I’m getting indications that it is a bit contrary to the culture. The coolest feature about Roam and Logseq is bidirectionally linked block-based graph traversal. Early evangelists are super-excited about this, and kind of dump on earlier (millennia old) ways of organizing knowledge.
I get it as a way of highlighting what’s new, but I think the baby’s going out with the bathwater.
The main evangelist who is trying to balance both the old and the new ways of managing information is Nick Milo. He loves minimal foldering, Maps of Content, and Datascopes, as ways of maintaining enough high-level knowledge about your content to enter the graph with some positional awareness.
For those of us who need that initial moment of orientation, doing pure block-based graph traveral sucks, quite frankly.
Early evangelists are full of excitement about the moment they “got it”, and they’re trying to help everyone else “get it”, but aren’t widening the funnel much for those of us who prefer to do things a bit differently.
Historically, this has been very associated with the culture around Roam, but it happens a bit around Logseq too.
I’m the kind of person who is very mentally clear at the 50,000 ft overview level of my information, and I need to orient myself to my knowledge landscape before I decide where to land and hunt. But early evangelists of block-based PKM tools are sometimes most excited about ruling that out.
I want the new ways of exploring information, but I want to choose my starting place, somewhere besides the Daily Journal, or an un-indented list of Favourites.
So my question remains genuine. I’m not sure if a rich commitment to hierarchies and classification is kosher, for Logseq’s developers.
- Is it an exciting way to differentiate themselves from Roam and support a wider market of users?
- Or is it an irritating distraction and people like me should go and struggle with Obsidian
- Obsidian isn’t outline-based, but which has a culture supporting soft hierarchies of knowledge
I decided to stop looking for tools, and chose Logseq, because of that “Hierarchies” section on a page. It felt like I was “coming home” to a tool that combined the ancient magic of classification with the new magic of graph traversal.
But I fear that the “Hierarchies” feature will be considered to be an aberration that they will leave to wither and then phase out - ironically because people may use it too much, the wrong way.
Not everyone will have that “conversion experience” to pure block-based graph traversal, and they’ll choose to focus on the true believers, and not the larger masses.
I anticipated this kind of issue. I wanted to know I could discuss hierarchies and classification with some clarity and energy. I didn’t want to disrupt this community, if in fact I was wrong about what Logseq plans to become.
So I’m still unsure if this is the place for me. It’s a bit sad, because I don’t want to be in “tool-choosing hell” again… but I don’t feel good when my needs are deligitimized (Different ways to structure data - #27 by boisjere) - especially because I love this tool, and I think my needs reflect those of future users, farther along the technology adoption curve, “across the chasm”.