For people looking for alternatives to Roam, here are lists that will keep you busy a while (on the Notion site).
8 Likes
The offline storage situation is interesting. This from the email from CWS:
Third - for you privacy oriented folks - and particularly for those of who want to roam with thoughts you canāt trust to any 3rd party organization (state or trade secrets, info that could get you killed or thrown in prison) - we finally shipped local-only databases.
Right now this feature is only available for users on the Believer Plan - which might be a good incentive to upgrade - but we do plan to eventually make this available to everyone, even folks who got into the beta who arenāt paying for any plan.
You can learn more about how local databases work here. tl;dr they work off the same local storage system we use that enables offline editing in normal Roam, we just donāt send any data to our servers.
This is fragile.
Per the linked Roam Research info (emphasis added):
Currently, Local Only graphs are stored only in Local Storage on your browser
This means that if you clear all the data in your browser ā all of these local only notes will be lost - unless you have exported a backup
see "[[Import]] and [[Export]] for local graphs are the same as with [[Hosted [[Roam Graphs]]]] "
You still need to be connected to the internet so that you can fetch the Roam site - but none of your notes are sent to our servers.
If thatās the current solution, the TiddlyRoam or other (or Obsidian for true local-only service) is better.
7 Likes
This is worse than not having local storage at all, IMO.
3 Likes
Yeah thatās more along the lines of a cache versus storage. Too ephemeral and risky to use to be useful.
1 Like
There are apps that will wipe your browserās cache clean without even asking twice about it.
This is a really poor solution.
2 Likes
Agreed. Bad solution. If I am not mistaken, this was the same thing that notion did over a year ago except within their web wrapper. It literally was the reason why I did not stick with Notion back then. I could be mistaken on the technical differentiation, but both quite unstable. I prefer the online mode.
3 Likes
Ouch this is bound to blow up in their faces sooner than laterā¦
So I have to say all this hoopla on Roam Research reminds me of the parable
Blockquote " The Emperorās New Clothes " (Danish: Kejserens nye klƦder ) is a short tale written by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, about two weavers who promise an emperor a new suit of clothes that they say is invisible to those who are unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent ā while in reality, they make no clothes at all, making everyone believe the clothes are invisible to them. When the emperor parades before his subjects in his new āclothesā, no one dares to say that they do not see any suit of clothes on him for fear that they will be seen as stupid. Finally a child cries out, āBut he isnāt wearing anything at all!ā
Even more funny is watching all these people trying to justify putting all these tasks into Roam Research which it is not suitable for such as Task Managers, Calendars, Kanban boards.
There are multitudes of good software solutions available already in the market with clean and easy UIās. I previously had issues with trying to onboard people with Trello at the last company that I worked with and it is easy peasy, can you imagine trying to get people to engage with this programmerās type of UI?
Butā¦
Blockquote No one dares to say that they do not
see any suit of clothes on himunderstand a feature for fear that they will be seen as stupid.
Letās face it the real reason this is happening because of new shiny object syndrome and I think all the effort in putting these tasks into Roam negates any foreseen productivity gains.
Following the Emperor is Count Zettel. Now have spent considerable time over the weekend to try to learn the magic of Zettelkasten. Surely, with all the hype there must be something that I am not seeing here. Let me save any else the time, Basically, it is an indexing system with one topic per card with a unique id then references to other related card(s). Which simply is a link back to a note that references it. Yes, Count Zettel is also wearing no clothes.
This reminds me of when Steve Jobs introduced āCut and Pasteā to IOS and the crowd oohed and aahed! People wake up, cut and paste has been with us for decades, well in Zettelkasten it actually goes back centuries.
BTW in order to have local storage, which people here smarter than I already are outlining issues with, you have to be a BELIEVER status. Thatās right, Pony up $500.00 for this feature people!
With itās cult following it comes as no surprise that the Bible and Quran have already be uploaded first.
However, this remains its preferred functionality, to take a large number of notes and find cross-correlation with them.
So Bibles, Koran, and any other reference material would be a good target for this type of software. It will be good for anyone conducting research or research papers.
I am going to use it to build a CRM because unlike Task Managers, Outliners, Calendars the CRMās out there are terrible. Most are geared to Sales functionally aka Salesforce with their high price tag and are missing with some basic functionality. Such as:
-
I would like to have connectivity to retain how I meet a person with time dating. For Exampleā¦ Met Bob introduced to me by Bill at such and such place on dateā¦ Now as you build your personal and business network you would have a great graphical pattern that probably over time cross paths due to 6 degrees of separation
-
It needs to have a template that allows user-defined fields. For example, I have found that people have a preferred mode of communication. Some like texting while others like a phone call. So instead of trying to force people to my preferred mode I ask them what is thereās
-
There needs to be a setable reminder so you can set up a frequency to communicate with your defined relationships. Maintaining a relationship takes time and a lot of times we get caught up in our hectic lives and forget to maintain these relationships that we have identified as important to us.
-
Have a notes section to maintain a history of communication that was made to a person. It would be great if you could cc an email to it like Evernote and it would be it in the right record matching the person.
So this seems like a pretty simple list of requirements, but I have not been able to locate a piece of software that can solve this especially number one.
So I settled on Daylite that will handle two thru four while I build an MD template for Obsidian so I can see that nice graphical map.
Has anyone embarked on a similar endeavor?
3 Likes
Despite my comments throughout this thread over the last several months, I do believe credit is due to the new paradigm (again built mostly on old technologies). It is very powerful In ways that other apps arenāt. It is just tenuous at this point. It is niche. It is not really a note-taking app, right? It is more of a thinking app. Itās more of a mind map.
5 Likes
My take is that the emperor metaphor isnāt accurate for Roam, that thereās legitimate usefulness and productive novelty in the new paradigm. Thereās also a lot of bravado and hype, and some egregious missteps, which makes it hard for certain types (myself included) to really get behind it, but Iām paying attention and playing with it.
I think obsession with zettelkasten is a symptom of something larger: a frustration and sense of helplessness with how to work (and just be a decent human being) in a culture of chronic distraction. Look at what most folks zettel as their examples: books on productivity and self-improvement. Zettelkasten promises to organize, make things findable, make writing nearly effortless (just pull all these snippets together and the articleās practically written itself!), and on and on. Itās not a cure all, but nothing is. What I see when people get enamored with zettelkasten is a desire to control something that isnāt actually controllable (information) and to make easy something that is actually quite difficult (thinking, writing, etc.).
And I should mention that I say this with this hypocrisy and insight of someone who maintains a zettelkasten and is as obsessed by the shiny object as ever.
24 Likes
This does sound like it is only a temporary solution :
Currently, Local Only graphs are stored only in Local Storage on your browser
How long the wait is for the āupcoming versionā is we do not knowā¦
- [[Goals]] for upcoming version
- [[Desktop App]] - where you donāt need internet connection at all to use Roam
- Automatic synchronization with a directory in your file system - for JSON
- 1 Way syncronization with Markdown files
- Meaning - Edits to a Roam page will overwrite a Markdown file in your directory
- Which will allow you to keep a version controlled history of your Roam DB in git
- Changing those files will not automatically change the state of your roam though.
- [[MVP]] of 2 way syncronization
- Ability to upload a Markdown file to your Roam and have it overwrite the existing contents of your roam db
1 Like
Exactly. The seeming explosion in interest in taking notes (taking notes, of all things!) has got to be explained by something else other than software. As a human activity, taking notes is no more interesting than sparking joy by organizing sock drawers. So why do we chatter about it so much, and debate pros and cons of some guyās cloud service? I still think, as I said elsewhere,
Imagine if this forum was obsessed with using Macs to organize affordable housing, instead of Conor Whiteās follies.
3 Likes
From what Iāve seen, I think youāre probably a master note taker, and have mastered knowledge management to a high level, so this all probably seems passĆ© to you.
People like me struggle with this, and are searching for things that will help us understand, make connections, and retain information.
10 Likes
I listened to this podcast episode with Andy Matuschak the other day:
He notes: (itās the answer to the first question, right at the outset)
Knowledge workers are surprisingly bad at knowledge workā¦ and donāt really seem to know it. I use ābadā in kind of a loose sense here, but if you compareāfor instanceāthe seriousness of their practices to those of 99th-percentile athletes or musicians or something, itās really interesting how casually [knowledge workers] treat their practice. Myself included! Thatās fascinating. Activities like note-taking, for instance, are completely folksy and ad hoc and unsystematized. No one really has a clear sense of what it means to āaccrete insight.ā
This is why I show up here, really. Knowledge should have compound interest, but instead Iām more like a goldfish than a āknowledge investorā on most days. Thereās gotta be better ways.
I also think ānote takingā is an awful term for what these discussions actually centre on. We arenāt talking about scribbling on index cards. Weāre talking about how we learn, and how we use what weāve learned to create new things.
Hey, for my part, I am usinā this stuff to help address the worldās hardest problems!
edit: ps I nominate this thread for the best thread of all time
15 Likes
Agreed. And yet not a mention of any of these concepts on the podcast? (apologies if I am wrong, I have drifted away from the actual episodesā¦)
3 Likes
As a historian who studies memory, race/racism, and US politics, yes. Yes. Yes. But this is not the thread for that discussion.
2 Likes
I didnāt realize they āearnedā much since theyāve been VC-funded, yes?
Some of the comments in that thread are funny.
Amusing in a different way: someone at Amplenote (which added backlinks two weeks ago) tweeted in a Roam-related thread about their Roam-import tool, and Conor blocked him on Twitter.
1 Like