which folders are syncing across your relays this is just a good way to get an at a glance view of it if I go here and I click on the settings wheel for this particular relay for this folder here I can change the settings on this particular folder so remember how we had those limitations before on the different files well it looks like actually you can sync images now and audio videos and PDFs so that's interesting i'm not exactly sure how this will work in terms of the amount of storage we have so this is where I think you can say "Oh I only get 100 megabytes across my servers so maybe I don't want to enable video because just one video might blow through my entire storage capacity on the free tier." So you can choose what type of files get synced with a particular folder so it's cool that you get that control at the folder level rather than at the relay level because you could just toggle on and off depending on what you're looking for and what you're building out okay so now what I need to do is I need to go to Calum and Taylor copy this invite link and then I will go send this to Taylor okay so I just pass it along and now what I should be able to do is just wait for Taylor to accept the relay link have you added it okay and then give it a second for it to load cool okay so you can see over here now if I go down I can see relays on this side and there's an option here that shows Calluman Taylor is currently connected and it is having track changes in it so now if I go back here you can see there's now two users there's Wanderloots and Taylor and I now have the option to boot her out but if I boot her out she could just use this same share key to get back in which means I would need to change the share key but for now I'm not going to kick her out because I just brought her in i want to actually show you how this works so I'm going to go over to the folder itself Caluman Taylor and I'm going to create a new note and let's call this Doomite script because the two of us are working on a new video for our travel channel at Caluman Taylor and after we went to Western Canada and then to Costa Rica our third trip together was to the Doommites so we're currently working on this video and we've been finding it kind of annoying to use Google Docs to script back and forth because we both use Obsidian so much so I thought it would be really nice to be able to just both work within our Obsidian vault so maybe I'll start writing here and then Taylor can join this file as well do you see it okay and it looks like maybe she just got Oh yep there we go now you can see Taylor R oh she's writing in my spot so you can see now she's actually just writing in real time and I can start writing here i could say actually wait no this is not me this is Taylor's section so we can both be writing in here in real time like this is just such a great way for both of us to start working on this script at the same time because Taylor can start to bring in things like the fact that she loves the food and we didn't actually really see cows we saw coups so I can come in and correct her and that's a specific type of cow so the specifics don't exactly matter but my point is that we can start to bring in templates i could for example apply my YouTube description template so yeah Taylor just created her own file over here so you can see that um so this is just it's actually kind of fun like the fact that we're able to turn Obsidian into multiplayer right off the bat i can go see what she's putting in here she's just sitting there it doesn't update in real time it updates when you click on the note so that's one of the features that they've talked about bringing in in the future where you don't have to wait until for example if I go here and I say you can't Taylor's not going to see this edit until she clicks back into that particular file so that's just one example on how we can collaboratively work on a particular note together this could be a project file we could set up any number of subfolders down here and have it for for example just life things like we could create a subfolder here that's called life plans and maybe I put a new note in here that's grocery list and I could be working on my grocery list here and Taylor could just come in and start adding as well so yeah we can just go back and forth we can keep working on this and that kind of just shows you a gist of how it all works so now if I go back to relay if I wanted to again I could share another folder so it doesn't just have to be that single folder I shared but each relay has a certain limitation on the number of files that can be synced the size of the files and how much of an edit history it keeps track of and again you can go in and control the specific settings for each folder specifically so some folders maybe you give access to images and others you don't it just is totally up to you cool so I hope that shows you a bit more how this works and I just want to walk through a couple more specific examples on how I think this could be used practically so the first example is that you could use this to sync your own notes between your phone and your computer so this would effectively become an Obsidian sync alternative though again remember that the issue is that it's not end to end encrypted so depending on the type of information you're putting in here you might not want to send this to your own relay in which case you might want to run your own relay server so that's just one example another one is like I mentioned you could use this for sharing notes in general rather than using something like Apple notes which is what I would have typically done for sharing notes with Taylor now I can just share notes in Obsidian which is where I'm already writing everything anyways so that just speeds things up a lot the main use for relay that I see is working on different projects with people so this could be school reports this could be scripting a YouTube video like creating a shared asset together this could be planning for a meeting where you're working asynchronously with someone else on scripting or planning for something that you're both going to be at in the future you could use this for editing i could write my newsletter in here and then Taylor could go in and edit the newsletter directly without me having to send it anywhere else i'm just keeping everything where I already am we also often work on social media captions together because Taylor is a marketing expert so it's really nice getting her feedback on everything we could do this for trip planning together honestly there's literally no end anything that you would want to share a note with like you would with Google Docs or with Obsidian Sync you can do this together in Relay and it's just so cool as another example what I've been doing with my friend we tend to share quotes back and forth with one another and we've been using Google Docs to do this because we'll talk about things like intuition and flow state and philosophy but it's kind of annoying to use Google Docs because both of us are already using Obsidian to publish our notes into our digital garden so what's cool is I could just create a new relay now where I just don't just call it Callum and Taylor maybe now it's Callum and Jared instead of having our conversations back and forth by texting or in Google Docs we can start writing letters back and forth to each other so this kind of takes the multiplayer component of Relay and adds it to something like a multiplayer digital garden we can share ideas on collaborative projects which is actually something I've been doing with another friend that we are working on building out an app together instead of using Obsidian Sync we could just use a relay and that would save us a few dollars a month and for the most part would be totally fine with confidentiality based on what we're looking for and then this is something else that I wanted to show you we can take this multiplayer mode within Obsidian and we can make it public if I just go back to the Doomite script for example I could just go here and I could just apply my digital garden template and then under the properties section I now have this option for DG publish if I toggle this on DG publish equals true and then click publish it would automatically get added to my digital garden so what's cool about this is there would now be a new folder here and the folder would be Caluman Taylor and there would be the Doomite script underneath this or for Callum and Jared there would now be some new discussion on flow states or intuition or philosophy and this note that I just wrote inside of Obsidian would be automatically published to my digital garden that's a cool way that we can use relay to make the digital garden publishing format multiplayer now my assumption I'll test this out and and let you know if this is incorrect but my assumption is that because the digital garden plugin converts notes into links what that means is that I should be able to get links to Jared's garden or Taylor's garden when the note is published but if not I might need to update particular note references to have the external links so that's just one limitation that might be in there but I'll have to test that out and get back to you i'll make a video specifically on multiplayer digital gardens at some point so I'll let you know in that one what ended up happening with the multiplayer mode on digital gardens but I think it's just cool that even if we're not dealing with the linking and we just want to publish our writing together I could just share this directly to my digital garden using something like Obsidian's digital garden plugin without needing to use Obsidian Publish so Relay and the Digital Garden plugin allows me to combine Obsidian Publish with Obsidian Sync but all for free so now that you've seen how this can be used to think together in Obsidian to make Obsidian multiplayer to create a co-working space or collaborative space for you and other people let's take a look at what the company's planning on doing with the road map so they've already added a lot of features including the ability to sync different file types which is what I mentioned so you can see that they're in the process of doing self-hosted collaboration which would enable you to focus more on privacy uh which is what I was talking about that this would be something I'd be much more interested in for things that I'm working on based on confidential client information or working on intellectual property like coming up with patentable ideas for example where I wouldn't want anyone to be able to look at it because that could be a problem and then the universal file sync is also in progress where they're they've made it available for the paying members at the moment and they're also working on introducing continuous background syncing so this would be notes update in the background as opposed to just when you click on it so that's a current limitation but not really that big of a deal because if I'm clicking into a note it's going to update in that moment anyways they're going to be introducing other features potentially like canvas collaboration commenting which I think would be a great feature different types of permissions like if you can just per example have a read server versus a write server or even a read folder or a write folder notifications different login services end toend encryption oh and the ability to share content via web app so that's a cool alternative potentially to the digital gardening or to obsidian publish where you might be able to share certain files or folders based on links because they're already being synced with the relay server anyways I hope that you found this tutorial helpful and and that you can see how many different ways this plugin can be used to make your Obsidian Vault multiplayer and just generally enable a more collaborative working space with the tool that you're already using i'm curious though how do you plan on using Relay i've talked to a few different people that have a few more use cases that I hadn't thought of but I'd be curious about hearing how you're going to use it in the comments below i'll also test out that concept that I showed you earlier on how I can potentially make my digital garden multiplayer and I'll let you know how that goes in another video a reminder to please like and subscribe if you found this video helpful and consider sharing this with a friend as word of mouth is by far the best way for me to grow my channel i'm very much working on making YouTube my full-time career so any support is very much appreciated thank you very much to my members who are paying to get access to my Obsidian templates your support also has really been boosting my ability to continue making so many videos so thank you very much if you're interested in learning more about how I structure my Obsidian vault and how I generally augment my personal knowledge management system with an emergent structure check out my Obsidian and digital gardening playlist my PKM playlist as many people have been finding it very helpful and I think you will too if you're interested in learning more about the other tools I use like artificial intelligence tools I recommend checking out my AI learning playlist where I walk through tools like Notebook LM integrating AI with Obsidian and Google AI Studio and I think that you would find it as helpful as I have thanks again for watching and I will see you in the next video