I guess you will all need to blame me. I was the one who used Roam as a model first, and got this ball rolling. TiddlyBlink/Stroll was just an experiment to see how much of Roam I could replicate in TW. Saq was a big help there. When I saw it worked pretty good I promoted it on Twitter by adding Roam's Twitter tag. Then Anne-Laure got hold of it and it took off. And when Roam got rid of the free beta, there was another wave of interest of people looking for free alternatives, and a couple videos on Youtube helped.
I am kind of letting Stroll die a slow death because to me it was just an experiment, and I feel like the experiment succeeded; I don't have time to add new features and keep its momentum growing; and there are other good options now like Drift and TiddlyResearch. The existence of those options, and the continued positive feedback I get on Stroll, tells me I was onto something. Back to Roam: it is an ingenious combination of concepts: outliner, granular backlinking, mindmap, autocompletion, automatic page generation, automatic journal entry for the day, side-by-side pages, a bunch of easy to use "macros" and filters. And they have only begun. Users are now creating CSS themes. I played with that and enjoyed it. There has been a lot of thought behind this, marketed it intelligently, and they know where they want to go with it. They deserve the praise, and the money, they get. Just because the Roam creators are making money and getting investors, and we are open source and are less known, doesn't mean they are doing anything wrong. Just because some of their features have been around for years, many of them in TiddlyWiki, doesn't make their unique integration of those features any less amazing. Every day I read new tweets of people hooked on Roam. TT's post feels like it came out of envy rather than from an attempt to say something constructive. If there is any envy or sadness on my part, it's that TiddlyWiki really could have had that number of users, even a few years ago, had there been a sustained interest in onboarding and documentation rather than just random spurts. I might have been willing to take more stabs at that, (I *did* do some non-techy documentation in 2014 that is still there in tw.com), but to me the complicated problem of saving made me give up the idea of promoting TW to the general public. I knew most non-techy potential users would be turned off by something for which the first step would be to figure out which of 40 options for saving they should use. Timimi seems like a good game changer, it works great, but even Timimi requires several steps to install. Thanks to Timimi, though, I am thinking again about doing some introductory Youtube tutorials in Spanish for TiddlyWiki. As for me and Roam, I went in a week or two ago to try it out, to see if I really ought to commit to it, mainly because of the value of granular line-by-line backlinks, but utimately decided to stick with TiddlyWiki and Dynalist. I use Dynalist for when I need to generate and organize thoughts really quickly. I use TiddlyWiki for everything else. For my purposes, that is enough. And you can bet something will come along in a year or two that will wow people even more than Roam. What Roam did to Notion, something else will do to Roam. Anyway, a number of disconnected thoughts to offer a balance to TT's original post. No less love for him, though. Blessings. On Tuesday, September 15, 2020 at 12:34:06 PM UTC-5 TiddlyTweeter wrote: > See my Tweets ... > > @RoamResearch <https://twitter.com/RoamResearch/> way OVERRATED. The >> concepts it advances are NOT new. It is basically leveraging a loss of >> memory for profit. >> https://twitter.com/BeaBonobo/status/1305918780145635328 > > > > Thought is as thought does. Technology interacts with it. > > That reflexive process is enabling (or crippling in bad tech). > > #TiddlyWiki <https://twitter.com/search?q=%23TiddlyWiki> basic is >> AGNOSTIC on HOW humans use it to make meanings. > > That is a great quality. MOST other non-linear systems are OVER-commited >> on. > > https://twitter.com/BeaBonobo/status/1305917906316910592 >> > > Best wishes > TT > -- 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 [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/8661381a-f0ac-4d7e-97fe-d7d3ae24f0e2n%40googlegroups.com.
