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Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research

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131–140 of 153 posts

Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research

#131
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dream would be seamless interoperation between all these tools. Would also mean better 'competition', easier to convince people to try them, avoiding lock-in in one tool, etc etc. For some tools it's already possible to interoperate -- for them would be nice to have summaries on what are the caveats (e.g. would the tool format my whole note base? would it break any special syntax imposed by the other tool? etc etc…

I've been thinking of a tool to generate a kind of schema for a website, similar to RDF[0] or JSON-LD[1]. The end goal of this would be interoperability between tools - ideally I could browse HN and other related sites or forums in my RSS reader with a unified interface, or translate the Roam note format into the Athens equivalent to use with either. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework [1…

To me RSS is exactly that. I don't see the advantage of converting an HTML to RDF because it would cover the entire spectrum. All the semantics might be lost. RSS is the smallest common denominator. If you agree somehow, you might be interested in that tool [0], it converts HTML to RSS using pattern matching.

[0] https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy

Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research

#132

A few alternatives in this space: org-roam https://www.orgroam.com/ tiddlyroam https://tiddlyroam.org/ Dendron https://dendron.so/ Foam https://foambubble.github.io/foam/ Remnote https://www.remnote.io/ Obsidian https://obsidian.md/ logseq https://logseq.com/ Not an expert with them at all. I've never had a desire to dig into all their complexity, but some are pretty passionate about it.

+1 for Logseq. Data lives locally (either Markdown or Org-mode), it's open source and moving very fast

Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research

#134
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering the page you linked is a javascript application, why would anyone expect to be able to use a Javascript application without Javascript?

Is it a "javascript application" or a "page with text that uses javascript for dynamic features"...

It’s the entire product.

Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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

Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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