Roam, Twenty Years Before Roam
borretti.me
borretti.me
Nelson was 30 years late delivering Project Xanadu when Berners-Lee jettisoned the _impossible_ parts of Ted's vision and ate his lunch with the WorldWideWeb. [0]
Ted dreamed of these bidirectional links. Not just that you got _notified_ if someone linked to you, for which we have pingbacks (which are massively exploitable for spam if you auto-publish them), but if someone changed their document's address or title, they'd have the power to update _your_ document with the link to it. No bitrot! All it takes is one entity having complete executive control over the entire WWW, and probably the ability to change anything on any page without your knowledge, or even better, give remote control of your documents to anyone who controls the server you happen to link to.
He had other ideas, like you'd write a page and get automatically paid micropayments by any people reading it, and if anyone wanted to excerpt a section or an image and transclude it in their page, they could do that and you'd get paid your share. Universally monetizing the web would have strangled the information revolution in the crib. It'd be like putting a coin slot on your computer terminal a-la Ubik. People would _avoid_ reading pages to avoid getting billed, they'd be easily swayed to centralised providers offering free access to their pages (because what they really want is power and influence) like Facebook Zero cynically did to India. There'd also need to be, for billing, a perfect record of absolutely everything that anyone ever read, and anyone ever published. It'd be an authoritarian's wet dream.
If you haven't read The Curse of Xanadu, [0], I urge that you do, and be willing to ditch ideas that don't work so people can benefit all the sooner from ideas that do, and other people don't beat you to the punch _thirty years_ after you started.
Letter to the Editor: https://www.wired.com/1995/09/rants-raves-123/
Extended material: https://xanadu.com.au/ararat
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_-5cGEU9S0
Feature length: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASgjSxNdDqI
Notice of legal action: https://archive.org/details/Ted_Nelson_Responds_to_Charges_i...
If you absolutely have to change the link, and if a million people link to it, and are still interested in whatever your link is, they'll update the links themselves.
If you removing the link for good, people will have to link to the Wayback Machine instead; Wikipedia bots do this automatically. [1]
[0] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI (has been at this URL since 1998)
- Outlining: or the ability to represent a tree of (separate data) blocks on the simple classic text page
- In-line querying (+ block references/embed) : or the ability to visually reference/reuse distant blocks anywhere else within the (outline) tree.
- Bidirectional linking
So It is first about visualizing tree networks (=outlining) that you can freely recompose/reuse (=query/references), then (and only then), on top of it, building that other (virtual) hyperlinked network (=bidirectional linking)
I would say that the fundamental difference is that in (Media)wikis the pages are the nodes in the networks, while in outliners, it is the (sub) blocks that constitute them.
Also, in Mediawiki features like embedding and listing, like Bidirectional linking (as shown in this article), are almost an afterthought (limited, hidden…), while in Roam they became more integrated and advanced while being simple to use (and on that more granular block level).
You can transclude any page into another page, not just templates. If you want to compose content in MediaWiki atomically and transclude them into articles or books, that's built in. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Transclusion
An extension allows you to tag any arbitrary content for named transclusion, but it isn't required to transclude any article: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Labeled_Section_Tra...
That doesn't include the built-in Lua scripting that can create content modules with more power than transclusion alone.
> and list pages (tables...)
Dynamic Page List extensions let you query content by namespace, category (including category intersection), and search results. You can also template the output, for instance to generate an image gallery from a query that returns `File:` namespace results.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DynamicPageList3
You can do what Roam does in MediaWiki, but only if you're comfortable with MediaWiki markup, which can be miserably clunky with a steep learning curve when you get into templating. Roam's value is focusing on and surfacing those features and creating a UI around them.
You can't do MediaWiki in Roam, and Roam would be a worse product if you could. If you use Roam and wish it could do X or Y, you can get there with MediaWiki.
TiddlyWiki is an amazing piece of software, but it has too many points of friction. The first being that you have to run a local server, which eliminates 99% of users.
Up until recently, most wiki software was modeled on Wikipedia, designed for consumption as a website. As an app, Obsidian can have more freedom when it comes to UI, e.g. multiple panes, tabs, command prompt, etc. All of which can make the experience feel richer and snappier than a website.
That said, whenever someone non-techy asks me what Obsidian is, I always start by comparing it to Wikipedia. People understand the idea that Wikipedia is organized via relationships/links rather than chronologically/hierarchically.
This was not always true. One reason TW became popular was because you could save your data without running a web server on Firefox. Then Firefox decided to pull that functionality, and TW suddenly became a lot less exciting. You could still download apps or use the Github saver, but those were far less appealing than the old approach with Firefox.
But in general, I don’t mind subscriptions as a way to safely try some software.
$220 is on the high side, compared to SimpleMind which is around £30 (one-time).
I’ve been using TheBrain (previously called “PersonalBrain”) for more than a decade now and got a lot more value out of its graph-based navigation and spatial linking concept than I would have with any of the text/outliner-based tools that have been popping up recently (although I use some of them too, for different reasons).
What an astounding claim. I guess if I had even heard of Roam up to this point, it might be less astounding.
Most are now on Roam or Obsidian, and I hear that at least in some in scientific circles Roam has made an even bigger splash. I've tried Roam and Obsidian and a few copycats and stuck with Roam, and it's lightyears ahead of what I had before, but there seems to be no good way to interface with the graph using code and that's limiting things severely for me. Still looking for something better, but IMO it's absolutely fair to say that Roam has had a huge impact.
Perhaps alphabetical sorting was the problem? You need some way of sorting by relevancy. PageRank?
I’ve been following MediaWiki development since about 2005 and have contributed to it, so I’m part of the problem.