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Comment by maurelian | Hacker News Reader

Curious what it's missing that Roam has? I liked the Roam concept, but didn't use it for long before moving to Obsidian because of the privacy model, so I never really got a good feel for it. I still feel like I'm not getting the most out of the bi-directional link functionality everyone loves so much because I keep forgetting to create them.

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Roam is essentially an outliner: every bullet-point has a unique ID and you can't link directly to it. That way you can a) reference specific blocks of texts (Obsidian only allows to link to headings) b) display the entire block in the backlinks section (Obsidian only renders a set number of words around that mention)

I think Roam's graph is flawed, but it's much better that Obsidian's, which you can't even zoom out of. Also Conaw experiments with some neat things like to-do lists that double as backlinks, Kanban boards, Pomodoro timer (ok that's overkill but it was added recently anyway). Daily note-taking is also pretty streamlined in Roam with new notes created every day that can be referred to in a neat fashion, and perhaps also allow for SRS.

Idk, Roam feels too familiar to me as well, so I doubt that I'll drop it anytime soon (we'll see how will I handle the future $15 price tag).

Interested in hearing more about the graph view!

As of the latest release our graph view can be zoomed in and out, and we've rewritten it to generate the graph with WebGL rather than SVG, so it's a lot more performant for 1,000+ notes.

Love it. Would also love to be able to search/filter in the graph view!

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