Yes, backlinks is certainly of interest. I remember using them in the ill-fated Note Studio years ago.
But I think Dynalist is so far ahead of the pack, discussions about alternatives is more about the future development of Dynalist rather than serious competition. Some of us may use one of these for niche purposes, but it is far from being a replacement.
If anybody really wants to see the program, what it can do, the short videos are helpful, but the real meat is in the Help document. There you see all kinds of information arranged in an editable and very hyperlinked manner. Itās very interesting, but itās confusing to use, and being full of bugs at present just makes it more so. Iāll be watching to see how this develops.
Looks a bit like a combination of TiddlyWiki (which has been around for many years) and an outline. Not sure what the constraint of an outline adds, especially since the idea of TiddlyWiki is that itās free form. Itās a link maker rather than a list maker so I wouldnāt see it as a Dynalist or Workflowy competitor. Might be useful for students and researchers which seems to be the demographic theyāre pitching it at.
What outline adds is Workflowy style subdocument links, albeit powered up.
Yep, I think theyāre precisely targeting researchers, thus the name.
Dynalist is definitely better w.r.t. general outliner functionality. But I believe the backlinks/graph representation/automated concept definition (like described in https://twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/1190102758164066304) point at something interesting/important.
Would love to see a support of something like that in Dynalist! (is there a Trello card I can upvote for this one? 
Cross-references talks about something related too
Just did a bit more exploring and sharing the blocks of data + the inline versioning seems like a great idea too!
I think this card is the closest thing: https://trello.com/c/iKkPV6JK/151-show-all-mentions-of-an-internal-link
@Erica I think itās related but does not really capture the main value of the way Roam represent things, Iād recommend you to play with their demo workspace if you havenāt already
I have played with it, but unfortunately their demo/white paper is a bit messy right now. If you can give me some more specific pointers, like how to access the features you mentioned, that would be helpful! 
I really like the feature āRoam Sidebarā, but I wish it to be more sophisticated. For example, anything you shift-click will open the sidebar with correspond function (item -> item & childs, link -> webpage, tag -> all relate tagā¦). Right now I always have to open a new window if I donāt want to lose my place. It will be a great new Pro feature 
Hey, glad to see this thread!
Iāve also been trying out Roam and although it isnāt very polished, I definitely think its onto something new and important treating notes as a graph instead of a hierarchy and automation. I believe this is the paradigm that makes these features really intuitive and frictionless.
These are the features that have stood out to me. I would love to see more cross-pollination from other outliners, but I havenāt seen them implemented the same way anywhere else:
I love Dynalist and Iād be curious to hear if any of these features are in the pipeline or could beā¦ or canāt be done.
The backlinking setup is a good idea even for a more traditional hierarchical app like this, makes it easier to cross-pollinate pages and eg. build bibliography files (which is something Iāve been looking for for ages, to link authors and their writing together easily)
What I like most about Roam is that I can write almost anything and not have to organize the information. If I tag or link the subject(s) itās complete. This gives me a lot of confidence in the system that I wonāt lose or in frustration search for relevant notes. I donāt feel it is a trendy new feature. Itās a critical missing element in all note solutions.
Wow Iāve found another one that follows a very similar knowledge representation model to Roam (graph with easy way to crete and connect concepts, backlinks, transclusion, etc). But it also has spaced-repetition model (autogenerating cards from your knowledge graph) on top of that: https://www.remnote.io
UX is kind of clunky though.
There was a discussion on the Tinderbox forum around a report that the owner of Roam was looking at pricing the product at $30/month or $10,000 lifetime subscription. (Thatās not a typo.)
I agree. Dynalist is so far ahead of the competiotion.
Agree. Deeplinking or crossreferences or backlinking would be super usefull. For the time being the best workaround is using tags intentionally.
See my post here: Tag structure for Dynalist (GTD , Zettelkasten and SecondBrain )
Pricing isnt set in stone. The founder also mentioned that beta users will not pay full price if they create an account before the official launch. I would love to see Dynalist add backlinks feature like Roam has.
The wiki style creation of pages, using square brackets, is cool, of course. Whatās super powerful in Roam Research is:
Those are killer features for a knowledge system.
It would be feasible to do similar manually in Dynalist, or for Dynalist to add features like this. āHardestā would be dealing with the document space. New entries created by square bracket use would have to live in a sort of ānew pagesā document. People can leave them there. Of course once a user would move the page the links would break as weāre not really using words as the GUID but real GUIDās.
As for the price point: $30 USD is a lot of money. Itās more than a software + sync services subscription to TheBrain, which has been around forever. The founder really believes Roam brings so much value that it would merit that price point, even though he keeps the door open to possible changes.