Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 35

github.com/foambubble/foam impressive.

Open source Roam Research clone.

Markdown based, Visual Studio Code based.

Template project: github.com/foambubble/foam-template.

Publishing possible but not mandatory focus, main focus is self notes. Publishing guide at: foambubble.github.io/foam/user/recipes/recipes.html#publish Related: jackiexiao.github.io/foam/reference/publishing-pages/.

They seem to use graphs more than trees which will complicate publication.

TODO are IDs might be correctly implemented and independent from source file location? Are there any examples? github.com/foambubble/foam/issues/512

A CLI tool at: github.com/foambubble/foam-cli

A list of reviews of such systems is maintained at:

This is the class of existing software the perhaps comes the closest to OurBigBook, in particular systems such as:

While we believe that OurBigBook can hold its own against most of them as a personal knowledge base, there is one feature which we believe truly distinguishes OurBigBook from all others in a big way: trustless mind meld with the OurBigBook topic feature, which no other system seems to have.

Many such systems are also no publishing focused enough, and are more focused only in maintaining people's private knowledge bases. Some of them don't even have publishing at all, or its complicated. While publishing is optional in OurBigBook, it is a crucial feature and extremely well supported.

Long story short, the project is so far a complete failure on the most important metric: number of regular users, which current sits at exactly one: myself.

There were notable users who found the project online and who actually tried to use the website for some content and provided extremely valuable feedback:Unfortunately after the period of a few weeks they stopped using it to follow their other priorities instead. Which is of course totally fine, however sad.

I still believe that the OurBigBook Web feature is a significant tech innovation that could make the website go big.

I also believe that the project gets many fundamentals of braindumping right, notably the infinitely deep table of contents without forced scoping, e.g.:does not make Calculus have an ID orr URL of mathematics/calculus, rather it's just calculus.

But there is a fundamental difficulty in reaching critical mass to that self-sustaining point, as people don't seem to be convinced by these logical "my system is better" argument alone, as opposed to having them Google into stuff they need now and then understand that the project is awesome.

A closely related critical mass issue is that existing big multiuser knowledge base websites such as Stack Overflow and Wikipedia have a tremendous advantage on PageRank. No matter how useless a Wikipedia article about something is, it will always be on top of Google within a week of creation for title hits. And since the main goal of publishing your stuff is to get it seen, it makes much more sense for writers to publish on such existing websites whenever possible, because anywhere else it is way way less likely to be seen by anybody.

Even I end up writing way more on Stack Overflow than on OurBigBook as a programmer. But I still believe that there is a value to OurBigBook, for the usual reasons of:

Perhaps what saddens me the most is that even on GitHub stars/Twitter/Hacker news terms there is almost no interest in the project despite the fact that I consider that it has innovations, while many other note taking apps as well in the thousands of stars. Maybe I'm just delusional and all the tech that I'm doing is completely useless?

Part of the issue is probably linked to the fact that most other note taking apps focus on "help me organize my ideas so I can make more money" and often completely ignore "I want to publish my knowledge", and stuff that helps you make money is always easier to sell and promote.

OurBigBook on the other hand a huge focus on "I want to publish me knowledge". It aims almost single mindedly in being the best tool ever for that. However this doesn't make money for people, and therefore there are going to be way less potential users.

I do believe strongly that all it takes is a few users for the project to snowball. For some people, once you start braindumping, it is very addictive, and you never want to stop basically. So with only a few of those we can open large parts of undergrad knowledge to the world. But these people are few, and so far I haven't been able to find even a single one like me, and on top of that convince them that I have created the ultimate system for their knowledge publishing desires.

Another general lesson is that I should perhaps aimed for greater compatibility with existing systems such as Obsidian. Taking something that many people already know and use can have a huge impact on acceptance. E.g. anything that touches Obsidian can reach thousands of stars: github.com/KosmosisDire/obsidian-webpage-export. Note taking apps that aim for "markdown" compatibility also tend to fare better, even if in the end you inevitably have to extend the Markdown for some of your features. And WYSIWYG, which I want but don't have, is perhaps the ultimate familiarity.

Another issue compared to other platforms is that OurBigBook just came out late. Obsidian launched in 2020. Roam Research and Trillium Notes also came earlier. And it is hard to fight the advantage already gained by those on the "I'm going to take some personal notes" area. I do believe however that there a strong separation between "these are my personal notes" and "I want to publish these". Once you decide to publish your knowledge, you immediately start to write in a different way, and it is very hard to convert pre-existing "private" notes into ones suitable for public consumption.