Comment by swah
1 day ago
Tana, Capacities, Bear, Lgseq all have backlinks and other stuff from Roam for years now or so, thanks to Roam IMO. I wish they were able to make some good money from this innovation but they moved too slow at some crucial moment.
OTOH the app that really won was Obsidian, due to flawless execution with the "local first" principle. Being closed source and "not listening too much to the community" weren't issues, they just focused and improved consistently.
> Tana, Capacities, Bear, Lgseq all have backlinks and other stuff from Roam for years now or so, thanks to Roam IMO. I wish they were able to make some good money from this innovation
I debunked this myth on the prior discussion in 2022. Backlinks were a well-known idea in the wiki community, to the point that they were part of WikiMatrix, and it's almost certainly the case that Roam copied the idea. TiddlyWiki had backlinks at least as early as 2006. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30330835
I'm surprised to this day everyone still focuses on backlinks.
For me Roam's killer feature was transclusion. When they launched, no one else had it. I could write all my notes in the daily notes and still have a sufficiently-well-organised knowledge base for specific subjects, tasks, projects.
These days I use obsidian for the simplicity/portability of .md.
> For me Roam's killer feature was transclusion. When they launched, no one else had it.
Roam also copied the idea of transclusion. I'm not sure who is included in "no one else" but Wikipedia's had it pretty much from the beginning. See this page from 2005[1]
The term was coined in a book in 1980[2]. This page from 2007[3] says "...CvWiki, developed in 1997 by Peter Merel, which was the first Wiki clone to have functioning transclusion, backlinks and WayBackMode."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Transcl...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion#History_and_imple...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_wikis&...
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