Difference between Tags and Links

Basement
1

Hello,

I used Roam and Obsidian for a few days and was thrilled. But meanwhile I wonder if the backlinking is really the “eureka” moment we were looking for. What is so great about backlinking? If my page is called “X”, then unlinked mentions are shown to me where “X” occurs. But I can see that with a full text search as well.
Clicking through different links is basically like Wikipedia.

I am not sure if this is really the future. I currently use Evernote, Notion, Mendeley and Obsidian together. But I would like to sort my thoughts and notes better. Evernote has a cool feature called “Context”. It finds similar notes in your notebook. However, it works very poorly. Tagging is also a bad idea, because otherwise you have endless tags. I am a bit desperate and looking for a good structure.
I already tried PARA and IMF. IMF was okay for me. I did not like Para. “zettelkasten” is hyped and obsidian is not zettelkasten software. Or I haven’t seen a good setup/workflow yet.

2

Forget the programs, this is the key. You need a clear idea of what you are trying to do, and why, before thinking about the how.
Zettelkasten is a very specific system designed for one purpose by the person who used it. Very much about academic research. If that’s not you, then you would need to understand its advantages and disadvantages and decide whether it applies to you.
Ditto for any other system.
Forget the hype, do what suits you.

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