About us
DraftMesh is a sync and collaboration layer for Obsidian. We started from a simple conviction: your notes should stay plain files on your machine, work offline, and remain yours — even when you sync across devices, share a vault, or publish a page.
Obsidian is local-first by design
Obsidian treats a vault as a folder of Markdown on disk. That choice matters. Your knowledge is not trapped inside a proprietary database. You can back it up, version it, search it with ordinary tools, and move it when you need to. Plugins extend the editor without replacing the file model underneath.
For us, that is the baseline of a healthy knowledge app: the local copy is real, durable, and inspectable. Anything built on top of Obsidian should strengthen that property, not quietly undo it.
What local-first sync should mean
Local-first does not mean “never use the network.” It means the network is an enhancement, not a gatekeeper. You should be able to open Obsidian, edit a note, and trust that the file on disk is the thing you are working with — whether or not you are online.
- Local work comes first. Edits land in your vault immediately. Sync catches up when connectivity returns.
- Files stay portable. Markdown remains Markdown. Attachments stay attachments. Nothing requires a special viewer to recover your data.
- Privacy is structural. Sensitive content should be encrypted before it leaves your device, so infrastructure providers store ciphertext — not readable notes.
- Recovery is part of the product. History, conflict handling, and clear sync status are not extras. They are how local-first systems earn trust over years of use.
How DraftMesh puts that into practice
The DraftMesh plugin watches your vault the way a careful filesystem tool would: changes are detected locally, reconciled against remote state, and written back to the files you already use in Obsidian. We did not build a second note store inside the plugin. We built a sync engine around the vault you have.
- End-to-end encryption. Vault content is encrypted on your machine with AES-256 before upload. Our servers coordinate sync; they do not read your plaintext notes.
- Offline-friendly convergence. You can keep writing while disconnected. When devices reconnect, the reconciler merges changes instead of forcing a single “cloud winner.”
- Collaboration on top of files. Multiplayer editing and presence sit above the same Markdown files — so shared work still ends up as normal vault content, not a separate silo.
- History you can actually use. Paid tiers add markdown history and attachment sync so recovery is practical, not ceremonial.
Public sharing follows the same philosophy in a different shape: you choose what leaves the vault, publish a read-only page, and the rest of your notes stay local.
Where we are headed
Our long-term goal is modest and ambitious at the same time: make personal knowledge bases that feel permanently yours, while still letting people connect when connection adds value. We want sync infrastructure that disappears into the background — reliable enough to forget, transparent enough to inspect, and respectful enough of file sovereignty that Obsidian remains Obsidian.
That means continuing to invest in resilience: clearer recovery paths, stronger offline behavior, and collaboration that never asks you to trade ownership for convenience. If you care about notes that outlive any single service, we are building DraftMesh for you.
Ready to try it? Create an account or read the documentation.