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 my profile picture.

Being in a software community, especially so early on in the program’s lifetime, is a weird experience. The app is being developed in front of your eyes and you can even influence its direction. You can complain to its creators and they may sometimes answer to you. You get also new virtual friends/influencers, you can join a Slack channel and you start to get direct messages on Twitter with questions on how to solve one or another problem in the program — you are “INSIDE” the community.

However, Roam is not just an ordinary piece of software. It was arguably the app that made so-called bi-directional linking mainstream and outliners cool again. At least in the Twittersphere, there was quite a big hype around it. Groundbreaking character of Roam is also apparent in the fact that its inception gave life and inspiration to so many other apps: probably most notably to ObsidianMD, but also to others, like Logseq or…