Hi all. If I may, I'd like to chime in. I'm a new Tiddlywiki user and I've also been a Roam user for several months. Both are wonderful products. I think - at least for right now - there is space for both tools in the knowledge management ecosystem. I think it would be helpful if I provide my personal experience using Roam & Tiddlywiki, in the hopes of shedding light on each product's strengths and weaknesses and how to potentially think about forging a path ahead.
Let me start by explaining how I roamed onto Roam. I was doing some serendipitous Internet searching on neuroscience. I don't remember the details of what I was searching fo, but I stumbled on Anne-Laure's blog, so I must have had used some keywords associated with motivation or productivity. Through Anne-Laure's writing, I discovered Roam (I also discovered TiddlyWiki through Anne-Laure's article(s)). I was intrigued. I fell down the rabbit hole of seemingly endless Roam tutorials and content. It was overwhelming, but super exciting because Roam exposed me to new ideas that I had not heard of before. I know some folks have made the claim that these ideas are not new - I agree; but, they were new to me. Roam's content was my gateway to these ideas. Switching gears to my experience using Roam, in short, it's pretty clunky. It's not a beautiful and seamless user experience like Notion or Evernote. In fact, there's not even a mobile app. It requires some coding knowledge to understand how to use it. Again, it's clunky. I'm not happy about paying the subscription fee, but I'm biting the bullet because the community brings me value. I've learned a lot. Enter Tiddlywiki. I was pumped when I discovered it through Anne-Laure because it seemed like I could use it to create a digital garden that resembles Andy Matuschak's Notes <https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes>. Transcluding pop-ups is super cool, and Roam doesn't have that feature. I found it quite simple to implement in Tidlywiki once I got the hang of things. For me, personally, the learning curve to use Tiddlywiki was much higher than Roam. For example, I didn't need to learn how to host a website with Roam so I could save my work. As far as using Tiddlywiki, an empty Tiddler looks like just like a blog post. Tiddlywiki seems like a really nifty way to host your own blog. With a vibrant open-source community, a person could figure out how to modify the styling and turn it into a really cool personal homepage. You can't do the same with Roam. I'm not going to share my Roam database with the public. It would be like sharing my Google Drive journals. Valuable content, but it lacks the look & feel of a blog. I hope to have expressed that I think Tiddlywiki & Roam have their own unique space in the knowledge management ecosystem. One key point is that Roam, unlike Tiddlywiki, is a for-profit company that has already found monetization. They also now have investors to appease. Who knows what direction this may take them in. Roam's future is far from certain. Some questions that come to mind are, 1) will they be able to continue attracting new users? maybe, but they probably need to make Roam more user friendly; 2) will they continue to engage their current users? maybe, but they'll need to push out exciting new features to justify the subscription cost. Tiddlywiki's strength lies in its open source nature. When I think of Tiddlywiki, I think of platforms like Roku & Android that enable any dev to build on them and as a result these platforms have lots of apps and lots of users. The potential is there for both apps, and there is plenty of potential market share to go around. Most people don't use Roam or Evernote or TiddlyWiki, but most people are overwhelmed with information and would get a lot of benefit from using a knowledge management product that is useful, innovative, and easy to use. ✌️ On Thursday, September 17, 2020 at 11:58:06 AM UTC-7 David Gifford wrote: > Thanks strikke, my comment about blaming me for the recent emphasis on > Roam in the TiddlyWiki community was tongue in cheek, since TiddlyTweeter's > post title was that Roam is a negative influence - NOT a model, overrated, > and just out for the money. > > On Thursday, September 17, 2020 at 10:44:38 AM UTC-5 strikke...@gmail.com > wrote: > >> David, >> >> LOL, blame you, why? Stroll is great and a lot of new users learned about >> the existence of Tiddlywiki. Some got inspired and created variants and I >> would not be surprised if a lot of us are using some of your goodies too in >> other wikis. (I know I am). >> >> You have had lots of work following up on all the questions and creating >> collections for Goodies, very well done. The tutorial part of Stroll we can >> all learn from. >> >> The important thing is, that there is something for everyone and that >> also goes for money or no money. Most people need to take notes. >> >> >> Birthe >> > -- 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/a336a89e-2f99-4378-b002-471f27a1f121n%40googlegroups.com.
