I finally did the thing I've been putting off since basically last autumn: I ripped my notes out of iCloud and moved to a setup that's just Obsidian plus Syncthing, syncing directly between my own devices with no cloud company in the middle. Took me a Saturday afternoon and one mildly infuriating hour fighting my router's mDNS settings, but it's done and I'm not going back.
Backstory, for anyone who wasn't around for the earlier posts on this: I've used Apple Notes, then Bear, then Notion, then Obsidian-with-iCloud-sync for the last few years. The Obsidian part was always fine. The iCloud part was the problem. Sync would just... stop. No error, no notification, just a vault on my Mac that quietly diverged from the one on my phone for four days until I noticed my Tuesday meeting notes weren't there when I needed them in a meeting on Thursday. Not catastrophic, just the kind of low-grade unreliability that makes you stop trusting a tool, which is worse than it just breaking outright.
What I actually did
Syncthing is free and open source, and it does one job: it keeps folders identical across whatever devices you point it at, over your local network when they're on the same wifi and over the internet otherwise, encrypted, no server owned by anyone but you. I installed it on my Mac, my iPhone (via the Möbius Sync app, since Syncthing itself isn't on iOS), and an old Linux mini PC I keep on a shelf that acts as an always-on relay so my phone and laptop can sync even when they're never awake at the same time.
The setup itself is mostly clicking "add device," swapping device IDs (they look like ugly 52-character strings, copy-paste them, don't try to type them), and then adding the folder (in my case ~/Documents/vault) on each machine and pointing them at each other. Obsidian doesn't need to know any of this is happening. It just sees a folder full of markdown files and does its thing. That's the part I like best about this setup, honestly: the note-taking app and the sync layer have zero awareness of each other, so neither one can break the other.
The annoying hour was the mini PC. It sat behind my router and Syncthing's local discovery (the mDNS broadcast thing) wasn't reaching it reliably, so devices kept falling back to the public relay servers, which works but is slower and defeats some of the point. Turned out I had two devices on the router assigned to the same static IP from months ago when I was messing with a Pi-hole setup and never cleaned up. Once I fixed that, discovery started working on the first try. Not a Syncthing problem at all, just me finding old mess I'd made and forgotten about.
Is it actually better
Yes, and not by a small amount. It's been eleven days and sync has been instant every single time, including twice where I was on my phone on cellular data with wifi off, which used to be exactly when iCloud liked to fall over. There's no monthly fee either — I was paying Apple $2.99 a month for the 200GB iCloud+ tier basically just to keep Notes and Photos synced, and now that's down to whatever the 50GB tier costs, which is $0.99, since Photos is still the main thing eating that quota.
One thing I'll say against it: this setup is not for someone who doesn't want to think about infrastructure at all. If my mini PC's power supply dies, or my home internet is down for a weekend while I'm traveling, sync just doesn't happen until things come back. iCloud, for all its flakiness, never made me personally responsible for uptime. That's a real tradeoff, not a footnote. I'm fine with it because I like having one more small piece of my life not depend on someone else's server having a good day, but I wouldn't tell my mother to set this up.
If you want to try it yourself: grab Syncthing from syncthing.net, it's genuinely a ten minute install on desktop, budget more like thirty on mobile since the iOS situation is a workaround rather than an official app. Worth it though. My notes have never synced this reliably in the four-ish years I've been taking them seriously, and that's not nothing.