Our great sponsors
-
athens
Athens is a knowledge graph for research and notetaking. Athens is open-source, private, extensible, and community-driven.
-
logseq
A local-first, non-linear, outliner notebook for organizing and sharing your personal knowledge base. Use it to organize your todo list, to write your journals, or to record your unique life.
-
SurveyJS
Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
-
rss-proxy
RSS-proxy allows you to do create an RSS or ATOM feed of almost any website, just by analyzing just the static HTML structure.
-
rtnF
A web-based notetaking app. With WYSIWYG editor, support linking to other notes (wikilink), image paste support, basic formatting, autosave feature.
Using a filesync service such as Dropbox, you can sync state across multiple clients. We have a commercial user doing this. The single transit file won't scale however, so we've started working on a transaction log just as you said. Want to make sure it's pretty robust before deploying, however, as no data loss is the first priority! https://github.com/athensresearch/athens/pull/624
To your second answer, yes and yes. I write in the post:
> As for how we will make money, most users, even technical ones who could self-host, don’t want to self-host (but they value that optionality and insurance against lock-in). They want a subscription SaaS, which will make features like backups, integrations, and collaboration much easier.
Hi Jeff! Great to see a Roam alternative backed by YC!
What are you thoughts on the other Roam alternative, Logseq[1]? It seems to be doing really well and has a lot of features, from github sync and encrypted data to custom themes and publishing, it looks like privacy is their main goal, while being local-first and opensource, do you think that such features will be implemented in the near future and will those features become somewhat a standard across PKM's?
Good luck with the launch!
[1] https://logseq.com
It's not either or as you mentioned! Plan to have user data stored in plain files as well.
Roam's performance suffers mainly on first-load because they are server-first, and they load the entire db into memory at the beginning (such that it's quite fast thereafter).
Once we have true local-first data structures with something like https://github.com/replikativ/datahike, we could still have fast in-memory, but also fast initial load.
You can definitely export your data from Roam (maybe not some types of data, such as images, but you can scrape that if you need to). I can say this for certain as someone who's worked on open source import, export, and backup tools for roam. [1, 2]
[1] https://github.com/MatthieuBizien/roam-to-git
Im sure you're already familiar with Tiddlywiki[1]. For those who arent, I encourage you to check it out. Its one of the original bi-directional linked, open-sourced, graph-based (as revealed with TiddlyMap plugin, though not using a graph database) note-taking apps that is completely customizable.
It was recently posted and discussed on HN as well [2][3].
[1] https://tiddlywiki.com/
I've been thinking of a tool to generate a kind of schema for a website, similar to RDF[0] or JSON-LD[1]. The end goal of this would be interoperability between tools - ideally I could browse HN and other related sites or forums in my RSS reader with a unified interface, or translate the Roam note format into the Athens equivalent to use with either.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework
[1] https://json-ld.org/
Nice! I’m also developing a clone at https://github.com/cofinley/free-roam.
Done mainly to learn latest React/Redux. It’s coming along nicely. Also hosted on GitHub pages as a type of progressive web app (https://cofinley.github.io/free-roam). I love the idea of offline apps where you bring your own data. Kind of like the Beaker Browser.
To me RSS is exactly that. I don't see the advantage of converting an HTML to RDF because it would cover the entire spectrum. All the semantics might be lost. RSS is the smallest common denominator. If you agree somehow, you might be interested in that tool [0], it converts HTML to RSS using pattern matching.
[0] https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy
While i was researching on the possibility of using wiki software for ontology management back then on 2018, i just realized that "wiki is probably good for personal note taking". From there, at first, i forked pmwiki and modify its UI and UX, focusing it more for personal notetaking than a community wiki. Later, i completely rewrite everything from scratch, aiming for performance reasons (https://github.com/altilunium/rtnF). Now, i use it everyday for my personal use. In fact, this comment is drafted on rtnF first. HackerNews' textarea is too small for me to compose a long text.
Then, out there, coincidentally "networked note" application is booming. Roam Research, Obsidian, and even more : https://www.notion.so/Artificial-Brain-Networked-with-linear... . I dont know who is the actual first inventor. I think Roam popularized it first on the public.
Later, people start asking frequently "which notetaking app do you use?". The realization that people do need a notetaking app. Text editor and word processing software are not enough for notetaking. Because the former is intended just for editing a file and the latter is intended for producing printed document. Notetaking is different usecase. Well, even though the frequent answer like "i use pen and paper" "i use my own brain" is rampant on this kind of thread.
Whether on this is a fad or not, i think some people actually need this kind of app. But i doubt whether everyone need it or not. For me who usually research things, collect data from experiments, write down important texts from papers and articles, write down important information while attending online meetings. All of those can be stored and managed on this kind of app. Using text editor and word processing software for this kind of usecase will make your folder cluttered with files, it's hard to manage it.
>I wonder if this link-setting which is still a manual task would not get tedious over time. Then, I could imagine that finding content is still faster with a full-text search or question-answering DL models than clicking through all your links.
Link forces you to organize your notes, i think. Even though i agree that it get tedious over time.
Similar tool for "RSS from any page": https://github.com/taroved/pol#readme
Not sure what are the differences though
As it turns out there is already a tool [0] for my original idea which I just discovered today [1].
[0] https://github.com/inkandswitch/cambria