Roam – a graph-based personal knowledgebase | Hacker News Reader

Roam – a graph-based personal knowledgebase

23 pointschrisweekly6 comments

Roam (https://roamresearch.com) is a webapp for doing research (note-taking, "Zettelkasten", codex, personal knowledge-base, whatever you want to call it). Its UX has a lot of rough edges (esp. rel to import/export), but for now it's free, and IMHO this paradigm -- a graph instead of a hierarchy -- is extremely powerful and interesting. It takes some effort to get past the ugly UI, and I'm still adjusting to the awkwardness of bullet list items as the primary unit, and learning to resist the habit or instinct to categorize as I type... but even so, it's already useful and noteworthy. Interested to see if others here will agree.

The "privacy policy" is outrageous: https://roamresearch.com/#/v8/help/page/y7wOdeUpZ

Won't even try it, sorry.

Can you elaborate?

Not sure about severine, but I was curious so I read the policy. These 2 clauses stood out as deal breakers:

"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."

"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."

Seems risky to put content here.

There's a similar open-source tool with an Emacs front end called Semantic Synchrony.

https://github.com/synchrony/smsn/wiki/What-you-need-to-know...

Exactly what I've been looking for - but, a few caveats, what is the business plan? Is this going to be open sourced? Who is behind the project?

I've asked them about this. Their current thinking is something like $10/month service.

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