Goodbye Roam

I love Roam Research.

I love it so much that I am quitting it.

I used it since last April and collected tons of information about people I met, activities I did, thoughts I had. It became my second brain as it was promised. Too much, far too much for leaving this brain unencrypted on a distant server in unknown hands at a startup.

I warned me in August but I did not listen.

Time to be serious.

I already had bad experiences with cloud services. I have tons of data on Google Drive that I cannot delete anymore (ghosted). There is no-one to call there to help me. I must pay every month for a tier I do not need because of data I cannot access, for sticking to a mail address.

I must admit, without hard evidences, that I think some contents disappeared from my Roam. When suspicion settles, it is time to change

I want my data on my Mac, on my servers, on my backup hard drives. Encrypted!! I want to be in control.

Now, beyond this I have concerns about Roam Research itself. Since April, there was no real progress in the product except useless gadgets features (scientific graphing, pomodoro, and other prouesses...) that Conor (Roam's cofounder) announces in endless buzzing discussions on social networks. They are useless to me (and probably to many others), when we expect a serious mobile way to capture our thoughts on the go.

I also question the company's capability to raise money in an increasingly crowded market (now I wrote the same thing about Twitter in 2007...). Time is clocking on the stall roadmap. Disaster ahead?

To be fair, I must blame myself for not leveraging Roam at its maximum. I spend my day on Roam, I collect tons of ideas, and data. I have built a fairly big dataset... but I cannot find anything in it when I search. Roam creates a huge mess out of the data because there is not tagging, no folder.

Searching and finding is the core feature of such a tool, don't you think ?

I cannot leverage bi-directional links between topics. I created a large neural database but nothing comes out of this labor. The second brain is not so creative.

Now, those months with Roam totally changed my way of thinking personal knowledge management. When reading my notes in Obsidian, I see how naive and unexperimented I was. I also now look at DEVONthink with a totally new eye. I changed my setup in those tools to mimick somehow the Roam experience. DEVONthink now makes a far better job in linking ideas than Roam. Sorry to tell Conor.

Where do we go now?

As knowledge grows daily, as value grows exponentially with bi-directional linking, local, safe and private storage is an absolute must. Loosing years of connections would be a disaster.

As the value of the knowledge management turns gold with time it is better to invest what will remain on the long run.

For me, it is industry standard format (.md), in folders, on my machine, managed with Obsidian + the beautiful A.I. technology of DEVONthink (who brought bi-directional linking too in their version 3). Yeah DEVON is less cool, but it is future-proof.

Obsidian is the creative tool for transient content. DEVONthink is the rock-solid repository for the next 10 years to come, with OCR, ePub searching, tags, bi-directional linking, folders, clippers, iOS apps, etc.

Using Roam Research, typing notes in this system remains a magic experience. Far better than Obsidian to my taste. I love Roam's simple and basic interface design. I love opening it every morning and starting my daily notes. It brings me joy. But one must be reasonable: privacy, security, searchability and sustainability are more important.

So long, Roam, I loved you.