Roam: Being a Part Of a Community

And When Roam Community Is Accused of Being Unhealthy

I have never been a part of any community around a piece of software. Why should I be? This is not a normal experience for average users of Microsoft Word or Chrome. These programs are simply too big and we come to them as users too late. We might ask a question or two on an internet forum but very few of us will ever go beyond that. We are just users.

Roam is the first software community I am a part of — without any previous plan or intent. It simply happened to me by chance. I discovered Roam when it was still in the beta phase, I started to like it, I needed some help and thus opened a Twitter account with a pretty random name, and posted two questions.

My first Tweet was never answered at that time, but the second one about :hiccup got and it all :).

One of these two questions was answered and I was hooked. I started to experiment with HTML and CSS in Roam, I was noticed by Ramses Oudt who gave me a shout-out (is that the right word?) and I was in… Since then I created a lot of small custom CSS experiments, even some simple JavaScript plugins that become obsolete, a browser extension, and started to write here on Medium. And I became a duck — if you don’t believe me, look at…