The fall of Roam

The inevitability of this article's title feels like Roam was always tempting fate. I haven't used Roam, but I've toyed with Obsidian and Mem without any real commitment. I like the concept of bi-directional links, but it's not vital (I've tried to hack an approximation of this into Notion in the past). I actually like categorising and compartmentalising things myself if the system is accommodating enough. I use Notion for fairly structured notes, like phased learning for a language (whether it be Spanish or C#) or a knowledge system (moved a bunch of process guides and employee handbook type stuff to Notion for my team and it works really well). Small notes, fragments, and things there aren't really a place for yet have traditionally gone into Evernote, but Notion is absorbing some of this as well. Evernote is very much a text-only tool for me. In the past, URLs would be a big part of what I was using Evernote for, but Raindrop has taken over in that capacity for me. Eagle is my favourite tool for categorising images and design resources, and Milanote 2.0 has an edge for me when it comes to visual bookmarking over Notion (if layout and control of space is very important). Workona has some interesting features for merging static resources and bookmarks. In my head, something like Obsidian was meant to replace a lot of this Second Brain stack, but I never really got to grips with how I was going to achieve that without adding to my cognitive load instead of subtracting from it.

I stopped using Roam in the initial 15 days or so. Primarily because of the lack of timestamps and temporal context, which was one of the problems you mentioned. I currently just write out everything on Keybase, and it has worked reasonably well for me, apart from the lack of fuzzy search and bad UX for tag based systems. The lack of bidirectional links I solve with tags and common words, all the notes related to a thing will have that tag. The context when searching is temporal, which is generally enough for me. I think e2e encryption is important, so it's likely that Signal or Keybase storage-backed apps can fill this need. Alternative tools like Worldbrain's Memex and Anki form the rest of my knowledge stack.

I'm really enjoying Foam (https://github.com/foambubble/foam) because as a programmer I already live in VSCode and Foam also lives there. And weirdly CoPilot occasionally gives me useful suggestions. Also because it's open source, if there is something I don't like, I can change it myself. That said, that flexibility can be a burden if you're spending all day tinkering with it instead of doing your work, which is a temptation for me. Also no mobile app OFC though Github now has Codespaces and I've been meaning to try it with that.

The timing is almost too good - as we're launching our product on PH today with the goal to solve precisely what Roam and other note-taking / todo apps fail to do. Take a look :) would love your feedback Mindmesh