#+begin_rant<p>I've been very very skeptical about Roam - I appreciate the sentiment behind it and the fact that it's making more people aware of networked thought but the marketing around it has been insane. Especially investor Twitter is raving about it for many weeks now about how the tool is a savior. It's almost as if they're doing it to increase user count to Roam to justify their investment, which is likely.<p>It often misses the point here - the idea of networked thought and note-taking is the key here. If you have the time and means to do it, you can always do so using something as simple as text files too.<p>Something that's as critical as a note-taking tool, the first rule of thumb should be - don't lose data! Agreed, it was the readwise integration that messed things up here but the snapshotted database approach has its own perils in the long run too. For the most part, one does not need constant sync-ups. And Roam doesn't even have a mobile app today - which means that most likely folks are just using their laptops to add notes.<p>If you're just starting out, I'd recommend using [Obsidian][<a href="https://obsidian.md" rel="nofollow">https://obsidian.md</a>] or if you have a little bit more time, explore the world of emacs via [org-mode][<a href="https://orgmode.org" rel="nofollow">https://orgmode.org</a>].<p>Roam might be a success or might not be :shrug:. Use something that works for you and your workflow. Don't engage in productivity porn and lose many hours.<p>#+end_rant
Roam is the app I love to hate. I love it, but I really wish a competitor was built with a focus purely on speed, security, and reliability (plus the roam innovative linked references and tagging). I suspect a large % of users are over served by all the intricate features and many just want something basic with bi directional links that’s fast, secure and reliable, which is exactly the disruption-ripe scenario Christensen describes.<p>Every time I use roam I have a slight fear in the back of my head it’s going to lose some of my notes or have a data breach.
> Importantly for us, Roam differs from other webapps in that it doesn't store all state and history in its backend. Instead, Roam's backend just stores a snapshotted Datascript database (updated ~daily as far as I can tell) and the list of transactions since that last snapshot.<p>If I'm reading this right...
A) OP was hosed if they didn't finish this within ~24 hours. That's fun.
B) I now know why Roam takes a long time to load -- it's replaying every edit I made since its last snapshot!<p>Edit:<p>> When a message is more than 16KB, it's split into multiple messages without wrapping - so we'll need to stitch these bigger messages together. One way to detect a non-split-message is to just try and parse it as JSON - if it's valid, we can say it's non-split. (There's an edge case we're unlikely to hit here: if the 16KB chunk just so happens to be valid JSON as well we'll be out of luck. Lucky for us, I didn't run into this!)<p>This is an extremely inconsequential detail to focus on, but I don't see the edge here at all. What's an example 16KB string that OP's method would actually fail to parse? (Maybe I'm failing to grok what "without wrapping" means here.)