The Future of Obsidian Plugins

Obsidian just rolled out a shiny new Community site for plugins and themes, plus a developer dashboard, safety scorecards, and automated reviews meant to speed up approvals. On paper, it’s a big glow-up: more than 4,000 community-made add-ons, 120 million downloads, and a jaw-dropping 2,300 backlogged submissions reportedly processed in just days. But the real fireworks were in the comments, where celebration and side-eye showed up together.

One camp was basically popping champagne. Developers said the old manual review system had become a traffic jam, with plugin submissions stuck forever while the team got buried. One commenter called it a “huge scaling bottleneck,” and the mood there was pure relief: finally, less waiting, less burnout, more building. But the skeptics were not about to let the victory lap go unchallenged. The hottest pushback? Can a robot really spot a bad plugin? One user flat-out said automated checks won’t reliably catch anything malicious and argued the only real answer is locking plugins into a safe sandbox with clear permission prompts.

Then the thread took a wonderfully chaotic turn. Someone asked whether Obsidian can truly replace Notion for teams and basically answered their own question with a nervous “not yet,” saying it still feels too intimidating for non-technical coworkers. Another grumbled that local plugin installs should be as easy as copy-paste, then dropped the spiciest mic of all: because Obsidian is closed-source, maybe it’s “time someone builds a compatible clone.” So yes, Obsidian launched a tidy new directory — and the community immediately turned it into a debate about safety, teamwork, ease of use, and who might be plotting the rebellion.