The Fall of Roam

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • sursis

    A [personal]<-[notebook]->[network]. Complete with custom numerics for constrained Gaussian gravitation physics.

  • https://github.com/asemic-horizon/sursis

    Working demo (used by like two close friends besides me; please don't vandalize it):

    http://legibet.casino-rhizome.com:8501/

    [There's lots of fun stuff where nodes have "weight" so we color them by the Gaussian gravity field. But the idea of notes without body is already novelty enough for one sitting, I guess]

  • w2g

    World Wide Graph: A memex for semantic notetaking

  • A friend of Conor White-Sullivan (Roam's creator) propped up his own take on how to do a notetaking system that does support edges, and then he went a step further and opened it for everyone to edit, so it's just a single shared graph:

    <https://github.com/w2g/w2g>

    Mek works at the Internet Archive, and it clearly follows the same spirit of "we'll operate the service, feel free to bring your own frontend if you don't like ours". I wasn't happy with the way that one at graph.global tries to subvert/duplicate native browser features, so I put up a minimal "client" for browsing existing nodes that feels similar to the default one, sans annoyances on those specific axes:

    <https://graph.5apps.com/LP/streamline>

    I never got around to allowing editing, unfortunately. You'll have to use the default frontend for that (annoying, since it's buggy) or write a client of your own.

    The key issue I see with the graph.global model is that you have to use triples. I've found that this results in big hurdles for throughput—i.e., the opposite of notational velocity. The ideal thing would probably be to allow a Roam-like system where you can start out by simply linking two related nodes, and then fill the edge details after the fact. You could sort of approximate this with w2g as it stands by just using a generic is-related-to connector and then reify the relation. This does mean you would lose the ability to query by relation unless you add further attributes or went back and edited the original connector to replace it with something more appropriate before reification. Stopping in your tracks to find the appropriate connector is something I found to have lots of overhead.

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    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.

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  • oporg

    In-repo task management using org-ehtml and modified bigblow from org-html-themes.

  • 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.

  • > The next thing will incorporate its advances.

    Already has. Logseq [1] is essentially an open-source Roam that stores its data locally, in markdown files. It's not quite as polished yet, because it's still in beta, but I'm quite happy with it so far.

    [1]: https://logseq.com/

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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