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Comment by helloguillecl | Hacker News Reader

This is amazing. I like Roam Research but I refuse to give full control of something so important to any third party. At this point we have all experienced what it is like to give the control over your digital life to FAANG-like entities with priorities other than their own users well-being. We can and should ask for better.

If it will be my second brain (please note how important this sounds), what I want is to be able to be in full control of the data I generated with it.

I'd happily pay for an Open Source SaaS service from which I can download my data and use it in my own computer/server if I wish to do so, much like Sentry or Strapi.

Edit: Clarity, grammar and spelling

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You can export everything from roam in json or markup... does that basically not suffice?

Have you actually looked at what's exported? You need to do a lot of parsing, and modifying before that content is usable...

Someone could write a viewer, or converter for this format? Should be simpler than writing a new creation app.

You could, but why? I wrote a small package to automate my backups, and transform the content into something readable for myself. It's far from feature complete, even for my simple personal use.

But if you're doing a complete read-only copy of roam, why not go all the way and make it editable, and compete with them instead?

If, like OP, you are concerned about the closed nature of Roam, you could make that converter instead of a replacement for Roam.

You could say openness is “a feature, not a product”, and it’s a feature that could be retrofitted.

You could, yeah.

You could put in a lot of work, just for read-only feature parity.

Or you could work some more, and have a competing product.

You seem adamant, that the former is a better path, but I don't quite see why would you do all that work for naught.

(Roam already broke my backup script 2 times, and there are better uses of my time than interfacing with a proprietary product, if there are better alternatives.)

I'd say a parser is an order of magnitude less work, but if someone wants to make a full product I'm not going to try to stop them.

That's fine. I'm quite happy with roam, I have the exports if I ever need them.

> I have the exports if I ever need them.

Do yourself a favor and check if the exports actually have what you need, before blindly trusting it.

That's as useful as exporting your excel sheets into CSV or exporting your Google takeout backup. Yes you have your data, but can you do anything useful and continue working with it without a big deal of effort? I'd also like to continue working in the same learned workflow/method after I take my data.

I don't particularly want to spend ages trying to find "perfect" when roam is "good" enough. The chances of roam disappearing over night are pretty slim and I take weekly backups of my data from them. Worst comes to the worst I'll dump it into a directory and grep for what I'm looking for.

One more point: the exported data in markdown (and maybe in json too) is lossy. It's not just that the you can't use it out of the box, but that significant parts of it are missing as well.

Roam has plans for offline-only storage.

Is that out of beta and working now? Also is it still only available in the $500 (?) dollar plan or what ever it was?

Nope and yes!

I am just pointing out that closed source doesn't necessarily mean 'not in control of your data'.

True. And too bad, would give it a try again otherwise.

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