As one of the founders of the hackerspace you've visited out in seattle & a fellow recurser that you might've heard about the space from, I can drop to you some of my notes & learnings from two years in of devhack.
the biggest piece of advice by far that I pulled from a bunch of european-style hackerspaces (& HacDC, my formative hackspace) has been: Just do it. Find a physical space, start doing meetups, promote it a bit and cool folks will find you.
https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/attach...
We at devhack took a very word-of-mouth based approach to promotion and that has prevented what a lot of comments here are trying to mitigate in terms of attracting the wrong crowd too quickly -- although I think there's lots of value in creating a space which supports eccentric folks / ppl with diverse backgrounds.
Founding a hackspace is a very learn-as-you-go experience, has been very fulfilling and has had plenty of hiccups that we've had to react to as they come. The most important part is to have fun and create a fun space for you and your friends.
Also, put a roller rink in your space. very important and wish we had that
Am moving to Emacs, org, plus self-built elements, however. With much pain.
You see, what is /not/ self-guaranteeing about a full Obsidian life-organising workflow is the necessary reliance on plugins and their quirky configs. I felt as locked in to the ecosystem as I ever did with services that ‘merely’ used a proprietary storage format.
I know others in the same boat. Obsidian’s long-term legacy may well be primarily as a market-maker for Emacs.
both can be postured as a labor-saving measure, exposing user data to users is an additional burden on developers. Designing an extension system that is easy for other products to use is an additional burden on developers (& developer relations! And marketing! Other products won't just adopt your extension system willy-nilly)
But switching from obsidian to something else is so much easier on a file-level than say, google docs or whatever other super-proprietary system that's being used.
I'm very wary about adjusting my workflows to depend on flimsy or proprietary ecosystems. I don't really use vim with any plugins. I don't really use obsidian with any plugins, although I'm slowly trying to ease up to using a couple that would be big QOL improvements.
Striving for standard interfaces/workflows is a good thing, but I don't think emacs is that. vim isn't that. They've just cemented themselves as the de-facto.
I'm using vim bindings in obsidian, for what it's worth. I'm not re-learning a whole other set of keyboard shortcuts (although obsidian's is quite lacking)