%% Related: - %% # Why I left Roam Research for Obsidian ## The video <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AWUk8-6yG2g" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> ## Timestamps 0:00 Intro 0:21 Owning my own data 01:56 Future-proofing 03:25 Organizing vs creating 05:00 Performance 05:48 Community and Ethics 07:22 Bonus reason: Pricing ## Transcript 1 00:00:00,180 --> 00:00:02,610 - I discovered Roam Research a couple years ago 2 00:00:02,610 --> 00:00:04,730 and immediately drank the Kool-Aid. 3 00:00:04,730 --> 00:00:07,170 I wrote thousands of notes in my Roam graph. 4 00:00:07,170 --> 00:00:09,050 I wrote articles about Roam 5 00:00:09,050 --> 00:00:11,550 I paid for the five-year Believer plan, 6 00:00:11,550 --> 00:00:14,550 and I'm even a small personal investor of Roam. 7 00:00:14,550 --> 00:00:17,180 So if anything, I stand to gain money 8 00:00:17,180 --> 00:00:19,160 from more people using Roam. 9 00:00:19,160 --> 00:00:21,450 Here's why I left it for Obsidian. 10 00:00:21,450 --> 00:00:22,910 First is data ownership. 11 00:00:22,910 --> 00:00:25,590 But what does it mean to own your own notes? 12 00:00:25,590 --> 00:00:28,690 For me, that partly means being able to access my notes 13 00:00:28,690 --> 00:00:31,810 at any time, whether I'm online or offline. 14 00:00:31,810 --> 00:00:33,500 With Obsidian, this isn't a problem, 15 00:00:33,500 --> 00:00:36,710 because it stores your notes as local files, 16 00:00:36,710 --> 00:00:37,610 so it doesn't matter 17 00:00:37,610 --> 00:00:39,900 whether you have an internet connection or not. 18 00:00:39,900 --> 00:00:42,930 In contrast, Roam stores your notes on their servers. 19 00:00:42,930 --> 00:00:45,530 So first you need to connect to the internet 20 00:00:45,530 --> 00:00:47,340 and then log into your Roam account 21 00:00:47,340 --> 00:00:49,880 before you can access your own notes. 22 00:00:49,880 --> 00:00:52,380 This isn't a problem until there's data loss. 23 00:00:52,380 --> 00:00:55,510 And there were issues that Roam experienced early on. 24 00:00:55,510 --> 00:00:58,430 Personally, the thought of working on something for hours, 25 00:00:58,430 --> 00:01:00,480 which I do very regularly, 26 00:01:00,480 --> 00:01:03,350 and then losing it all was unacceptable. 27 00:01:03,350 --> 00:01:04,830 I wanna add here that there is a way 28 00:01:04,830 --> 00:01:07,400 that you can access Roam notes offline, 29 00:01:07,400 --> 00:01:10,340 but you have to pay for the $500 Believer plan, 30 00:01:10,340 --> 00:01:12,870 And even then, those notes are only stored 31 00:01:12,870 --> 00:01:14,850 in your local browser cache, 32 00:01:14,850 --> 00:01:16,010 so if you clear that, 33 00:01:16,010 --> 00:01:18,030 well, your notes are gone anyway. 34 00:01:18,030 --> 00:01:20,360 The ultimate test for whether or not you own your data 35 00:01:20,360 --> 00:01:22,130 is trying to migrate off of it. 36 00:01:22,130 --> 00:01:23,800 When I tried to do that with Roam, 37 00:01:23,800 --> 00:01:27,320 I realized that all the PDFs and images that I had saved 38 00:01:27,320 --> 00:01:29,960 onto my notes were actually being saved 39 00:01:29,960 --> 00:01:32,600 on Roam's Google Firebase account. 40 00:01:32,600 --> 00:01:35,120 I actually had to create my own Python script 41 00:01:35,120 --> 00:01:38,110 to parse my notes, grab those Firebase URLs, 42 00:01:38,110 --> 00:01:40,253 download the data, and finally save it 43 00:01:40,253 --> 00:01:42,440 into my Obsidian vault. 44 00:01:42,440 --> 00:01:44,700 I can't help but think that if I ever wanted to stop 45 00:01:44,700 --> 00:01:47,970 using Obsidian, all I'd have to do is not open 46 00:01:47,970 --> 00:01:49,580 the Obsidian app anymore. 47 00:01:49,580 --> 00:01:52,423 I would still have all of my files on my laptop 48 00:01:52,423 --> 00:01:54,340 exactly where I'd left them, 49 00:01:54,340 --> 00:01:56,470 which brings me to my next point. 50 00:01:56,470 --> 00:01:58,550 My second reason for switching to Obsidian 51 00:01:58,550 --> 00:02:00,010 is futureproofing. 52 00:02:00,010 --> 00:02:02,550 I used to think that the notes that I'm writing now 53 00:02:02,550 --> 00:02:06,210 would only ever be useful right now and in this context, 54 00:02:06,210 --> 00:02:07,670 but that's not true. 55 00:02:07,670 --> 00:02:10,520 After more than a decade of my career, 56 00:02:10,520 --> 00:02:13,140 and also just a lifetime of taking notes, 57 00:02:13,140 --> 00:02:15,170 I've realized I forget things. 58 00:02:15,170 --> 00:02:16,750 I forget things a lot. 59 00:02:16,750 --> 00:02:18,920 And so, any of the notes that I write now 60 00:02:18,920 --> 00:02:22,440 have to be accessible and searchable and usable 61 00:02:22,440 --> 00:02:24,400 to me in 10 years. 62 00:02:24,400 --> 00:02:26,610 And Obsidian does that really well 63 00:02:26,610 --> 00:02:29,020 because everything is held in plain text. 64 00:02:29,020 --> 00:02:30,790 Even now, if I had to use Obsidian, 65 00:02:30,790 --> 00:02:32,920 I'd still be able to access those notes. 66 00:02:32,920 --> 00:02:36,000 Here it is in VS Code, my IDE of choice. 67 00:02:36,000 --> 00:02:38,470 Here's another IDE I use, Atom. 68 00:02:38,470 --> 00:02:40,030 Obsidian also works really well 69 00:02:40,030 --> 00:02:41,630 with GitHub repositories. 70 00:02:41,630 --> 00:02:42,850 I do this a lot for work 71 00:02:42,850 --> 00:02:45,167 because we have lot of our internal documentation 72 00:02:45,167 --> 00:02:47,180 on GitHub repositories. 73 00:02:47,180 --> 00:02:50,130 The cool thing is my coworkers don't even have to know 74 00:02:50,130 --> 00:02:51,430 that I'm using Obsidian. 75 00:02:51,430 --> 00:02:54,030 They do anyway, because I can't stop talking about it, 76 00:02:54,030 --> 00:02:55,400 but they don't have to. 77 00:02:55,400 --> 00:02:57,110 There isn't anything that says 78 00:02:57,110 --> 00:02:59,120 that you have to be able to use Obsidian 79 00:02:59,120 --> 00:03:02,070 to read Obsidian notes, because Obsidian notes 80 00:03:02,070 --> 00:03:03,860 are just markdown files. 81 00:03:03,860 --> 00:03:08,700 Now Roam uses markdown, but it is a Roam-flavored markdown, 82 00:03:08,700 --> 00:03:11,210 which means that there's a lot of proprietary 83 00:03:11,210 --> 00:03:13,770 formats that really aren't going to make sense 84 00:03:13,770 --> 00:03:15,580 anywhere other than in Roam. 85 00:03:15,580 --> 00:03:17,420 Here's what my notes look like 86 00:03:17,420 --> 00:03:20,020 when I first migrated them from Roam. 87 00:03:20,020 --> 00:03:22,850 So they still needed considerable reformatting 88 00:03:22,850 --> 00:03:25,470 to be useful anywhere else. 89 00:03:25,470 --> 00:03:27,510 Number three is learning in public. 90 00:03:27,510 --> 00:03:29,960 I am a big proponent of the theory 91 00:03:29,960 --> 00:03:32,070 that in order to learn something, 92 00:03:32,070 --> 00:03:34,500 you have to create something new from it. 93 00:03:34,500 --> 00:03:37,440 And sometimes that means just documenting the process 94 00:03:37,440 --> 00:03:38,670 as you're learning. 95 00:03:38,670 --> 00:03:40,570 With Roam, this is a little bit finicky. 96 00:03:40,570 --> 00:03:42,780 There is a way to expose your Roam graph, 97 00:03:42,780 --> 00:03:45,950 but it is so slow and unusable. 98 00:03:45,950 --> 00:03:48,140 And it's in a format that most people 99 00:03:48,140 --> 00:03:49,920 aren't really going to understand. 100 00:03:49,920 --> 00:03:52,970 This is partly because of the fundamental divergence 101 00:03:52,970 --> 00:03:56,330 in the formatting of Roam's notes versus Obsidian. 102 00:03:56,330 --> 00:03:58,540 In Roam, every single thing that you write 103 00:03:58,540 --> 00:04:01,420 will be a bullet point of some sort, 104 00:04:01,420 --> 00:04:04,200 and in Obsidian, you can use bullet points, 105 00:04:04,200 --> 00:04:07,020 but you can also just use prose. 106 00:04:07,020 --> 00:04:10,670 You can have paragraphs upon paragraphs of information, 107 00:04:10,670 --> 00:04:13,460 which means that it's a lot easier to share that. 108 00:04:13,460 --> 00:04:16,630 I publish a large part of my Obsidian vault online 109 00:04:16,630 --> 00:04:18,230 using Obsidian Publish. 110 00:04:18,230 --> 00:04:20,260 I'll put the link to that in the description 111 00:04:20,260 --> 00:04:21,810 so you can poke around. 112 00:04:21,810 --> 00:04:23,540 And even though they're still messy 113 00:04:23,540 --> 00:04:24,780 because they're my notes, 114 00:04:24,780 --> 00:04:27,480 they're still in a very readable format. 115 00:04:27,480 --> 00:04:30,020 They're not in this weird, bulleted thing 116 00:04:30,020 --> 00:04:32,790 that makes sense to nobody but me. 117 00:04:32,790 --> 00:04:34,090 If you want to publish your notes, 118 00:04:34,090 --> 00:04:36,820 but you don't wanna use the service Obsidian Publish, 119 00:04:36,820 --> 00:04:37,930 that's okay too. 120 00:04:37,930 --> 00:04:40,060 Just grab those files and use 121 00:04:40,060 --> 00:04:42,220 some sort of static site generator - 122 00:04:42,220 --> 00:04:44,470 I'm partial to Hugo myself - 123 00:04:44,470 --> 00:04:46,350 and you're off to the races. 124 00:04:46,350 --> 00:04:47,940 I've found Obsidian in general 125 00:04:47,940 --> 00:04:51,050 to be focused on publishing, on creating, 126 00:04:51,050 --> 00:04:52,660 on sharing what you've learned. 127 00:04:52,660 --> 00:04:55,990 Whereas Roam is better for just working in the corner, 128 00:04:55,990 --> 00:04:58,790 doing your own thing and coming up with a system 129 00:04:58,790 --> 00:05:00,940 that nobody will ever understand. 130 00:05:00,940 --> 00:05:03,000 Number four is performance. 131 00:05:03,000 --> 00:05:03,833 I can't help it. 132 00:05:03,833 --> 00:05:05,570 I am a performance tester. 133 00:05:05,570 --> 00:05:07,420 I care about how fast my tools are, 134 00:05:07,420 --> 00:05:09,990 because I don't think that they should be getting in the way 135 00:05:09,990 --> 00:05:11,980 of me actually doing my work. 136 00:05:11,980 --> 00:05:14,780 You know how I said earlier that in Roam Research 137 00:05:14,780 --> 00:05:17,220 everything you write is a bullet point? 138 00:05:17,220 --> 00:05:19,060 Well, it's not just a bullet point. 139 00:05:19,060 --> 00:05:22,800 Every bullet point is actually an entry in a database. 140 00:05:22,800 --> 00:05:25,210 Now, that sounds cool because you can do some, 141 00:05:25,210 --> 00:05:29,196 admittedly, very cool block referencing and block embedding 142 00:05:29,196 --> 00:05:33,250 at a level that Obsidian hasn't quite gotten to yet. 143 00:05:33,250 --> 00:05:35,860 But, the downside is that there are significant 144 00:05:35,860 --> 00:05:38,340 performance disadvantages for that. 145 00:05:38,340 --> 00:05:41,870 Here's an awesome site that has done a lot of benchmarks 146 00:05:41,870 --> 00:05:44,640 for many personal knowledge management tools. 147 00:05:44,640 --> 00:05:45,620 And guess what? 148 00:05:45,620 --> 00:05:48,720 Obsidian was 100 times better than the competition. 149 00:05:48,720 --> 00:05:51,120 Number five is community and ethics. 150 00:05:51,120 --> 00:05:52,860 I intentionally said in the intro 151 00:05:52,860 --> 00:05:54,300 that when I discovered Roam. 152 00:05:54,300 --> 00:05:57,510 I drank the Kool-Aid because when you sign up to Roam, 153 00:05:57,510 --> 00:05:59,851 you're said to be part of the Roam cult, 154 00:05:59,851 --> 00:06:02,130 and that's very telling. 155 00:06:02,130 --> 00:06:04,920 The Roam team also has an unfortunate history 156 00:06:04,920 --> 00:06:06,950 of banning those that don't agree with them. 157 00:06:06,950 --> 00:06:08,040 Here's something on Reddit 158 00:06:08,040 --> 00:06:09,810 about how many users were banned 159 00:06:09,810 --> 00:06:11,506 from the Roam Research sub Reddit 160 00:06:11,506 --> 00:06:14,090 for not much of anything. 161 00:06:14,090 --> 00:06:16,580 On Twitter I've also seen some puzzling instances 162 00:06:16,580 --> 00:06:20,070 of arrogance or elitism on the part of the Roam team 163 00:06:20,070 --> 00:06:23,010 and in particular, their founder, Conor White[-Sullivan], 164 00:06:23,010 --> 00:06:27,470 in response to very innocuous questions about users 165 00:06:27,470 --> 00:06:31,710 maybe not understanding Roam or just asking questions. 166 00:06:31,710 --> 00:06:33,870 In contrast, the Obsidian community 167 00:06:33,870 --> 00:06:37,840 has been nothing but inclusive and warm and friendly, 168 00:06:37,840 --> 00:06:39,800 and the two developers, by the way, 169 00:06:39,800 --> 00:06:41,820 they're only two developers on Obsidian, 170 00:06:41,820 --> 00:06:44,170 which is really impressive, 171 00:06:44,170 --> 00:06:46,860 but they are active on the discord channels 172 00:06:46,860 --> 00:06:49,600 and I've personally interacted with them, 173 00:06:49,600 --> 00:06:52,070 and they've both been very thoughtful and receptive 174 00:06:52,070 --> 00:06:56,220 to constructive criticism or me reporting bugs. 175 00:06:56,220 --> 00:06:58,990 I also really like that there are a lot of initiatives 176 00:06:58,990 --> 00:07:02,350 that are community-led that are around Obsidian. 177 00:07:02,350 --> 00:07:04,470 There's the Obsidian Community Talks, 178 00:07:04,470 --> 00:07:06,780 which is a series of presentations 179 00:07:06,780 --> 00:07:10,020 by regular users of Obsidian, including me, 180 00:07:10,020 --> 00:07:13,980 because I spoke about how I use Obsidian for D&D. 181 00:07:13,980 --> 00:07:16,380 But it gives you the sense that the communication 182 00:07:16,380 --> 00:07:17,430 is two-way. 183 00:07:17,430 --> 00:07:20,140 That I am also helping Obsidian 184 00:07:20,140 --> 00:07:22,510 by participating in this community. 185 00:07:22,510 --> 00:07:23,570 Those were my five, 186 00:07:23,570 --> 00:07:25,030 but here's a bonus because I know 187 00:07:25,030 --> 00:07:27,250 this will be a deal breaker for a lot of people, 188 00:07:27,250 --> 00:07:28,730 and that's pricing. 189 00:07:28,730 --> 00:07:31,350 Roam Research hosts all of your notes, 190 00:07:31,350 --> 00:07:32,480 and part of that means 191 00:07:32,480 --> 00:07:36,280 that they incur more costs than Obsidian does. 192 00:07:36,280 --> 00:07:40,810 As a result, Roam costs $15 a month on the monthly plan 193 00:07:40,810 --> 00:07:44,810 or $13.75 if you're on the annual subscription. 194 00:07:44,810 --> 00:07:46,550 Then if you paid for the Believer plan, 195 00:07:46,550 --> 00:07:50,040 like I did, that's $500 for five years, 196 00:07:50,040 --> 00:07:54,410 which is probably their cheapest plan at about $8 a month. 197 00:07:54,410 --> 00:07:55,630 Obsidian on the other hand 198 00:07:55,630 --> 00:07:57,680 is completely free for personal use. 199 00:07:57,680 --> 00:08:00,560 You can pay a little bit more on their Catalyst plan. 200 00:08:00,560 --> 00:08:01,910 That's just to give them something 201 00:08:01,910 --> 00:08:03,510 to support their development. 202 00:08:03,510 --> 00:08:06,510 Or if you're using Obsidian for your business, 203 00:08:06,510 --> 00:08:08,040 then you pay for the Commercial plan. 204 00:08:08,040 --> 00:08:11,170 And then you also have add-ons like Obsidian Publish 205 00:08:11,170 --> 00:08:12,510 and Obsidian Sync. 206 00:08:12,510 --> 00:08:15,400 But those are by no means necessary 207 00:08:15,400 --> 00:08:17,180 to get all of the features 208 00:08:17,180 --> 00:08:19,280 that Obsidian brings to your life. 209 00:08:19,280 --> 00:08:21,542 You'll get all the access to plugins 210 00:08:21,542 --> 00:08:25,000 and all of the community features for nothing. 211 00:08:25,000 --> 00:08:27,490 I can't help but question Roam's value. 212 00:08:27,490 --> 00:08:29,690 Look, I'm not here to tell you which tool 213 00:08:29,690 --> 00:08:31,590 is unequivocably best for you. 214 00:08:31,590 --> 00:08:33,300 You're still gonna have to try them both out 215 00:08:33,300 --> 00:08:35,140 and make a decision for yourself. 216 00:08:35,140 --> 00:08:37,100 But despite hundreds of hours 217 00:08:37,100 --> 00:08:39,050 that I've invested into Roam, 218 00:08:39,050 --> 00:08:42,680 not to mention $1,500 of my own money, 219 00:08:42,680 --> 00:08:45,620 Obsidian is clearly, hands down, 220 00:08:45,620 --> 00:08:48,760 the better tool for me across all categories, 221 00:08:48,760 --> 00:08:51,772 even if I may be losing money by saying so. 222 00:08:51,772 --> 00:08:54,241 Thanks for watching. [Tagalog] Thank you!