I really think the user base would support @Erica doing this. I’ll put my money where my mouth is right now. 
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Okay I am reading that the first time and I am a bit surprised.
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I never want to add more work to anyone…but I think there is an amazing opportunity to borrow from the Dynalist history (great features, great community and great support). The world needs a competitor to Roam Research and I’d rather give @erica and @Shida my money than anyone else.
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I still prefer growing DynaList where it makes sense. My thought is if we get Clone, then having a command called Clone To… which gives a search dialog gets us pretty far towards a great knowledge management app within DynaList.
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I really don’t know what approach would make more sense (adding Roam features or starting over), but it is clear to me that Roam is on to something profound. The learning curve for Roam is much higher than for Dynalist, but as I delve into it I find myself using it more and more. One way to put it is that as you add more info to Roam it becomes more useful. While Dynalist can handle a lot of information elegantly, I feel like I have to spend more time re-organizing it to keep it under control… It might be interesting for @Erica and @Shida to do both: create a kind of playground app where they can try new ideas without the burden of legacy code, and at the same time try to implement these experiments back in Dynalist? If that makes any sense, I would be happy to support it!
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The underlying theme here is if organization of knowledge in a network or in a hierarchy is better. In my opinion this is the wrong approach to think about it. These two structures are not mutually exclusive, they can coexist. Hierarchies are effective for large-scale, slow-moving efforts while networks are good in small-scale, quickly changing situations.
Dynalists approach is to apply a network (with tags and links) on an underlying hierarchy while roam does the opposite. I personally think that the first approach makes more sense and can be applied to more use cases.
The drawback people see in the Dynalist approach is (like you wrote too) that they need to re-organize more in Dynalist. I think this is a sign that the system people are using is not optimal, not the tool. With the right system you need just one shortcut (CTRL+Shift+M) to move everything to the right place. Keywords here are P.A.R.A or the Zettelkasten method.
The lack of a real hierarchy in Roam makes it easier to use not necessarily better in the long run.
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Hierarchies are effective for large-scale, slow-moving efforts while networks are good in small-scale, quickly changing situations.
Yes, this gets at it perfectly. The world I work in requires me to constantly change and evolve my systems and I love that Roam has the flexibility to handle this. But I would also add that there is a lot of overlap and cross-fertilization between my various knowledge sets, and the Roam approach is useful for this as well. Thanks for helping clarify this.
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I’m of the same mind. It’s true that DynaList forces some kind of hierarchy on our data, but I’m not convinced that’s a bad thing. In the past when I’ve used sprawling wikis for my notes I often experience the nagging feeling of “missing something” – that there is information I’ve forgotten about and can’t find again except by luck. Having pages organized in a loose hierarchy helps me feel like everything is “in its place”.
“Cloning” would amp up DynaList’s capabilities tremendously. In my opinion, the main weakness of a hierarchy-based model is that often an item doesn’t fit in just one category, or have just one parent. Cloning would allow us to have multiple, curated, editable views of our data.
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Actually 2 seconds
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Actually that is a good point. Dynalist is more an sandbox where you can implement some roam functionality yourself while Roam presets a system for the user.
And I agree, cloning would be nice.
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Wow. This thread blew up quite a bit. But congrats on the launch of Obsidian and for taking the time to create a brand-new product in this space. I’m definitely going to try it out.
A friend of mine, Sam Ramji, once told me this pithy saying that I remember to this day: “it’s better to keep the cannibal in the family”
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Conor from Roam here.
Fwiw - I think one of the main things folks are missing is that we really lean on heirarchy as well.
In the backlinks section of each page, you see the hirarchy of each reference, and can use ALL the the other [[links and tags]] to filter for the subset/intersection of back-link references you’re interested in.
This is really enlightening conversation. Cool to see a bunch of familiar faces and see how you first heard about Roam.
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We officially announced pricing last night
Currently only Pro Plan (15/m, 165/y) or Believer Plan (500/5years. 8.33/m)… since we have huge waitlist and want to scale customer support team before having freemium.
Turns out was much bigger initial audience for tool - we thought we’d have to stay bunkered down with smaller professional knowledge worker base for first year to build sustainable company – which is why early ideas of pricing were higher.
Goal has always been to build a thinking tool for everyone, but wider the audience the more polish you need to teach new paradigm.
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We officially announced pricing last night
Currently only Pro Plan (15/m, 165/y) or Believer Plan (500/5years. 8.33/m)… since we have huge waitlist and want to scale customer support team before having freemium.
You should be good for that Dynalist Pro subscription now Conor 
Can strongly recommend it 
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totes, and nice to see you here. The key distinction for me is that everything until Roam forced every piece of work to exist in a single location. Roam lets me color outside those lines so I can embrace the good parts of hierarchy without being bound by it.
Well yesterday I finally got access to Roam and I have to admit after one day of use it was mind blowing. The sidebar (ahhh split screen as we would say here in dynaland) is a very efficient way to work when working on multiple documents or sections of a node. Really brilliant how they made it possible to have multiple documents visible in side bar.
I never understood the use of the backlink. Now I all I can say… I am not sure I can live with out it. The ability to interlink thoughts is very powerful.
Block referencing (aka transclusion in dynaland language) is as good as I imagined it would be. Totally reinvents the way you think about where data lives and is reused.
The ability to write a query in a node and have it renders content anywhere is an outliners time management dream come true.
So just a few features, and is a game changer.
Of course the price is outrageous. I can only hope the product rapidly improves. Missing some things (Outliner is inferior to Dynalist, the UI feels a little clunk, almost no UI configuration available without hacks, app documentation – or better said: what documentation? And no real central “user” community as we have here.
I didn’t want to write these thoughts, but after just a day of use, I rarely get this excited about a new piece of software and now understand why this thread is so long.
Frankly it makes me sad the team here didn’t combine the concept of Obsidian and Dynalist into a new tool. I think the Dynalist editor, along with the new knowledge and note taking capabilities of Obsidian would be very powerful competitor to Roam.
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Agreed. But I still hope this is the plan down the line.
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I have just joined on with Dynalist. I was looking at Roam. I will stay with Dynalist. I hope Dynalist maintains its updates but also does not try to get too complex. There is a market for the tool you have today that uses simplicity as an advantage. The prices should also be more appealing.
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This is a lot to read…I tried to skim for what Roam is but haven’t figured it out yet. They require your credit card info just to use a demo, which it fantastically dumb, but that’s another tangent.
I can’t find an explaination. Bidirectional relationships between nodes could mean any number of different things. Can someone explain like I’m 5 or show me a video?
I get what a tree and a graph are. It’s just heirarchal and nonheirarchal relationships.
But…you can literally hyperlink to any node from any node already in dynalist. Just becuase the underlying document is structured heirarchally doesn’t matter. You can write everything flat in a tree, or nested, whatever you want. And hyperlinks still work. So…dynalist is already “bi-directional” in functionality…just like the whole internets hyperlink graph is…so what’s Roam get you? You just lose the underlying tree? The tree you were already free to ignore? Sorry to ramble, just expressing my confusion, trying to wrap my mind around what they’re describing and thinking anyones gonna give their credit card over to.
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What are you saying child? The Emperor has no clothes on? 
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