31–40 of 153 posts
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 a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you see as the advantages vs. Zettlr? I haven't got to a point where perf seems to be an issue that would require a real graph database and having your knowledgebase just be a collection of markdown files is the ultimate in local first no lock-in portability.
The current major difference between markdown-based and db-based apps is block references. Over time, the difference will become significant as knowledge bases grow in size. CSV -> Excel -> SQL -> Distributed Cloud DBs Furthermore, our database supports data types, including numbers, dates, etc. I don't think any networked notetaking app has executed well on tables and non-string types. UX for tables is generally not…
- https://docs.asciidoctor.org/asciidoc/latest/macros/inter-do...
How do you feel about Workflowy (another YC company) suddenly starting to add new features like bidirectional linking, transclusion and file embedding functionality?
Long-term, open-source is great at building communities around a product/project, which is important for this space.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The current major difference between markdown-based and db-based apps is block references. Over time, the difference will become significant as knowledge bases grow in size. CSV -> Excel -> SQL -> Distributed Cloud DBs Furthermore, our database supports data types, including numbers, dates, etc. I don't think any networked notetaking app has executed well on tables and non-string types. UX for tables is generally not…
I'm not really familiar with Roam as I'm not interested in a non open source tool for this type of app (why I am more interested in what you're doing). What are block references? I guess I can see perf becoming an issue for a company wide knowledge base or a wikipedia type of thing but for a personal knowledge base which is my main use case currently I'm not clear it's necessary to have a real database and the benefi…
I'm currently using NotePlan because I haven't been able to find a good Roam-like iOS app. Is this on your radar?
Hopefully will have a great roadmap too like Gitlab's: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/maturity/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The current major difference between markdown-based and db-based apps is block references. Over time, the difference will become significant as knowledge bases grow in size. CSV -> Excel -> SQL -> Distributed Cloud DBs Furthermore, our database supports data types, including numbers, dates, etc. I don't think any networked notetaking app has executed well on tables and non-string types. UX for tables is generally not…
> The current major difference between markdown-based and db-based apps is block references. Over time, the difference will become significant as knowledge bases grow in size. That should be true, but so far it is Roam with the biggest problems with performance, from 30+ seconds of loading each time you load/refresh tab to constant lags in normal usage for some users :) I personally like the most this mixed approach…
Roam's performance suffers mainly on first-load because they are server-first, and they load the entire db into memory at the beginning (such that it's quite fast thereafter).
Once we have true local-first data structures with something like https://github.com/replikativ/datahike, we could still have fast in-memory, but also fast initial load.
Hey! This looks super cool. The desktop app seems fairly explicitly single-user (looks like 1 big transit file). Do you have any opinions on using these tools in general and Athens in specific to do knowledge sharing among teams? (I would imagine that needs some kind of transaction log, mostly hoping transactions commute and maybe stacking the deck with something like Pijul.) Is the answer "host it as a web service"…
To your second answer, yes and yes. I write in the post:
> As for how we will make money, most users, even technical ones who could self-host, don’t want to self-host (but they value that optionality and insurance against lock-in). They want a subscription SaaS, which will make features like backups, integrations, and collaboration much easier.
> For maximum power, you want a true graph database. Do you have empirical validation of this claim? Anecdotally, Postgres has a pretty rich set of graph modeling features these days, and keeps getting more of them, and SQL databases are often operationally simpler than graph databases. Maybe this matters less in a client side app?
SQL databases are indeed operationally simpler but that's because they have been around for much longer and are more battle-tested.