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postexitus

I did - it's slicker with better UX for sure, but technically what's different?

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Blocks (paragraphs with subtrees) as first class objects with uids that can be pointed to.

Pages as filterable collections of backlinks from blocks.

A datalog engine for structured data via attributes.

Collaborative real time editing.

But you're mostly right - UX that comes from that is the thing that matters.

It looks like the main differences are the bidirectional links and the automated creation of those links.

Bi-directional links are visible if you go to the What Links Here [0] section of a page. Notably though it doesn't include "unlinked references" (as Roam refers to it), which is quite useful.

[0]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:What_links_here

You can still fish that up if you need to either from the UI's search or the search API, but in poking Roam that felt like a potential anti-feature around ambiguous terms, for instance with no clear way to flag a particular reference as not relevant to a term.

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