I wrote in detail last year how I use Mochi as a full-time note-taking app for my long-term studies. After a year of using this app, two unintended benefits emerged organically:

To recap, my workflow consists of writing a long note, then refactoring that note into smaller, linked notes over time. I dump all my thoughts during a study session in one note, so I don't waste mental effort organizing prematurely. As the note gets longer and longer, I split it into smaller, related notes and continue expanding each one as needed. Mochi makes this workflow possible by providing a built-in "create new card from selection" feature. With a single shortcut, it removes the selected text, creates a new card, and puts a link in place of the deleted text.

As I extract parts of a larger note into dedicated ones, the larger note eventually shrinks into a list of links to those smaller notes. This workflow automatically creates hub notes. Obsidian people call them MOCs (Maps of Content). I don't have to sit down and manually create such notes. Instead, they're organically created as a subject gets denser/larger. Even better, when a hub gets too big, I further split it into smaller notes, too. Now I have hubs of hubs! And everything is automatically linked. The first unintended benefit is that I don't need to plan ahead. I wouldn’t know, and don’t need to know ahead of time, how big a particular area I'm studying is going to grow, or if it's going to stay small enough for a single note. I just start writing, and split as I go.

That's how I made sense of my huge aircraft manuals when working on my promotion to airline captain. And these past few months, I've been using it for my programming journey. These hubs leave a trail of my study sessions that I could trace back to a particular note. That's the second unintended benefit. Although direct search works really well (much better than Obsidian's search), using hubs helps me remember the surrounding context. Through drilling in these hub notes, I maintain a bird's eye view of my notes and the whole subject. I tend to remember where I write a particular piece of information. I don't lose my notes in a sea of unlinked cards or forget about them altogether.

Before Mochi, I used Obsidian for a solid two years. Obsidian also implements the concept of backlinks and a somewhat similar text-extraction workflow, but they’re clunky, and I could never use them long enough for the benefits I mentioned above to emerge. Mochi’s implementation is much neater, which I again explained in my previous post.

Other than being clucky, I think Obsidian is made for a fundamentally different kind of note taking. Obsidian fans promote the idea of liberal tagging and linking of loose and atomic notes, in hopes of finding “unintended connections” between unrelated concepts. Students doing deep research for Master’s and Doctoral theses swear by this concept, and PKM fans take pride in showing their beautiful knowledge graphs. I never found myself in need of finding such connections, and those knowledge graphs felt nothing more than eye candy. What I always wanted was a semi-structured system of taking notes for specific subjects and to easily find them later. I don’t need to find an unintended connection between the procedure to land an aircraft without engines and how to sort an array in JavaScript!

Or maybe it’s about the vibe, and it’s personal. I really vibe with Mochi :)