on "Roam’s road ahead"
(divinations.substack.com)
If you take a bong rip and close your eyes, you can imagine a world where Roam is a new sort of internet. Where people can publish ideas and reference each other’s ideas in deep, interlinked ways. It’d be like a giant public brain, instead of a private second brain.
^ This 1000%! They're completely missing the broader contextualization of Vannevar Bush's Memex idea.
At it's core, Roam and many of it's competitors are simply notebooks or commonplace books that one can use to collect and interlink one's ideas for future use and honing. The bi-directional links are incredibly powerful.
The piece they're missing (and most are missing) is what if my commonplace book can talk to your commonplace book? One could use the W3C Webmention standard to do notifications from one notebook to another and build the ability to do transclusion of these ideas within notebooks. This is even better than group "notebooks" since everyone can have their own copies.
Incidentally, I've started piping my Hypothes.is feed into my personal notebook (I'm using Obsidian.md, which is similar in flavor to Roam, but seems a bit more flexible in its data ownership model). One of the problems all of these platforms have is getting data from other web pages, books, and miscellaneous sources into one's notebook to do something with. H is a beautiful, intuitive, and nearly perfect method for doing this. It also has the side benefit of my being able to do something much more powerful with my annotations and highlights after-the-fact. I wish I'd had these tools when I was a student.