It's also why I won't use them, because I see my notes as a decades-long project, and I have no guarantee they'll be there for long.
Plus I avoid anything that's associated with the word cult, and they quite literally refer to their community as a RoamCult. (The title of forum.roamresearch.com is "Roam Research - Home of RoamCult".)
It was mostly a joke meant to play off the idea that avoiding a cult because it's something like superstitious is itself a superstitious action.
But since the joke didn't go over and I'm in explainer mode anyway, the kernel of truth in the joke is simply that the word cult here is obviously a tongue in cheek reference to how excited the early adopters are about the tech, and acting like it's evidence of some deeper shadiness is probably assigning more meaning to the word/phenomenon than it deserves. And changing one's behavior as though the meaning they imagine is real, well... there's a word for that ;)
Having checked out both Roam Reserach and org-roam, I'm still surprised by the existence of the former.
The core idea is literally bolting backlinks on top of Workflowy. How is it you can make a business out of that? How is it that the idea is only now reaching viral popularity, even though its a rather obvious concept that had various well-known incarnations in the past (e.g. automated "pingbacks" on blogs in the 2000s), was fully conceptualized into an even better idea all the way back in the 1970s (Xanadu's transclusions), and probably traces its lineage all the way to ancient Sumeria. I sometimes don't understand the lifecycle of ideas and tools in our reality.
(That's not a jab at Roam Research folks. I congratulate them on building a successful piece of software. Though I'm not going to use it anyway, because I like to own my data.)
I think if you look at the landing page of Roam Research and org-roam you already know why the first one is popular with regular people and not the latter one.
I'm not surprised org-roam isn't going viral (and actually it is, within the population of org mode users!). I'm surprised you can make a startup out of a single, simple idea that is automatically tracking backlinks.
To borrow a phrase from discussions around Dropbox, this most definitely is a feature, not a product.
It's definitely just a feature - but a very liberating one. Not having to worry so much about how you organize your files and where to put stuff is such a relief.
But I think it's too early to call roam, the startup, a success. It has some mindshare, but the product has no defensibility. It's not that complex. A competent developer can probably build a clone of Roam in 1-2 months of full-time work. A lot of copycats have started already and I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years it's not Roam that has won but just another copycat that had a better UI. Kind of reminds of how Slack killed that other app before it... was it... hipchat?
I tried it and loved it but the pricing model and fact that it is hosted made me stop using it. I have nothing against either choice, they are just not right for me.
The takeout option lets you download a copy of your files at any time but they also often have sync issues, etc. As far as I can tell, they make heavy use of local browser storage which syncs to a cloud back up. People keep seeing data loss (or did when I stopped following them) when this connection fails. Is it growing pains? Yes, probably. Is it right for me when this risk can lead to data loss and not just a conflict resolution process? No.
I do wish them luck and am looking forward to the various local clones getting better (org-roam, Obsidian, etc... no shortage).
I've been using it daily for a few months and haven't had a single issue. Perhaps the server load also went down when they introduced the pricing. I do download my data every few days or so just in case.
Personally I'm not a fan of the company, culture, and the cult-like following Roam has. I hope somebody else succeeds and takes over the market and I'll move there. But so far roam is the best life/knowledge management app I've used, and I've tried a lot of them.
Plus I avoid anything that's associated with the word cult, and they quite literally refer to their community as a RoamCult. (The title of forum.roamresearch.com is "Roam Research - Home of RoamCult".)