Some thoughts on using Roam as an Obsidian person / Questions for Roam Refugees

[Calhistorian]

So I am writing this post to engage in dialogue - as is suggested by the OP. If you have seen me on Twitter, you know I am a genuine person willing to listen to critique and engage in dialogue (@Calhistorian). So I am writing this really long post, as a form of intellectual engagement. I concede with many of your points below - particularly in regards to security/privacy.

For full disclosure I am a full-tim Roam user and part-time Obsidian user. I use Obsidian for privacy specific notes and for Obsidian Publish (as I am building a hyper-text textbook for my classes). Feel free to engage if you like. Ignore if you don’t.

@KevinR

Roam refugees often cite the price and the cult as reasons they left. But what about the product?

Price is steep, but I get the ROI. My read on the “cult” item, is that only people who have a problem with the word itself are turned off. The community is AMAZING!

@KevinR

First of all, I hate that Roam is a web app.

Yep, I am in the same position.

@KevinR

But being a web app also means it’s available everywhere, on everything that I use.

This is why I use it. I teach with my iPad Pro and Pencil on a digital whiteboard.

@KevinR

The browser extensions are OK. Safari is my main browser because it does a great job of working across all of my devices.

Same. Hate chrome. Though I have made an exception. Though all the Chromium options work really well too.

@KevinR

Block referencing has been great for easily pulling together outlines for class lectures from many different sources and notes. I also like the ability to create a page out of a tag, so that it’s possible to have blocks tagged with something like “thoughts” that are then automatically available on a “page” called “thoughts.”

I too am an academic, and this is huge for me.

@KevinR

I hate the privacy policy.

It is standard and comparable to Notion, etc. E2EE would be nice, but I just don’t put “secret” stuff in there. I don’t have much though. There is an offline only version, but still only lives in browser (dangerous for stability in my view).

@KevinR

And yes, some parts of the community freak me out. Like a silicon valley Stepford community.

I am still waiting for someone to point me at this. Other than the founder who is quite abrasive.

@KevinR

For the Roam Refugees in the house, How was your move? Have you had to change your workflow? Were you using Roams power features, like block references, and if so, has that made a big difference in how you do your work? How much of a pain will it be to move after amassing a medium to large graph?

Technically I am “dual-national.” My primary is Roam, but I use Obsidian for Obsidian Publish and super secret stuff.

@KevinR

And most importantly, if Roam was free, would you have moved?

So perhaps this post wasn’t for me to dialogue with. But as I said above, the price is worth it since I am a knowledge worker.

Happy to converse about Roam or Obsidian. I wrote some thoughts as to why I remain in Roam here:

Why I use Roam as my Primary

@icebear

Local files or bust,

I was this way too, but I backup to plain text which can frankly be imported into Obsidian. Which I demonstrated here:

Discord - A New Way to Chat with Friends & Communities

@rigmarole

But the biggest risk to using a web app isn’t the price, but the lock-in.

Totally agree, but no lockin really with Roam - perhaps for the less technically minded, which is basically me. But everything is in plain text - though it acts like a database on the server.

@rigmarole

I just used a script to reformat my Daily Notes from YYYY-MM-DD to YYYY-MM-DD_dddd last night,

I do miss this from my DEVONthink days.

@rigmarole

So I haven’t experienced any friction or pain by switching. Except I did have to download and relink all my Google Firebase online attachments to local files.

I only link to DEVONthink for my images and files for this very reason.

@macedotavares

arrogant CEO/cult leader

As I said. But do you know all the CEOs you use and “who” they are. And to be clear, there is no leader to the cult .

@macedotavares

such an intellectually dishonest crowd

Them fightn’ words. None offense taken.

@macedotavares

Regarding portability, my advice to you would be to stay off anything with double curly braces, because they’re all you’re going to get when you export to .md. Also, long texts are really a pain, with an hyphen at the beginning of every line.

@kdjamesrd

I still follow incantations of the RoamCult and realize that every new and shiny thingy they are adding to Roam breaks the concept of each page being a simple Markdown file. The Markdown that Roam exports is not compliant with most other Markdown editors and significant cleaning up needs to be done.

This is imporving dramatically by the day.

@macedotavares

I’ve once had a Roam cultist explain to me that it wasn’t right to keep private notes. Instead we should all be sharing everything we write in this new global brain. So it has come to this.

That ridiculous

@justindirose

I’ve had a few Roam users basically tell me that I can’t do what I’m doing in Obsidian because it’s a Roam workflow. Sorry, but PKM is not a Roam-only thing!

@RikD

Here and in other places I read some weird stuff about their community and how they behave. It doesn’t seem like the warm and respectful environment the Obsidian community is in right now.

Who are these idiots?

@LexTenebris

The non-locality of my data and inability to really control access to it is really frustrating and annoying, and potentially dangerous.

So true. Though haven’t been bothered yet by it.

@LexTenebris

that it made me $15 a month in personal profit

It has definitely done so for me, but that is just the nature of my knowledge-work.

@RikD

Certainly don’t want to start a conspiracy theory thing and sure Google is not looking over our shoulders when we create files in “the cloud” but they could if they wanted too.
Same goes for every “Drive” system in the clouds. Certainly don’t want to bash on Google alone here (and I don’t want to bash at all to be clear).

It is a shame, but that is the way it goes with cloud services. This is why i keep my student records in DEVONthink with local sync.

@dburkes

Having said that, I’d much rather pay Obsidian. Having control and stewardship over my own data is a powerful value proposition. I’d pay more than $15 a month for that.

@dburkes

So I’ll wait and watch, eagerly, until I can make the jump.

If I could get the same ROI, I would do so.

I patiently await the virtual barrage. I suppose I would love to talk about the most extreme use-cases of obsidian and how an extreme Roam user could replicate. I have 9000+ notes, extreme transclusion and data density/linkages.