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Posted by Dr Andus
May 16, 2021 at 10:39 PM
Franz Grieser wrote:
@Stephen:
>Roam is a silo, Obsidian isn’t.
You can export all your Roam notes as markdown files though, so there is no lock-in in that sense.There was some talk of Roam API coming at some point as well.
Posted by Simon
May 17, 2021 at 04:28 PM
Of course it does depend on what you mean by “silo”. Text can be extracted from any app. I don’t use Roam or Obsidian, but from what I’ve read, everyone loves the linkage between the notes and the tagging. You may be able to export all your md files, but if all those connections no longer work you have a problem. I had this when I used to use Ulysses and they had their bespoke version of markdown. Yes I could export all my text, but lot’s of functionality was lost.
If an app is classed as not being siloed because it can simply export the text, then most proprietary apps aren’t silos. I would question how useful this is with thousands of interlinked notes?
Posted by satis
May 17, 2021 at 10:03 PM
Simon wrote:
> I had this when I used to use Ulysses
>and they had their bespoke version of markdown. Yes I could export all
>my text, but lot’s of functionality was lost.
The default choice in Ulysses is their own Markdown XL, because features Ulysses provides like Comments, Annotations, local image and other (notes, goals) embedding, Delete are not part of the original Markdown syntax.
But if you don’t want to use those you can change it easily in Edit > Convert Markup, letting you choose between Markdown XL, regular Markdown, Minimark, Textile’d… or even your own custom variant, like grafting citations to documents.
https://ulysses.app/answers/reference-managers
Personally the only thing I dislike about Markdown XL is the lack of an option to always show URLs when writing. But I got used to the more WYSIWYG view.
Posted by Dr Andus
May 17, 2021 at 10:51 PM
Simon wrote:
Of course it does depend on what you mean by “silo”. Text can be
>extracted from any app. I don’t use Roam or Obsidian, but from what I’ve
>read, everyone loves the linkage between the notes and the tagging. You
>may be able to export all your md files, but if all those connections no
>longer work you have a problem. I had this when I used to use Ulysses
>and they had their bespoke version of markdown. Yes I could export all
>my text, but lot’s of functionality was lost.
You have a point.
But your post made me look into my Roam export file and I was quite happy with what I saw.
As each link is denoted by the [[double brackets]] and the content within the double brackets is the name of the md file, it is not too hard to follow manually the links, as one just needs to look through the alphabetical list to find the target of the given link.
It would be usable even as a paper-based Zettelkasten, if it was printed out. It’s essentially a simple library reference system.
I was also happy to see that the outline hierarchy of the individual ‘blocks’ as they’re called (within a page) was also preserved.
Granted, I’m a very simple Roam user, I don’t use aliases often or build any fancy query pages. Those automatically rendered pages might get lost.