[robenkleene]

Thanks for this great explanation! This definitely helps me see the advantages of those specific features. Just to be clear, I think Roam is a great and interesting product, I didn’t mean to diminish it. Frankly, I’m just thankful they’ve rejuvenated the note-taking conversation.

But there’s a separate point I’m still trying to make: What surprises me is that there’s not a separate, parallel conversation happening about the features that can easily by applied to plain text. E.g., the fact that default Markdown supports simple Wiki links like `[A Link](a-link.md)` appears to be lost on an extraordinary number of users of Markdown. These days I come across someone asking for “Markdown with Wiki support” literally almost daily, now that Roam has popularized the feature.

To put it another way: If people were already managing their notes in Markdown Wikis, and then Roam came along and added some additional valuable features that are more difficult to add to plain text, like back links and transclusion, then that would make sense. But what we have is people lamenting that Markdown doesn’t support Wiki links, when in reality, it already has its own form of them...

[devin]

This conversation is absolutely happening. Athens, for instance, is a clone of roam that is open source. It reminds me, however, of the conversation that happened about IRC vs Slack.

[slifin]

Athen looks like the first clone I've seen that understands the stack that makes roam viable

I hope they do well