I’m probably even worse at managing and recruiting than design or engineering!
A better CEO would almost certainly have grown our team faster, and managed the great staff we have more effectively
In that world we’d have even better collaboration and “Trust No One” security
As it stands, we have best in class security, but the class includes folks like Google, Facebook, and every run of the mill tech company that wants to mine your data to serve you ads.
We’re explicit in our terms of service that Roam will not read your notes, but code beats law.
We’re working as fast as we can, and I’m doing best I can to level up my own abilities as a leader, and the collective intelligence of our team and community.
Open questions like E2EE may take time, but one thing we can do near term is turn local-only graphs on for all accounts.
Local-only graphs still aren’t where I want them to be, they’re still based on browser storage so it is possible to wipe your data.. but
Local notes never touch our servers
you can turn on hourly backups to text
And if you’re using only Roam core, that’s TNO level security
I’ve been a bit of a perfectionist here, and wanted to wait for a few other things - like our desktop app - to ship
But I’m fairly confident this is a change we can start rolling out tonight — and if local graphs are good enough for @patrickc they’re prob good enough for you too
So @phonetoroam is probably the @RoamResearch js extension that has had the biggest impact on my workflow so far.
Uses a simple and elegant "hack" to do things I had not imagined possible
If you've been waiting for our backend API, you'll want to know about this
Quick thread
The problem:
Roam is still running off the local first architecture I developed in 2017 to optimize for rapid iteration and a snappy editing experience
The backend is an event stream of edits, all logic of the graphs is on the frontend
There isn't a server in traditional sense
This is one of the reasons large graphs in Roam can be slow to load initially, but consistently have snappy editing -- we optimized for the writing and collaboration experience at the expense of being a great tool for publishing your ideas (at this stage)
We listened to 8 hour podcast about an actual cult on this drive... and it could not be MORE different from the values of @RoamResearch and our community
I love tongue in cheek humor and the history of #roamcult, but believe it’s time we set an example [[Taking Words Seriously]]
They seek to control and manipulate members, break bonds, isolate people from friends and family, destroy the individuals faith in themselves, and to be an unchallengeable fountain of “truth” that their adherents never question.
In every way, Roam seeks to do and be the opposite of all those things.
But the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves matter - and jokes are often most funny when they are half true
And sometimes the things that are fun in your youth and just plain irresponsible as you grow