15 ms·

Roam: Why I Love It and How I Use It

288 points by yarapavan 7y ago

remmargorp64 7y ago
This actually looks very interesting! I have been trying to get all of my immediate family to coordinate on a shared google document to try and capture a lot of our family history, but the unstructured nature of memory snippets and anecdotes is challenging to organize coherently. For example, I want to be able to easily capture the fact that we owned a dog. Oh wait, but what about all the other dogs we owned over the years? What about the time I got bit and had to get stitches? what about the other times I had to get stitches? What about the times that other family members got stitches? I find that memories oftentimes don't bubble to the surface until they are sparked by other memories. I want to be able to easily organize everything in a connected graph, but also still map it to a timeline. I'm definitely going to have to give Roam a try. I wonder how well it works when it comes to collaboration between different people?
fudged71 7y ago
Have been using Roam for a while now. Very powerful potential. I’m excited to start a second database and use it as a personal CRM
funnygrass 7y ago
IMO "easy" linking to other pages should be doable, but part of Roam's power is creating those pages by just making the link. The linked references block I think could be extremely powerful in Notion. Bidirectional linking helps to associate data better than anything else I know, and if that can be handled semi-automatically it would blow people's minds. Also, yeah, opening other pages in a sidebar would be amazing for being able to reference data without context switching and literally losing sight of what you're working on. Personally, I'm using Notion for structured data, and Roam for unstructured, freely associated data. They're both pretty awesome in their own ways.
- gexla 7y ago
  > Also, yeah, opening other pages in a sidebar would be amazing for being able to reference data without context switching and literally losing sight of what you're working on. Can't you already do this? For example, if you right click on a title of a page, you get an option for "open in side bar." Then if you navigate to another page in the main pane, the sidebar still stays at the page you opened there.
  - waterbadger 7y ago
    You can also shift-click on links to open in them in the sidebar
    - conaws 7y ago
      Or control-shift-O when cursor is hovering over a link to open page or referenced paragraph/subtree (block) in sidebar.
- Jaruzel 7y ago
  > but part of Roam's power is creating those pages by just making the link This is exactly how MediaWiki (and clones) have been doing it for years.
  - jackbaty 7y ago
    Not exactly. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in MediaWiki (and others), you need to click the link, (optionally) type some text, and hit "Save" or the page doesn't actually exist yet. With Roam, the page is automatically just there when it's mentioned. A subtle difference but I'm finding it quite useful.
m0zg 7y ago
Trusting my "personal knowledge" to a proprietary tool seems like a fundamentally bad idea to me, and no amount of clever features is going to fix that.
- gexla 7y ago
  I believe the founder mentioned that they will eventually allow you to encrypt your data. If you do any sort of public writing, you could use it for your writing process since that info would be private eventually anyways. Or you could expand that idea and include anything which you would be okay with being public. For example, I may not have a reason to share a snippet from an article, but I wouldn't be bothered if it became public. I may also not be bothered if notes on that snippet were shared. And maybe if I did some writing for myself for understanding a subject, then that might be fine as well. That's pretty much how I use the app.
  - m0zg 7y ago
    Doesn't it bother you that "the app" will be gone and forgotten in 5 years?
    - gexla 7y ago
      Not if there's no other app which doesn't have the same functionality. I would rather get the power of the app now and then lose that power in 5 years rather than disregard it completely. If the work I did in the app provides an ROI today, then I'm willing to face the possibility of the app evaporating.
      - oursin 7y ago
        I'd like to add to this that since the app lets you export your content, even if/when Roam dies, it would still be possible to move the data to another app somewhat easily.
        gexla 7y ago
waynesonfire 7y ago
i used 'tomboy' a while ago which has support for links between notes
- gexla 7y ago
  So do lots of other apps. You can link between files. Even just plain markdown would allow you to link between files. You could just include a build step and edit MD files and read HTML. But ROAM also allows you to reference sections. Links you create leave references at the bottom to show you which sections link to this particular page or section. That gets to be a slog with plain text.
trynewideas 7y ago
Other than the interface (which is a big "other than"), I'm trying and failing to see how this differs from a managed MediaWiki. Even most of the syntax appears to be similar. MW would also solve some of the complaints about a lack of mobile support (MW has mobile skins), APIs (MW's is robust, for better and worse), scaling, and aliases (redirects).
- conaws 7y ago
  Play in the Sandbox on the help db for an hour and see if you still think this.
  - postexitus 7y ago
    I did - it's slicker with better UX for sure, but technically what's different?
    - physicsyogi 7y ago
      It looks like the main differences are the bidirectional links and the automated creation of those links.
      - frakkingcylons 7y ago
        Bi-directional links are visible if you go to the What Links Here [0] section of a page. Notably though it doesn't include "unlinked references" (as Roam refers to it), which is quite useful. [0]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:What_links_here https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:What_links_here
        trynewideas 7y ago
        You can still fish that up if you need to either from the UI's search or the search API, but in poking Roam that felt like a potential anti-feature around ambiguous terms, for instance with no clear way to flag a particular reference as not relevant to a term.
9214 7y ago
For Windows users who prefer native apps and control over their data, Connected Text (paid, closed source ultimate kitchen sink with 30 days trial)[1] and WikiPad (free, open-source wiki engine)[2] are good alternatives to Roam. Personally, I use TreeSheets [3] for note-taking and try to organize them as nodes in yEd [4] when I want to gain insight, but that quickly grows out of control and becomes unmanageable. Auto-linking and graph overview are extremely powerful features in this regard, but my gripe with e.g. Roam's approach (judging by screenshots) is that you can't visually filter out all the nodes at ones and "walk" the paths in a filtered graph -- that's why I consider switching from yEd to VUE [5], which has more decent filtering/search/layering/grouping options. In general, [6] and [7] have good coverage of existing note-taking and mind-mapping tools. Does Roam have any data export options though? If so, I might give it a try. [1]: http://www.connectedtext.com/ http://www.connectedtext.com/ [2]: http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/ http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/ [3]: http://strlen.com/treesheets/ http://strlen.com/treesheets/ [4]: https://www.yworks.com/products/yed https://www.yworks.com/products/yed [5]: http://vue.tufts.edu/index.cfm http://vue.tufts.edu/index.cfm [6]: https://pauljmiller.wordpress.com/category/software/note-taking/ https://pauljmiller.wordpress.com/category/software/note-tak... [7]: https://pauljmiller.wordpress.com/category/software/mind-mapping-concept-mapping/ https://pauljmiller.wordpress.com/category/software/mind-map...
- conaws 7y ago
  Co-founder of Roam here. Also huge fan of treesheets, do recommend. We export to markdown and JSON.
  - 9214 7y ago
    Cheers!
infogulch 7y ago
This looks awesome! I've been wanting a personal knowledge store for a long time. Between bookmarks, random notes and lists that I throw away, cool quotes I find, and even thoughts that I ponder and get distracted from, I feel like there's so much interesting stuff I've found that remains inaccessible or was lost or is just laying around uncatalogued. It's just that all the usual data-cataloging systems seem so clunky or have a whole "system" that intrusively proscribes how to use it. Roam looks like a pretty interesting solution to this problem. Simple but capable flat document system, especially the very nice tagging with automatic bidirectional linking to organize everything with. Pretty UI, maybe a little more customized than my tastes, but still nice to interact with. My only reservation is the reason why I haven't tried any of the other big proprietary solutions: I really don't want to switch away once I'm on it, and I don't want to ever worry about losing access to it. I.e. I'll want to self host it. Don't get me wrong, I would still be quite willing to pay for such an app, but I also need it to be open-sourced and have a simple open data model. To that end, it seems like this UI on top of Perkeep's API https://perkeep.org/doc/overview https://perkeep.org/doc/overview might be pretty nice combination.
tkainrad 7y ago
This was very interesting for me to read. I am a heavy user of Notion and recently documented my own knowledge management practices [1]. I understand some of the Notion criticism, but I think you can get around most of it. Instead of relying on the tree structure, I organize pretty much everything in databases, which can have relations to each other. This way, you can have bidirectional linking and the user experience for creating these links is very good. [1] https://tkainrad.dev/posts/managing-my-personal-knowledge-base/ https://tkainrad.dev/posts/managing-my-personal-knowledge-ba...
- pps 7y ago
  No, it is completely different experience to do that in Notion and (have it automated) in Roam. I was heavy Notion and Dynalist user, now I'm completely sold to Roam. Try it for a month with some hobby project and to log your daily life, it's crazy good, after few weeks of use I'm still in awe and I find new, better workflows every week.
  - tkainrad 7y ago
    I will leave the argument which one is better for the marketing people of the respective companies. My post covers also other tools that I use, such as GitLab and Workona. Just wanted to point out that Notion is very versatile and that there are ways to achieve bidirectional linking.
  - bhl 7y ago
    > I was heavy Notion and Dynalist user, now I'm completely sold to Roam. What scares me about this comment is that, in there lies the possibility of a better notes app coming along, and having to deal with porting the data from one place to another.
    - achileas 7y ago
      I've jumped around between a whole bunch of different note-taking apps and methods (Markdown notes in vim or ST3, Evernote, Keep, gdocs, Nuclino, etc.) and have mostly settled on Bullet Journalling. The act of writing itself is helpful for memorization, threading and indexes helps with information location, and the mobile app lets you take pictures of your notes and link them to others (across notebooks, etc.). I am tempted to try Roam regardless because of tagging, but the lack of some way to sync with my more important physical notes kind of turns me off of the effort, as minor and specific as it is.
seanhunter 7y ago
He doesn't seem to understand tags and links in evernote. Evernote can absolutely be structured as a flat graph in the way that he describes as a big benefit of Roam. That said, as a long-term evernote user, I've been wanting to leave for a while and move to an OSS/self-hosted solution. It might be joplin but my few attempts to use it I haven't yet had enough time to evaluate whether it would be a viable long-term solution. Edit: I'm also seriously considering just using https://github.com/Alok/notational-fzf-vim https://github.com/Alok/notational-fzf-vim and only doing note-taking on my laptop (not on mobile). It's extremely fast and basically zero friction. This would have a slight downside in that I quite often want to consume notes on the go so I may need to find an option there (eg serve my notes up using a private server or something).
- conaws 7y ago
  Problem w evernote is that file is bad unit of organization. In a meeting with 4 people, discussing three big ideas, related to two projects, what file do you put the note in? In Roam that's not even a question you have to ask, all info in each paragraph goes to all the right places
  - blowski 7y ago
    This is definitely a problem I run into. I’m having a team meeting about Project X, and someone mentions that a particular task is waiting for something from Project Y. The only way I’ve found to handle this is manual. Note the dependency in the meeting notes, then process the notes after the meeting creating relevant todos elsewhere. But that’s only maintainable if you don’t have a lot of work on at the same time, or a lot of dependencies - and we find ourselves back at lean. Too much work is too much work, and no amount of automation is going to fix that. Furthermore, life is messy, and there is no universal way of structuring that mess. The more mess there is, the harder it will be to live with it. So reduce the mess to the point you can live with it, rather than trying to structure it.
  - seanhunter 7y ago
    I don't use files, I use tags. I have 2 notebooks to differentiate notes that I want synced to my mobile devices, but really that's not needed. You can tag any note with multiple tags and then use saved filters to always find notes which are in a given tag. All of this used to work a lot better (evernote search has been getting consistently worse) but it still works fine.
tobr 7y ago
I’m intrigued by Roam, but I can’t see myself using it as long as it’s browser & cloud only. Also, good typography and visual design is critical in any kind of note taking app, but in Roam that barely feels like an afterthought. Something like this but as a plain text based, native Mac/iOS app with stellar typography... that would be a dream.
- comex 7y ago
  Ditto. I was actually thinking of trying Roam until I read there was no mobile app. I like the idea of a “second brain”, but for me that has to be something that never gets detached from my first brain. It has to be accessible at all times, for both reading and writing. I currently make do with Apple Notes, but I’m interested in finding something more organized… A second brain should also be as private as my first brain – ideally end-to-end encrypted, which I guess Roam is not if it’s a webapp. Too bad. (Apple Notes isn’t end-to-end encrypted either, but that’s another reason I’m looking for an upgrade.)
  - bradam 7y ago
    Even though it's a webapp it can be end-to-end encrypted. Fortunately, they are planning to do it, but I am not 100% convinced that all the function will work on e2e notes.
    - RhodesianHunter 7y ago
      Just in case the NSA is keeping special tabs on your favorite recipes and approaches to meditation.
      - somebodythere 7y ago
        The NSA, or, y'know, the app's creators.
  - iamben 7y ago
    I've been using Inkdrop, mostly because I like my notes E2EE. It's worth a look: https://docs.inkdrop.app/security https://docs.inkdrop.app/security
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shifty3 7y ago
At first glance it looks somewhat like MediaWiki (the wiki software behind Wikipedia), which also supports creating pages implicitly by linking to them. The markup style also looks similar. Does anybody know how it compares? The MediaWiki interface looks clunkier and you probably will need extensions for some of the stuff Roam does (e.g. like Semantic MediaWiki).
tomerbd 7y ago
sign up with google didn't work it takes me back to sign up screen.
- dexterdog 7y ago
  I have that problem with many sites that use that. It's usually because of privacy blocking so I just use the regular login.
tomerbd 7y ago
can't store work confidential data on it because its not a local app.
sriku 7y ago
This has me really intrigued and I've been on to workflowy and a smattering of org-mode for over a decade now. Consistency is more important to me than optimality and workflowy has served me well for that. Reading on interestedly ..
2rsf 7y ago
This clause from the privacy policy is not very encouraging: > We may terminate or suspend your account and bar access to the Service immediately, without prior notice or liability, under our sole discretion, for any reason whatsoever and without limitation, including but not limited to a breach of the Terms.
- shrikant 7y ago
  I think that's a lost battle now -- the Terms of Use / Privacy Policy of pretty much every online service, important or otherwise, says the same thing. For example, from HN's own terms of use: > You agree that Y Combinator, in its sole discretion, may suspend or terminate your account (or any part thereof) or use of the Site and remove and discard any content within the Site, for any reason, including, without limitation, for lack of use or if Y Combinator believes that you have violated or acted inconsistently with the letter or spirit of these Terms of Use.
  - 2rsf 7y ago
    But HN doesn't hold my entire life's writings
    - shrikant 7y ago
      Sure, and Github might hold your life's code, but they state exactly the same thing. > 3. GitHub May Terminate > GitHub has the right to suspend or terminate your access to all or any part of the Website at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately. GitHub reserves the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time. https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-of-service#l-cancellation-and-termination https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o... Also see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107783
  - aktuel 7y ago
    The battle is not lost. Just don't use this kind of crap. There are alternatives.
te_chris 7y ago
Actually going to look into this - given up on Evernote, don't like Apple Notes and Bear writer just didn't click....but did anyone else get put off by the whole "casually going to show off my notes on Prepping and Bugging Out as they're totally normal and chill things to be across". Undermines the credibility of the writer.
- Multiplayer 7y ago
  I thought it added to the credibility as it positioned them in my mind as a longer term thinker than myself. By the way, I’ve been bouncing between bear and Ulysses and I’ve decided that I just love the Bear experience more than any other editor. There’s something really elegant about it....
sriku 7y ago
From privacy policy - "As a condition of your use of the Service, you grant Roam a nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide, transferable, sub-licenseable license to access, use, host, cache, store, reproduce, transmit, display, publish, distribute, modify and adapt and create derivative works (either alone or as part of a collective work) from your public Content." So "public content" on Roam is considered essentially "public domain content"?
- mojzu 7y ago
  That is standard legal boilerplate that allows them to host/display content that you mark as public. All sites that share user generated content publicly have similar clauses.
  - ThePowerOfFuet 7y ago
    That doesn't explain modify, adapt, or create derivative works.
    - tallanvor 7y ago
      It does, though. They need to be able to update the saved data to be compatible with updated code. It's a common problem with legalese. Even straightforward things sound scary without a lot of additional text explaining everything.
    - myfonj 7y ago
      I think "adaptation and derivative works" could apply even for simple format conversion like Markdown (what you authored) to HTML (what you see) or even image thumbnails of pages (?)
  - sriku 7y ago
    Medium's policy doesn't seem to ask for rights to create derivative works and such. I found the verbage unnecessarily broad for what i know is likely to be narrowly applied. If RoamResearch decides to declare that all public content on Roam is relicensed under public domain tomorrow, that would seem within the scope of the policy as stated, though perhaps not within the scope of applicable law. edit: I see that notion.so also has the same wording.
rakoo 7y ago
A very interesting read, but I can't shake the feeling that Roam is "just" a better wiki. Which is probably all that is needed to have a product that works, sometimes the littlest changes make for the best tool. Another wiki that is pretty interesting is https://tiddlywiki.com/ https://tiddlywiki.com/, although Roam seems to have a easier to use interface.
- conaws 7y ago
  TiddlyWiki is great, was one of many tools I used before starting to work on Roam. Lack of easy collaborative option and the speed of organizing sets of intersecting sets of notes were some of main reasons I needed something else.
  - rakoo 7y ago
    > organizing sets of intersecting sets of notes Could you please be more specific ? I'm curious about what this is exactly and how Roam solves it
bachmeier 7y ago
I've never managed to find Roam's pricing. As most apps have a link to pricing right on the landing page, I take it as a bad sign when I don't see it.
- sisk 7y ago
  Founder mentions on twitter pricing tbd though hopefully this year, considering $30/mo with a discounted annual plan. Discounts/scholarships for students, non-profits, and low income. Also mentions a $10k lifetime plan with a potential “code escrow” should they cease to operate (though acknowledges not expecting to get many of those—mentions expecting 10, ever).
  - dexterdog 7y ago
    $30/mo seems insanely expensive for a note taking app. I guess I'll stick to the local vscode on top of a notes directory that takes advantage of local access and indexing and runs on a synced folder.
    - gexla 7y ago
      It's insanely expensive if you are comparing the price and functionality to existing apps. I would expect a "me too" app to have "me too" pricing. The reason people are talking about Roam is because it's not like other note taking apps. People who use the app will need to extract a break-even $30 / month worth of ROI just like you might from any other piece of equipment or tool which extends your capabilities. I find Roam compelling enough that I believe I can reach that point. If I'm not reaching that point, then I need to adjust my efforts. I feel pricing shouldn't be a sticking point. I try to keep my consumption to a bare minimum, so that my focus is on high value activities. If the tooling can't return the investment, then that activity and the related tools aren't for me. It's not that the tooling is bad, it's just that my efforts are best pointed elsewhere. I believe the founders operate on this idea and it's refreshing. Yes, it will be expensive for many. Potential users will walk based on the pricing. And I wish more developers would be willing to create something different and charge proper pricing for the effort.
Invictus0 7y ago
It's crazy to me that someone could have so many notes that they need to do all this tagging just to be able to find them. After 2000+ notes in Apple notes I've learned that the notes I go back to most often are nonfiction book notes and certain periodically updated lists, and any other notes I just find through the search bar.
winter_squirrel 7y ago
I've been using TheBrain for a couple weeks now and I have to say, being able to visualize my knowledge as a literal graph has ruined other note taking apps for me. I now use it for everything from tasks to reading notes and then all the normal knowledge I get from browsing the internet. I put most articles I read in it and attach notes to them and then I can just browse through my graph and refresh my memory on stuff really fast.
Crontab 7y ago
I just read about this and find it interesting. Two questions: 1. Is Roam text only? I haven't noticed any images in the examples I have seen so far. 2. What is its business model? I didn't see any pricing information.
- gexla 7y ago
  1. Yes, you can upload images. 2. The co-founder has said he's looking at charging $30 / month when it's ready. https://twitter.com/Conaw/status/1214867422496165888 https://twitter.com/Conaw/status/1214867422496165888
drevil-v2 7y ago
Maybe I am from a different time but I simply cannot imagine entrusting my private thoughts and knowledge to a cloud service ( aka someone else’s computer) without end to end encryption.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- nateliason 7y ago
  They've said E2EE is coming out pretty soon, it's a high priority project
- applecrazy 7y ago
  I personally think it depends—there are multiple levels of knowledge that you can store in a notes app. I personally would love something that could store my lecture notes and provide me the freedom to take them any way I want to. I wouldn't care if a company had access to those things. But yeah, definitely not personal data.
johnwish007 7y ago
so popular, i love it
greggeter 7y ago
TiddlyWiki has many of these auto tagging and page creation features. I enjoyed using it for a time. It's a self-contained portable file.
- cosmojg 7y ago
  Its homepage is an excellent demo of the software itself: https://tiddlywiki.com/ https://tiddlywiki.com/
magwa101 7y ago
I've been through a hundred note apps, in the end, taking notes is for the brain to help remember. The app is your brain. Generally now, I through stuff in Google Docs and move on. It's searchable, good enough.
mark_l_watson 7y ago
I like the author’s enthusiasm for organizing personal information. That was me from about 15 years ago to about 3 years ago. I stopped spending time and effort when I realized how little I used my organized notes. Specifically, I used Evernote and had my personal information wonderfully organized, but rarely used it. Now I use something simpler: For work: about 20 Emacs org-mode files for various topics. I use grep to find stuff. For personal: at different times I have used Apple Notes or Google Keep to maintain todo lists, shopping lists, notes on present and future writing projects, planning travel, etc. Both support search. I spend very little time writing these notes and they are useful. A few times a year, I spend a few minutes deleting notes I don’t need anymore. Anyway, thinking about cost/benefits, not spending much time organizing my own information makes sense to me. The turning point was spending months of part time hacking writing my own Evernote’s clone in Clojure in the backend, a Firefox plugin, and a web app. It was a fun project, but mire fun writing it than using it.
- vorpalhex 7y ago
  I use my notes for big ideas that serve as fodder. So, I don't really keep notes on like "Here is how to do X in Javascript well" but instead "here are a collection of clippings on interesting LED art pieces and a link to my parts inventory".
- dustingetz 7y ago
  the pitch for Roam imo is that the #1 challenge of modern business is scaling communications. All large companies have dysfunctional communication and if we can get a 10x improvement here that would translate to getting the same amount of work done with 10x fewer people which is a whole layer of middle management just gone. Or alternatively you can continue to barely keep it together at 10x greater scale.
  - The_Colonel 7y ago
    > the pitch for Roam imo is that the #1 challenge of modern business is scaling communications I completely agree with this, but I think it's naive to think this is fixable by some tool. Scaling communication is just innately hard problem - the most efficient you can get with communication is if you can keep everything inside one brain, next best thing if you have one colleague with whom you talk all day, then it's still quite OK in a small team, then you get multiple small teams, then multiple departments, located in multiple locations, continents etc. There can be tools and processes to make this a bit more efficient but you won't remove this problem short of doing some sort of telepathic brain interconnect. And existing tools (like confluence etc) are already getting getting quite close to the local optimum, of course you can improve upon them, but nowhere near the claimed 10x improvement ... that's just bullshit marketing talk.
maitland 7y ago
What data structure would be best suited to implementing this set of features?
fizixer 7y ago
Minor nitpick. His whole description about how "fluid information" works and how it's so much better than rigid/siloed hierarchy: Really it's tree-based vs tag-based organization [1][2]. Tag-based organization turns the collection into a graph. Simple as that. IMO it's the superior way, since a graph is kinda like a superset of a tree, but there is nothing novel that was done by Roam here. You could have tag-based file systems too [3]. Note: when you have tags, it has to be capable of multiple-tags (not just one), otherwise it's not much different from a tree structure. [1] https://www.nayuki.io/page/designing-better-file-organization-around-tags-not-hierarchies https://www.nayuki.io/page/designing-better-file-organizatio... [2] https://zapier.com/blog/how-to-use-tags-and-labels/ https://zapier.com/blog/how-to-use-tags-and-labels/ [3] http://web.mit.edu/6.033/2011/wwwdocs/writing-samples/sbezek_dp1.pdf http://web.mit.edu/6.033/2011/wwwdocs/writing-samples/sbezek...
thunderbong 7y ago
Trillium Notes have been mentioned before [0]. Provides similar functionality with a lot more power. It's open source and self hostable. It's possible to script additional functionality into it from the UI itself. I find it quite powerful. [0] https://github.com/zadam/trilium https://github.com/zadam/trilium
ckluis 7y ago
Stupid question - but I can't tell if this can be used by multiple people as part of a company KB. For me (and for many) sharing knowledge within a company is a bigger win than my personal KB (which I happen to use workflowy for). The perk of this it seems to support images & videos which workflowy does not.
- nateliason 7y ago
  It can! You can share your database with people and all collaborate on it. I've been debating doing that for my team to replace our Notion wiki.
  - ckluis 7y ago
    Is there a "team" or "company" specific version? Or is it like workflowy where you would have to explicitly share at different nodes.
nateliason 7y ago
Hi, I wrote this! Thanks for sharing yarapavan. Happy to answer any questions about how I'm using Roam.
loriverkutya 7y ago
In the last few years I repeated the same cycle: register, start of use, enjoy, invite my family, get the announcement that it has been bought, export my data when they announce they shutting down, rinse and repeat. The first one was google reader. One day it was shut down and however I could exported my feeds, I was following a few people and read some really amazing article at least once a week which I could not find by myself. Also people I was following started to use 3 different platforms each with limited set of funcionality. I've been using an email client which was bought and killed by google. Online diary app I used is gone now. My todo app was bought and "integrated" into their product by Microsoft. (However, Kudos at the same time, I still can open the doc files I created in 99). Calendar app gone. About 90% of the mobile apps I bought on my iPhone 3G is not usable anymore (some of my favourite games gone forever). Even some of the software I bought for my business (and paid double price for the business license) is now gone or not usable because of lack of upgrades (I would have been happy to pay for the upgrade license). I'm really, really tired of the fact, that no matter if it is a website, a mobile app and from time to time, I need to do another cycle of exporting, finding a new tool for the same task, setup, import, etc. I'm privileged, because I can setup my own hosted tools for myself and my family, and my current job is also consist a serious amount of "tinkering". I would be seriously be happy to pay if I don't have to do the same cycle again and again and again and wasting my time doing instead of spending my time away from the keyboard. Currently there is no startup which can be trusted that they will be around in a year. So whenever anybody is asking to invest time and effort to start using their product, which has no clear plan about their revenue streams nothing about how they going to sustain their business is a huge red blinking no. When I hear the expression serial entrepreneur (I throw up in my mouth), it says to me, stay away. (And lets forget about privacy, because that is another massive can of dragon sized worms) Edit: business stuff added
- joshspankit 7y ago
  The crux of these points is one of the main reasons I’m reluctant to put any amount of time in to new applications. And, unfortunately, the more of us that feel this way, the less companies get invested in the space, and (it seems) the further we get away from real long-term solutions.
makach 7y ago
I worry for my data. If I invest a lot of time to build a repository of information, how can I archive it, extract it out of the platform. It is in early release, and they seem to avoid the question about pricing.
marvinblum 7y ago
I wrote about this idea ("Zettelkasten") on our blog. Here is the link in case you missed it: https://emvi.com/blog/luhmanns-zettelkasten-a-productivity-tool-that-works-like-your-brain-N9Gd2G4aPv https://emvi.com/blog/luhmanns-zettelkasten-a-productivity-t...
rezeroed 7y ago
This looks like a gui vimwiki.
Symmetry 7y ago
Does anybody know what Roam's business model is?
hashhar 7y ago
This looks an awful lot like nvALT (https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/ https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/) or Vim-Wiki or any Wiki software for that matter. It can be easily replaced by MediaWiki for the backend but to it's benefit the UX is very good and is a very good choice for people who don't want to muck around with MediaWiki. But given the current state I cannot use it long term due to non-availability of non-desktop use, no encryption and no good PRICING or an idea of pricing. Having said that I'm keeping this in my radar and shall revisit periodically.
throwaway286 7y ago
You can't even sign up for Roam if you use a pihole for DNS, since it redirects you to a blackholed site. Okay. A good reminder of the commercial interests I don't want in control of my notes.
austinrileygray 7y ago
I made the switch to Roam for a week and put my thoughts into a new post on comparing to Notion. Notion vs. Roam: Which Tool For Productivity https://www.austinrileygray.com/articles/notion-vs-roam https://www.austinrileygray.com/articles/notion-vs-roam

288 points by yarapavan 7y ago

This actually looks very interesting! I have been trying to get all of my immediate family to coordinate on a shared google document to try and capture a lot of our family history, but the unstructured nature of memory snippets and anecdotes is challenging to organize coherently. For example, I want to be able to easily capture the fact that we owned a dog. Oh wait, but what about all the other dogs we owned over the years? What about the time I got bit and had to get stitches? what about the other times I had to get stitches? What about the times that other family members got stitches? I find that memories oftentimes don't bubble to the surface until they are sparked by other memories. I want to be able to easily organize everything in a connected graph, but also still map it to a timeline. I'm definitely going to have to give Roam a try. I wonder how well it works when it comes to collaboration between different people?

fudged71 7y ago

Have been using Roam for a while now. Very powerful potential. I’m excited to start a second database and use it as a personal CRM

funnygrass 7y ago

IMO "easy" linking to other pages should be doable, but part of Roam's power is creating those pages by just making the link. The linked references block I think could be extremely powerful in Notion. Bidirectional linking helps to associate data better than anything else I know, and if that can be handled semi-automatically it would blow people's minds. Also, yeah, opening other pages in a sidebar would be amazing for being able to reference data without context switching and literally losing sight of what you're working on. Personally, I'm using Notion for structured data, and Roam for unstructured, freely associated data. They're both pretty awesome in their own ways.

gexla 7y ago
> Also, yeah, opening other pages in a sidebar would be amazing for being able to reference data without context switching and literally losing sight of what you're working on. Can't you already do this? For example, if you right click on a title of a page, you get an option for "open in side bar." Then if you navigate to another page in the main pane, the sidebar still stays at the page you opened there.
- waterbadger 7y ago
  You can also shift-click on links to open in them in the sidebar
  - conaws 7y ago
    Or control-shift-O when cursor is hovering over a link to open page or referenced paragraph/subtree (block) in sidebar.
Jaruzel 7y ago
> but part of Roam's power is creating those pages by just making the link This is exactly how MediaWiki (and clones) have been doing it for years.
- jackbaty 7y ago
  Not exactly. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in MediaWiki (and others), you need to click the link, (optionally) type some text, and hit "Save" or the page doesn't actually exist yet. With Roam, the page is automatically just there when it's mentioned. A subtle difference but I'm finding it quite useful.

m0zg 7y ago

Trusting my "personal knowledge" to a proprietary tool seems like a fundamentally bad idea to me, and no amount of clever features is going to fix that.

gexla 7y ago
I believe the founder mentioned that they will eventually allow you to encrypt your data. If you do any sort of public writing, you could use it for your writing process since that info would be private eventually anyways. Or you could expand that idea and include anything which you would be okay with being public. For example, I may not have a reason to share a snippet from an article, but I wouldn't be bothered if it became public. I may also not be bothered if notes on that snippet were shared. And maybe if I did some writing for myself for understanding a subject, then that might be fine as well. That's pretty much how I use the app.
- m0zg 7y ago
  Doesn't it bother you that "the app" will be gone and forgotten in 5 years?
  - gexla 7y ago
    Not if there's no other app which doesn't have the same functionality. I would rather get the power of the app now and then lose that power in 5 years rather than disregard it completely. If the work I did in the app provides an ROI today, then I'm willing to face the possibility of the app evaporating.
    - oursin 7y ago
      I'd like to add to this that since the app lets you export your content, even if/when Roam dies, it would still be possible to move the data to another app somewhat easily.
      - gexla 7y ago

waynesonfire 7y ago

i used 'tomboy' a while ago which has support for links between notes

gexla 7y ago
So do lots of other apps. You can link between files. Even just plain markdown would allow you to link between files. You could just include a build step and edit MD files and read HTML. But ROAM also allows you to reference sections. Links you create leave references at the bottom to show you which sections link to this particular page or section. That gets to be a slog with plain text.

trynewideas 7y ago

Other than the interface (which is a big "other than"), I'm trying and failing to see how this differs from a managed MediaWiki. Even most of the syntax appears to be similar. MW would also solve some of the complaints about a lack of mobile support (MW has mobile skins), APIs (MW's is robust, for better and worse), scaling, and aliases (redirects).

conaws 7y ago
Play in the Sandbox on the help db for an hour and see if you still think this.
- postexitus 7y ago
  I did - it's slicker with better UX for sure, but technically what's different?
  - physicsyogi 7y ago
    It looks like the main differences are the bidirectional links and the automated creation of those links.
    - frakkingcylons 7y ago
      Bi-directional links are visible if you go to the What Links Here [0] section of a page. Notably though it doesn't include "unlinked references" (as Roam refers to it), which is quite useful. [0]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:What_links_here https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:What_links_here
      - trynewideas 7y ago
        You can still fish that up if you need to either from the UI's search or the search API, but in poking Roam that felt like a potential anti-feature around ambiguous terms, for instance with no clear way to flag a particular reference as not relevant to a term.

9214 7y ago

For Windows users who prefer native apps and control over their data, Connected Text (paid, closed source ultimate kitchen sink with 30 days trial)[1] and WikiPad (free, open-source wiki engine)[2] are good alternatives to Roam. Personally, I use TreeSheets [3] for note-taking and try to organize them as nodes in yEd [4] when I want to gain insight, but that quickly grows out of control and becomes unmanageable. Auto-linking and graph overview are extremely powerful features in this regard, but my gripe with e.g. Roam's approach (judging by screenshots) is that you can't visually filter out all the nodes at ones and "walk" the paths in a filtered graph -- that's why I consider switching from yEd to VUE [5], which has more decent filtering/search/layering/grouping options. In general, [6] and [7] have good coverage of existing note-taking and mind-mapping tools. Does Roam have any data export options though? If so, I might give it a try. [1]: http://www.connectedtext.com/ http://www.connectedtext.com/ [2]: http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/ http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/ [3]: http://strlen.com/treesheets/ http://strlen.com/treesheets/ [4]: https://www.yworks.com/products/yed https://www.yworks.com/products/yed [5]: http://vue.tufts.edu/index.cfm http://vue.tufts.edu/index.cfm [6]: https://pauljmiller.wordpress.com/category/software/note-taking/ https://pauljmiller.wordpress.com/category/software/note-tak... [7]: https://pauljmiller.wordpress.com/category/software/mind-mapping-concept-mapping/ https://pauljmiller.wordpress.com/category/software/mind-map...

conaws 7y ago
Co-founder of Roam here. Also huge fan of treesheets, do recommend. We export to markdown and JSON.
- 9214 7y ago
  Cheers!

infogulch 7y ago

This looks awesome! I've been wanting a personal knowledge store for a long time. Between bookmarks, random notes and lists that I throw away, cool quotes I find, and even thoughts that I ponder and get distracted from, I feel like there's so much interesting stuff I've found that remains inaccessible or was lost or is just laying around uncatalogued. It's just that all the usual data-cataloging systems seem so clunky or have a whole "system" that intrusively proscribes how to use it. Roam looks like a pretty interesting solution to this problem. Simple but capable flat document system, especially the very nice tagging with automatic bidirectional linking to organize everything with. Pretty UI, maybe a little more customized than my tastes, but still nice to interact with. My only reservation is the reason why I haven't tried any of the other big proprietary solutions: I really don't want to switch away once I'm on it, and I don't want to ever worry about losing access to it. I.e. I'll want to self host it. Don't get me wrong, I would still be quite willing to pay for such an app, but I also need it to be open-sourced and have a simple open data model. To that end, it seems like this UI on top of Perkeep's API https://perkeep.org/doc/overview https://perkeep.org/doc/overview might be pretty nice combination.

tkainrad 7y ago

This was very interesting for me to read. I am a heavy user of Notion and recently documented my own knowledge management practices [1]. I understand some of the Notion criticism, but I think you can get around most of it. Instead of relying on the tree structure, I organize pretty much everything in databases, which can have relations to each other. This way, you can have bidirectional linking and the user experience for creating these links is very good. [1] https://tkainrad.dev/posts/managing-my-personal-knowledge-base/ https://tkainrad.dev/posts/managing-my-personal-knowledge-ba...

pps 7y ago
No, it is completely different experience to do that in Notion and (have it automated) in Roam. I was heavy Notion and Dynalist user, now I'm completely sold to Roam. Try it for a month with some hobby project and to log your daily life, it's crazy good, after few weeks of use I'm still in awe and I find new, better workflows every week.
- tkainrad 7y ago
  I will leave the argument which one is better for the marketing people of the respective companies. My post covers also other tools that I use, such as GitLab and Workona. Just wanted to point out that Notion is very versatile and that there are ways to achieve bidirectional linking.
- bhl 7y ago
  > I was heavy Notion and Dynalist user, now I'm completely sold to Roam. What scares me about this comment is that, in there lies the possibility of a better notes app coming along, and having to deal with porting the data from one place to another.
  - achileas 7y ago
    I've jumped around between a whole bunch of different note-taking apps and methods (Markdown notes in vim or ST3, Evernote, Keep, gdocs, Nuclino, etc.) and have mostly settled on Bullet Journalling. The act of writing itself is helpful for memorization, threading and indexes helps with information location, and the mobile app lets you take pictures of your notes and link them to others (across notebooks, etc.). I am tempted to try Roam regardless because of tagging, but the lack of some way to sync with my more important physical notes kind of turns me off of the effort, as minor and specific as it is.

seanhunter 7y ago

He doesn't seem to understand tags and links in evernote. Evernote can absolutely be structured as a flat graph in the way that he describes as a big benefit of Roam. That said, as a long-term evernote user, I've been wanting to leave for a while and move to an OSS/self-hosted solution. It might be joplin but my few attempts to use it I haven't yet had enough time to evaluate whether it would be a viable long-term solution. Edit: I'm also seriously considering just using https://github.com/Alok/notational-fzf-vim https://github.com/Alok/notational-fzf-vim and only doing note-taking on my laptop (not on mobile). It's extremely fast and basically zero friction. This would have a slight downside in that I quite often want to consume notes on the go so I may need to find an option there (eg serve my notes up using a private server or something).

conaws 7y ago
Problem w evernote is that file is bad unit of organization. In a meeting with 4 people, discussing three big ideas, related to two projects, what file do you put the note in? In Roam that's not even a question you have to ask, all info in each paragraph goes to all the right places
- blowski 7y ago
  This is definitely a problem I run into. I’m having a team meeting about Project X, and someone mentions that a particular task is waiting for something from Project Y. The only way I’ve found to handle this is manual. Note the dependency in the meeting notes, then process the notes after the meeting creating relevant todos elsewhere. But that’s only maintainable if you don’t have a lot of work on at the same time, or a lot of dependencies - and we find ourselves back at lean. Too much work is too much work, and no amount of automation is going to fix that. Furthermore, life is messy, and there is no universal way of structuring that mess. The more mess there is, the harder it will be to live with it. So reduce the mess to the point you can live with it, rather than trying to structure it.
- seanhunter 7y ago
  I don't use files, I use tags. I have 2 notebooks to differentiate notes that I want synced to my mobile devices, but really that's not needed. You can tag any note with multiple tags and then use saved filters to always find notes which are in a given tag. All of this used to work a lot better (evernote search has been getting consistently worse) but it still works fine.

tobr 7y ago

I’m intrigued by Roam, but I can’t see myself using it as long as it’s browser & cloud only. Also, good typography and visual design is critical in any kind of note taking app, but in Roam that barely feels like an afterthought. Something like this but as a plain text based, native Mac/iOS app with stellar typography... that would be a dream.

comex 7y ago
Ditto. I was actually thinking of trying Roam until I read there was no mobile app. I like the idea of a “second brain”, but for me that has to be something that never gets detached from my first brain. It has to be accessible at all times, for both reading and writing. I currently make do with Apple Notes, but I’m interested in finding something more organized… A second brain should also be as private as my first brain – ideally end-to-end encrypted, which I guess Roam is not if it’s a webapp. Too bad. (Apple Notes isn’t end-to-end encrypted either, but that’s another reason I’m looking for an upgrade.)
- bradam 7y ago
  Even though it's a webapp it can be end-to-end encrypted. Fortunately, they are planning to do it, but I am not 100% convinced that all the function will work on e2e notes.
  - RhodesianHunter 7y ago
    Just in case the NSA is keeping special tabs on your favorite recipes and approaches to meditation.
    - somebodythere 7y ago
      The NSA, or, y'know, the app's creators.
- iamben 7y ago
  I've been using Inkdrop, mostly because I like my notes E2EE. It's worth a look: https://docs.inkdrop.app/security https://docs.inkdrop.app/security

LouisJScott 7y ago

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shifty3 7y ago

At first glance it looks somewhat like MediaWiki (the wiki software behind Wikipedia), which also supports creating pages implicitly by linking to them. The markup style also looks similar. Does anybody know how it compares? The MediaWiki interface looks clunkier and you probably will need extensions for some of the stuff Roam does (e.g. like Semantic MediaWiki).

tomerbd 7y ago

dexterdog 7y ago
I have that problem with many sites that use that. It's usually because of privacy blocking so I just use the regular login.

tomerbd 7y ago

can't store work confidential data on it because its not a local app.

sriku 7y ago

This has me really intrigued and I've been on to workflowy and a smattering of org-mode for over a decade now. Consistency is more important to me than optimality and workflowy has served me well for that. Reading on interestedly ..

2rsf 7y ago

This clause from the privacy policy is not very encouraging: > We may terminate or suspend your account and bar access to the Service immediately, without prior notice or liability, under our sole discretion, for any reason whatsoever and without limitation, including but not limited to a breach of the Terms.

shrikant 7y ago
I think that's a lost battle now -- the Terms of Use / Privacy Policy of pretty much every online service, important or otherwise, says the same thing. For example, from HN's own terms of use: > You agree that Y Combinator, in its sole discretion, may suspend or terminate your account (or any part thereof) or use of the Site and remove and discard any content within the Site, for any reason, including, without limitation, for lack of use or if Y Combinator believes that you have violated or acted inconsistently with the letter or spirit of these Terms of Use.
- 2rsf 7y ago
  But HN doesn't hold my entire life's writings
  - shrikant 7y ago
    Sure, and Github might hold your life's code, but they state exactly the same thing. > 3. GitHub May Terminate > GitHub has the right to suspend or terminate your access to all or any part of the Website at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately. GitHub reserves the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time. https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-of-service#l-cancellation-and-termination https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o... Also see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107783
- aktuel 7y ago
  The battle is not lost. Just don't use this kind of crap. There are alternatives.

te_chris 7y ago

Actually going to look into this - given up on Evernote, don't like Apple Notes and Bear writer just didn't click....but did anyone else get put off by the whole "casually going to show off my notes on Prepping and Bugging Out as they're totally normal and chill things to be across". Undermines the credibility of the writer.

Multiplayer 7y ago
I thought it added to the credibility as it positioned them in my mind as a longer term thinker than myself. By the way, I’ve been bouncing between bear and Ulysses and I’ve decided that I just love the Bear experience more than any other editor. There’s something really elegant about it....

sriku 7y ago

From privacy policy - "As a condition of your use of the Service, you grant Roam a nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide, transferable, sub-licenseable license to access, use, host, cache, store, reproduce, transmit, display, publish, distribute, modify and adapt and create derivative works (either alone or as part of a collective work) from your public Content." So "public content" on Roam is considered essentially "public domain content"?

mojzu 7y ago
That is standard legal boilerplate that allows them to host/display content that you mark as public. All sites that share user generated content publicly have similar clauses.
- ThePowerOfFuet 7y ago
  That doesn't explain modify, adapt, or create derivative works.
  - tallanvor 7y ago
    It does, though. They need to be able to update the saved data to be compatible with updated code. It's a common problem with legalese. Even straightforward things sound scary without a lot of additional text explaining everything.
  - myfonj 7y ago
    I think "adaptation and derivative works" could apply even for simple format conversion like Markdown (what you authored) to HTML (what you see) or even image thumbnails of pages (?)
- sriku 7y ago
  Medium's policy doesn't seem to ask for rights to create derivative works and such. I found the verbage unnecessarily broad for what i know is likely to be narrowly applied. If RoamResearch decides to declare that all public content on Roam is relicensed under public domain tomorrow, that would seem within the scope of the policy as stated, though perhaps not within the scope of applicable law. edit: I see that notion.so also has the same wording.

rakoo 7y ago

A very interesting read, but I can't shake the feeling that Roam is "just" a better wiki. Which is probably all that is needed to have a product that works, sometimes the littlest changes make for the best tool. Another wiki that is pretty interesting is https://tiddlywiki.com/ https://tiddlywiki.com/, although Roam seems to have a easier to use interface.

conaws 7y ago
TiddlyWiki is great, was one of many tools I used before starting to work on Roam. Lack of easy collaborative option and the speed of organizing sets of intersecting sets of notes were some of main reasons I needed something else.
- rakoo 7y ago
  > organizing sets of intersecting sets of notes Could you please be more specific ? I'm curious about what this is exactly and how Roam solves it

bachmeier 7y ago

I've never managed to find Roam's pricing. As most apps have a link to pricing right on the landing page, I take it as a bad sign when I don't see it.

sisk 7y ago
Founder mentions on twitter pricing tbd though hopefully this year, considering $30/mo with a discounted annual plan. Discounts/scholarships for students, non-profits, and low income. Also mentions a $10k lifetime plan with a potential “code escrow” should they cease to operate (though acknowledges not expecting to get many of those—mentions expecting 10, ever).
- dexterdog 7y ago
  $30/mo seems insanely expensive for a note taking app. I guess I'll stick to the local vscode on top of a notes directory that takes advantage of local access and indexing and runs on a synced folder.
  - gexla 7y ago
    It's insanely expensive if you are comparing the price and functionality to existing apps. I would expect a "me too" app to have "me too" pricing. The reason people are talking about Roam is because it's not like other note taking apps. People who use the app will need to extract a break-even $30 / month worth of ROI just like you might from any other piece of equipment or tool which extends your capabilities. I find Roam compelling enough that I believe I can reach that point. If I'm not reaching that point, then I need to adjust my efforts. I feel pricing shouldn't be a sticking point. I try to keep my consumption to a bare minimum, so that my focus is on high value activities. If the tooling can't return the investment, then that activity and the related tools aren't for me. It's not that the tooling is bad, it's just that my efforts are best pointed elsewhere. I believe the founders operate on this idea and it's refreshing. Yes, it will be expensive for many. Potential users will walk based on the pricing. And I wish more developers would be willing to create something different and charge proper pricing for the effort.

Invictus0 7y ago

It's crazy to me that someone could have so many notes that they need to do all this tagging just to be able to find them. After 2000+ notes in Apple notes I've learned that the notes I go back to most often are nonfiction book notes and certain periodically updated lists, and any other notes I just find through the search bar.

winter_squirrel 7y ago

I've been using TheBrain for a couple weeks now and I have to say, being able to visualize my knowledge as a literal graph has ruined other note taking apps for me. I now use it for everything from tasks to reading notes and then all the normal knowledge I get from browsing the internet. I put most articles I read in it and attach notes to them and then I can just browse through my graph and refresh my memory on stuff really fast.

Crontab 7y ago

I just read about this and find it interesting. Two questions: 1. Is Roam text only? I haven't noticed any images in the examples I have seen so far. 2. What is its business model? I didn't see any pricing information.

gexla 7y ago
1. Yes, you can upload images. 2. The co-founder has said he's looking at charging $30 / month when it's ready. https://twitter.com/Conaw/status/1214867422496165888 https://twitter.com/Conaw/status/1214867422496165888

drevil-v2 7y ago

Maybe I am from a different time but I simply cannot imagine entrusting my private thoughts and knowledge to a cloud service ( aka someone else’s computer) without end to end encryption.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
nateliason 7y ago
They've said E2EE is coming out pretty soon, it's a high priority project
applecrazy 7y ago
I personally think it depends—there are multiple levels of knowledge that you can store in a notes app. I personally would love something that could store my lecture notes and provide me the freedom to take them any way I want to. I wouldn't care if a company had access to those things. But yeah, definitely not personal data.

johnwish007 7y ago

so popular, i love it

greggeter 7y ago

TiddlyWiki has many of these auto tagging and page creation features. I enjoyed using it for a time. It's a self-contained portable file.

cosmojg 7y ago
Its homepage is an excellent demo of the software itself: https://tiddlywiki.com/ https://tiddlywiki.com/

magwa101 7y ago

I've been through a hundred note apps, in the end, taking notes is for the brain to help remember. The app is your brain. Generally now, I through stuff in Google Docs and move on. It's searchable, good enough.

mark_l_watson 7y ago

I like the author’s enthusiasm for organizing personal information. That was me from about 15 years ago to about 3 years ago. I stopped spending time and effort when I realized how little I used my organized notes. Specifically, I used Evernote and had my personal information wonderfully organized, but rarely used it. Now I use something simpler: For work: about 20 Emacs org-mode files for various topics. I use grep to find stuff. For personal: at different times I have used Apple Notes or Google Keep to maintain todo lists, shopping lists, notes on present and future writing projects, planning travel, etc. Both support search. I spend very little time writing these notes and they are useful. A few times a year, I spend a few minutes deleting notes I don’t need anymore. Anyway, thinking about cost/benefits, not spending much time organizing my own information makes sense to me. The turning point was spending months of part time hacking writing my own Evernote’s clone in Clojure in the backend, a Firefox plugin, and a web app. It was a fun project, but mire fun writing it than using it.

vorpalhex 7y ago
I use my notes for big ideas that serve as fodder. So, I don't really keep notes on like "Here is how to do X in Javascript well" but instead "here are a collection of clippings on interesting LED art pieces and a link to my parts inventory".
dustingetz 7y ago
the pitch for Roam imo is that the #1 challenge of modern business is scaling communications. All large companies have dysfunctional communication and if we can get a 10x improvement here that would translate to getting the same amount of work done with 10x fewer people which is a whole layer of middle management just gone. Or alternatively you can continue to barely keep it together at 10x greater scale.
- The_Colonel 7y ago
  > the pitch for Roam imo is that the #1 challenge of modern business is scaling communications I completely agree with this, but I think it's naive to think this is fixable by some tool. Scaling communication is just innately hard problem - the most efficient you can get with communication is if you can keep everything inside one brain, next best thing if you have one colleague with whom you talk all day, then it's still quite OK in a small team, then you get multiple small teams, then multiple departments, located in multiple locations, continents etc. There can be tools and processes to make this a bit more efficient but you won't remove this problem short of doing some sort of telepathic brain interconnect. And existing tools (like confluence etc) are already getting getting quite close to the local optimum, of course you can improve upon them, but nowhere near the claimed 10x improvement ... that's just bullshit marketing talk.

maitland 7y ago

What data structure would be best suited to implementing this set of features?

fizixer 7y ago

Minor nitpick. His whole description about how "fluid information" works and how it's so much better than rigid/siloed hierarchy: Really it's tree-based vs tag-based organization [1][2]. Tag-based organization turns the collection into a graph. Simple as that. IMO it's the superior way, since a graph is kinda like a superset of a tree, but there is nothing novel that was done by Roam here. You could have tag-based file systems too [3]. Note: when you have tags, it has to be capable of multiple-tags (not just one), otherwise it's not much different from a tree structure. [1] https://www.nayuki.io/page/designing-better-file-organization-around-tags-not-hierarchies https://www.nayuki.io/page/designing-better-file-organizatio... [2] https://zapier.com/blog/how-to-use-tags-and-labels/ https://zapier.com/blog/how-to-use-tags-and-labels/ [3] http://web.mit.edu/6.033/2011/wwwdocs/writing-samples/sbezek_dp1.pdf http://web.mit.edu/6.033/2011/wwwdocs/writing-samples/sbezek...

thunderbong 7y ago

Trillium Notes have been mentioned before [0]. Provides similar functionality with a lot more power. It's open source and self hostable. It's possible to script additional functionality into it from the UI itself. I find it quite powerful. [0] https://github.com/zadam/trilium https://github.com/zadam/trilium

ckluis 7y ago

Stupid question - but I can't tell if this can be used by multiple people as part of a company KB. For me (and for many) sharing knowledge within a company is a bigger win than my personal KB (which I happen to use workflowy for). The perk of this it seems to support images & videos which workflowy does not.

nateliason 7y ago
It can! You can share your database with people and all collaborate on it. I've been debating doing that for my team to replace our Notion wiki.
- ckluis 7y ago
  Is there a "team" or "company" specific version? Or is it like workflowy where you would have to explicitly share at different nodes.

nateliason 7y ago

Hi, I wrote this! Thanks for sharing yarapavan. Happy to answer any questions about how I'm using Roam.

loriverkutya 7y ago

In the last few years I repeated the same cycle: register, start of use, enjoy, invite my family, get the announcement that it has been bought, export my data when they announce they shutting down, rinse and repeat. The first one was google reader. One day it was shut down and however I could exported my feeds, I was following a few people and read some really amazing article at least once a week which I could not find by myself. Also people I was following started to use 3 different platforms each with limited set of funcionality. I've been using an email client which was bought and killed by google. Online diary app I used is gone now. My todo app was bought and "integrated" into their product by Microsoft. (However, Kudos at the same time, I still can open the doc files I created in 99). Calendar app gone. About 90% of the mobile apps I bought on my iPhone 3G is not usable anymore (some of my favourite games gone forever). Even some of the software I bought for my business (and paid double price for the business license) is now gone or not usable because of lack of upgrades (I would have been happy to pay for the upgrade license). I'm really, really tired of the fact, that no matter if it is a website, a mobile app and from time to time, I need to do another cycle of exporting, finding a new tool for the same task, setup, import, etc. I'm privileged, because I can setup my own hosted tools for myself and my family, and my current job is also consist a serious amount of "tinkering". I would be seriously be happy to pay if I don't have to do the same cycle again and again and again and wasting my time doing instead of spending my time away from the keyboard. Currently there is no startup which can be trusted that they will be around in a year. So whenever anybody is asking to invest time and effort to start using their product, which has no clear plan about their revenue streams nothing about how they going to sustain their business is a huge red blinking no. When I hear the expression serial entrepreneur (I throw up in my mouth), it says to me, stay away. (And lets forget about privacy, because that is another massive can of dragon sized worms) Edit: business stuff added

joshspankit 7y ago
The crux of these points is one of the main reasons I’m reluctant to put any amount of time in to new applications. And, unfortunately, the more of us that feel this way, the less companies get invested in the space, and (it seems) the further we get away from real long-term solutions.

makach 7y ago

I worry for my data. If I invest a lot of time to build a repository of information, how can I archive it, extract it out of the platform. It is in early release, and they seem to avoid the question about pricing.

marvinblum 7y ago

I wrote about this idea ("Zettelkasten") on our blog. Here is the link in case you missed it: https://emvi.com/blog/luhmanns-zettelkasten-a-productivity-tool-that-works-like-your-brain-N9Gd2G4aPv https://emvi.com/blog/luhmanns-zettelkasten-a-productivity-t...

rezeroed 7y ago

This looks like a gui vimwiki.

Symmetry 7y ago

Does anybody know what Roam's business model is?

hashhar 7y ago

This looks an awful lot like nvALT (https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/ https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/) or Vim-Wiki or any Wiki software for that matter. It can be easily replaced by MediaWiki for the backend but to it's benefit the UX is very good and is a very good choice for people who don't want to muck around with MediaWiki. But given the current state I cannot use it long term due to non-availability of non-desktop use, no encryption and no good PRICING or an idea of pricing. Having said that I'm keeping this in my radar and shall revisit periodically.

throwaway286 7y ago

You can't even sign up for Roam if you use a pihole for DNS, since it redirects you to a blackholed site. Okay. A good reminder of the commercial interests I don't want in control of my notes.

austinrileygray 7y ago

I made the switch to Roam for a week and put my thoughts into a new post on comparing to Notion. Notion vs. Roam: Which Tool For Productivity https://www.austinrileygray.com/articles/notion-vs-roam https://www.austinrileygray.com/articles/notion-vs-roam