Matt's Roof Garden

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February 13th, 2022

it's funny in the tweet he links the author explicitly explains how to use roam which OP aparentally ignored?

i've been thinking about why I take these kinds of articles kind of personally. I think for those of us who's brains work the same way that roam does an attack on roam can start to feel like an attack on us

roam isn't for everyone, and it can't do everything. It never was. If, after writing something, you never wish to return to it or re-use parts of it then a tool designed to do that isn't going to be helpful

if you're not interested in connections between new work and old work then roam won't be helpful

There was a strong vein of magic-bullet-ism last year

He's asking roam to do something that it never has done, wasn't designed to do, and is then frustrated when it doesn't work that way

seems like he wants to take the though out of thinking

The whole point of roam isn't to tell you 'where' to put something, the urge to find a 'perfect place' for something isn't actually how our brains work. They work on associations. So don't worry about 'where' to put something just think about what you associate with what you're writing and then use that because most likely that's how you'll remember it when you want to come back

it's a bit of a learning curve to figure out what balance between too specific and too general works for you. Also don't make so many tags/pages that each one is absurdly specific and you forget half of them even exist?

If you often remember things based on where you did them then use location based tags if emotions stand out strong to you tag an emotion

This writer is falling into the same traps that roam is made to help avoid. It's the tagging fallacy, folder panic. This isn't unique to roam its the problem that all curation systems have. Roam is just unique because it works with associations between those tags/pages

The point of roam is chaos, notion is for perfectly curated order. Which one works depends on how your brain works and what you're trying to do

That being said he's not entirely incorrect, roam has much room to grow. I'd be interested to see his comparison between the Apple Notes search and Roam's. In my experience they work much the same...

He also completely leaves out some of the more powerful search in roam, Queries. Being a programer myself I've definitely resorted to a console datalog query to really leverage the power of my graph in ways that aren't exposed through the UI yet. Maybe that's part of. what give me so much entheusium for