
Roam: Why I Love It and How I Use It - yarapavan
https://www.nateliason.com/blog/roam
======
mark_l_watson
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.

~~~
SamBam
This is exactly me with Evernote, and my same thoughts reading this.

I wish Evernote had some sort of stats on notes: I'm sure I would find that
90% of my notes have never been opened. _Some_ of them (e.g. warranty numbers,
etc) are there just in case they're needed, but the majority will never be
opened. I probably use the same 2% of my notes (< 30 notes) 90% of the time.
(Lots of invented stats here, yes.)

The article describes an incredibly easy content-creation system, but one
where you can easy create much more content than is useful. (It reminds me of
the ease of taking hundreds of photos a day with smart phones, particularly if
you're a new parent.)

Even when you want to find the information, I think this lack of structure
makes it hard to do so. For example, the author has a note that looks like
this:

    
    
        * Had a really good [[Super Tuscan]] [[Red Wine]]  
          * [[Dogajolo Tuscano]] from [[Tuscany]]
    
    

My understanding (from looking at the other examples) is that if he went to
the [[Red Wine]] page (presumably to look up a nice wine to buy), he'd see

    
    
        December 3rd, 2019
          * Had a really good [[Super Tuscan]] [[Red Wine]]
        Some other date
          * Bought a [[Red Wine]] for [[so-and-so]]:
        Yet another random note about other stuff:
          * Buy some [[Red Wine]] for [[whats-his-name]]
    
    

Even the links that point to useful information don't have the information
right there -- you have to click through for each link. And some of the
references may not have anything to do with a good wine recommendation at all.
So you have to edit the [[Red Wine]] page to make it a useful list, but that's
what we do with Evernote already, and the linking part wasn't that useful.

~~~
pps
You can shift-click them to open them in sidebar (where you can edit them the
same way as in main view). You can open unlimited number of pages/blocks in
the sidebar. And if you find that they're not useful for you anymore then you
can simply remove or unlink them. Without ever leaving Red Wine page.

It's funny how almost everybody here tries to compare it to other things. Yes,
you can do everything even on paper! Zettelkasten was done first on paper, GTD
was done first on paper. But this is new kind of software, which promotes new
workflows and ideas about using your thoughts and data, and if you want to
compare it to existing solutions then you should compare it to TheBrain or
ConnectedText. It's not your typical markdown editor / outliner with some new
features - you can start using it like that, but you will change your workflow
after few hours or days in ways that you can't simply imagine right now :)

I hope we will have more software with such flexibility in the future,
competition is always good, I might even reimplement this myself as my private
hobby project, because it's so useful and I can't imagine going back to normal
note editors if something happens to Roam dev.

~~~
SamBam
Perhaps this is all true. My main point, which was lost in my example of [[Red
Wine]], was more about it being _too_ easy to create new pages.

In Evernote, I've tried to get away from creating notes on every random new
thought, and started towards maintaining more useful large notes -- a list of
books I want to read, instead of 50 pages that mention a book all tagged with
"#books-to-read", for example.

To me, this seems like moving back the other way -- it encourages you to
create those 50 pages, because they all can be "linked" to each other.

I guess I'd have to try it to know, but I feel like, for me personally,
information would be lost.

~~~
pps
It will not be lost. Don't only give it a try, but force it to work for you
and it will. I changed my process of writing in Roam multiple times, each time
it was more optimised for me and weirder to explain for other people. I have
GTD system that finally, after years of trying in every other existing
software, works exactly like I want. It looks way different than any example
of "GTD in Roam" I found so far - those examples could be reimplemented in
Dynalist/Workflowy/other outliners - mine can't, it requires these mentions on
the bottom and editable block references from other pages in my main dashboard
page. But I didn't design it, it created itself. Explore and you will find
your own ways. If you like simple lists then create simple lists without any
links, that's perfectly fine, you can always change things later. I'm
personally doing way less linking than author of that blog post, I don't feel
like I'm forced.

You can do there much more than that blog post describe and Roam docs also
sucks in explaining what else than writing you can do so it might be a good
idea to look for videos in Youtube, Roam dev created some demos and was also
interviewed with demo presentations.

~~~
conaws
One of the devs here - totally true, our help docs and landing page don't
really show half of what you can do. Help docs have a lot if you dig around
though.

Heres a link

[https://roamresearch.com/#/v8/help/page/1wnq-
ZAAN](https://roamresearch.com/#/v8/help/page/1wnq-ZAAN)

Really appreciate users like pps who do the work of figuring out how to make
Roam work for them at this early stage.

~~~
SamBam
(1) How close are you guys to a mobile app?

(2) What's the monetization strategy?

Thanks!

------
tobr
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
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
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
Just in case the NSA is keeping special tabs on your favorite recipes and
approaches to meditation.

~~~
somebodythere
The NSA, or, y'know, the app's creators.

------
sriku
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"?

~~~
flir
It's not public domain; only Roam gets the permission.

~~~
rrix2
They demand an irrevocable worldwide license, with the ability to transfer the
license and to sublicense according to to the text in the post you're replying
to.

~~~
flir
That's still not public domain, though. I doubt Roam will sublicense to me
(for example).

------
drevil-v2
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.

~~~
applecrazy
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.

------
9214
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-
tak...](https://pauljmiller.wordpress.com/category/software/note-taking/)

[7]: [https://pauljmiller.wordpress.com/category/software/mind-
map...](https://pauljmiller.wordpress.com/category/software/mind-mapping-
concept-mapping/)

~~~
conaws
Co-founder of Roam here. Also huge fan of treesheets, do recommend.

We export to markdown and JSON.

~~~
9214
Cheers!

------
tkainrad
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-
ba...](https://tkainrad.dev/posts/managing-my-personal-knowledge-base/)

~~~
pps
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.

~~~
bhl
> 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
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.

------
rakoo
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
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
> 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

------
2rsf
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
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.

~~~
aktuel
The battle is not lost. Just don't use this kind of crap. There are
alternatives.

~~~
shrikant
I think literally every online service has this sort of clause, and in the
absence of language explicitly stating the contrary, a cautious approach would
be to assume they mean exactly this. Pragmatically speaking, you should have a
local backup of everything you've placed online.

------
m0zg
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
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.

~~~
Summershard
> I believe the founder mentioned that they will eventually allow you to
> encrypt your data.

Well, as soon as the encryption comes this product will be usable. Giving my
personal data to a non open source note taking project without any encryption
capabilities is a big no.

~~~
conaws
Use nvalt till that ships then, import will be easier, and you'll start to
taste power of very fast two-way links.

------
funnygrass
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.

~~~
Jaruzel
> _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
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.

------
loriverkutya
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
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.

------
trynewideas
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
Play in the Sandbox on the help db for an hour and see if you still think
this.

~~~
postexitus
I did - it's slicker with better UX for sure, but technically what's
different?

~~~
physicsyogi
It looks like the main differences are the bidirectional links and the
automated creation of those links.

~~~
frakkingcylons
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
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.

------
hashhar
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.

------
thunderbong
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)

------
infogulch
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.

------
seanhunter
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
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

~~~
xanth
But in the current state of the app sharing a note shares your entire DB, its
an awesome tool but I'm unable to find a way to create a secondary DB without
creating a new account.

~~~
conaws
Capability is there, but UX sucks for both sharing single pages and creating
seperate workspaces.

Been working on both this week.

~~~
xanth
could you point me to the doco

------
remmargorp64
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?

------
bachmeier
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
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
$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
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.

~~~
tallanvor
Despite what the article claims, I really don't see much new in what Roam does
over any other note taking app or wiki. --Whether they have more or less
structure, they all let you link pages together, so hierarchies are generally
up to you to decide if you want more or less of.

I use OneNote since I already have O365 anyway. To convince me that I should
pay more than 3 times what O365 costs, you'd have to be able to show amazing
improvements, and Roam just doesn't.

~~~
gremlinsinc
Seems similar to Mindforger ... Mindforger I think uses ai or something to
'link' internally between docs. Just found it the other day, but it's free. so
-- I'll probably stick w/ that.

------
nateliason
Hi, I wrote this! Thanks for sharing yarapavan.

Happy to answer any questions about how I'm using Roam.

------
fizixer
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-
organizatio...](https://www.nayuki.io/page/designing-better-file-organization-
around-tags-not-hierarchies)

[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...](http://web.mit.edu/6.033/2011/wwwdocs/writing-
samples/sbezek_dp1.pdf)

------
te_chris
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
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....

------
Invictus0
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.

------
magwa101
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.

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

------
shifty3
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).

------
fudged71
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

------
marvinblum
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-t...](https://emvi.com/blog/luhmanns-zettelkasten-a-productivity-
tool-that-works-like-your-brain-N9Gd2G4aPv)

------
ckluis
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
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
Is there a "team" or "company" specific version? Or is it like workflowy where
you would have to explicitly share at different nodes.

------
austinrileygray
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)

------
sriku
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
..

------
makach
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.

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

------
throwaway286
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.

------
Crontab
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
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)

------
rezeroed
This looks like a gui vimwiki.

------
Symmetry
Does anybody know what Roam's business model is?

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

~~~
gexla
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.

------
tomerbd
sign up with google didn't work it takes me back to sign up screen.

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

------
johnwish007
so popular, i love it

------
greggeter
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
Its homepage is an excellent demo of the software itself:
[https://tiddlywiki.com/](https://tiddlywiki.com/)

