Comment by dalmo3
18 hours ago
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&...
Thanks for the history lesson, I guess, but that's extremely pedantic. No one ever said Roam invented transclusion.
I'm talking in the practical sense here. It's hard to take you seriously when you mention Wikipedia in the context of personal note taking apps.