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Comment by devin | Hacker News Reader

Keep hating on it or bringing up open source alternatives, but Roam is going places.

I don’t know how long the momentum keeps up, but it’s clear to me that Roam has captured a market segment that’s been mostly ignored by the bigger players who’ve focused on creating project management software.

It may not be for you or your company, but it is clearly resonating.

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I would argue that the people signing up to Roam have a short-term outlook on their data when they shovel their words into a blackbox. Notes are the maybe the most important thing to have a fungible, exportable standard behind.

They have an option to download everything as json I believe.

You can export all your notes as Markdown or JSON. Obsidian, for instance, even has a plugin to faciliate importing your Roam notes if you choose to migrate.

Unless something has changed, you're left with a bunch of unlinked Markdown notes. Those connections have to be relinked from scratch in whatever program the exportee then chooses. It sounds like Obsidian is offering a bespoke method of recreating these links, is that right?

Yes, Obsidian has a few options specifically geared towards importing Roam markdown: https://i.imgur.com/eDtRXSX.png

Any existing use of [[link]] style ones will work natively.

I’m all for people being productive and all but most People jumping the Roam bandwagon are doing it as a fad. They’ll move to the next one that’s the note-taking-method du jour. Zettlekasten/Cornell notes/ Anki etc need a change in the user outlook rather than the tooling.

You can use/build all of these methods within Roam.

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