Roam was helpful to me to see the potential of bi-directional links, which TiddlyWiki has had for a long time. They were just hidden in a tab of the info area under the more menu. So I created TiddlyBlink early 2020, then Stroll, to imitate Roam's way of displaying them. And the relink plugin and the auto comptext plugin were key components to make that work like Roam's backlinks.
I remember seeing Athens around that time. They had caught on to the bi-directional links around the same time. Obsidian is the other big tool that people are touting as an alternative to Roam. It was created by the two-person team that does Dynalist. It is a self-contained app that you download, uses markdown, and has the graph database that Roam has. One plus for bi-directional linking is that it ties in well with the process of Zetellkasten, something that, thanks in part to Tiago Forte, was trending around the same time that Roam was taking off early last year. Bi-directional linking is not a magic bullet. But it is a great shortcut for connecting and navigating between related tiddlers. It is essentially like tagging but one advantage is that you don't have to leave the keyboard to add new links. Another is you can have many links, and links with long tiddler names. To do either in tagging would make the tag chooser dropdown in TW look too cluttered. Dave On Tuesday, March 2, 2021 at 3:25:58 PM UTC-6 dieg...@gmail.com wrote: > > 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/e2d11b60-32a1-461a-9c7a-73886203f9e1n%40googlegroups.com.
