Hello all, A YC (venture capital firm) backed open-source Roam alternative launched today on HackerNews:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26316793 Some relevant parts of the announcement (my opinion only): - Athens is an open-source and local-first alternative to Roam Research. Roam Research is a notetaking application, and *what they really got right was the "bidirectional link."* - With bidirectional links, you never have to worry about where you write a note. Bidirectional links allow you to connect any two notes together, creating a knowledge graph. - This is why Athens is about more than just notetaking. *I believe networked applications with bidirectional links and data could become a new category itself.* - Of course, this *bidirectional idea isn't new*. In fact, it goes as far back as the origin of the Web. It's the original concept of hypertext and Xanadu, which Ted Nelson has been advocating for decades. More recently, aspects of it were attempted by the Semantic Web. *Yet the adoption never really caught on, until perhaps now.* - Something else that's interesting about the most powerful networked tools like Roam and Athens is t*hat you can't really make these apps with JavaScript or plaintext/markdown.* *For maximum power, you want a true graph database*. Both Roam and Athens leverage a front-end graph database called DataScript, which is written in Clojure(Script). JavaScript doesn't have a native analog, and Neo4j is only server-side. *This matters because I believe this is the first consumer use case for graph databases*. I believe both Roam and Athens are general-purpose platforms where individuals and organizations can centralize all of their knowledge and tasks. I believe the graph is the right data structure to do this with. I find this fascination with bi-directional links without a huge mention of TW slightly frustrating. Also, his point about a graph database is an interesting one to consider. What are your thoughts? Diego -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tiddlywiki+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/5c301ed4-c216-4f6e-b4ea-9933156470d2n%40googlegroups.com.
