(@Technoshaman, pinging you because I know you’re using Obsidian, but this note is for all.)
I have a longer post I want to write about this, but I also wanted to post the gist ASAP, so here you go. As such, this post will be missing details, but let me know if I can answer questions, which would help me write the longer post anyway!
I tried [[Roam]], and while I appreciate it, it’s not for me.
I tried [[Obsidian]], and I like it a lot. I started moving stuff into it (and was able to just a previous set of Markdown-wiki into it with no problems!)
Last week, I tried Stroll, and I love it. It is my new favorite, and I feel like I can do all I was doing with Obsidian, but better and more cleanly. I’m switching to Stroll. (Aside about TiddlyRoam: it’s based on TiddlyBlink, which is the deprecated tool that preceded Stroll, by the same author. I decided to go with Stroll, but YMMV.)
Note, Stroll doesn’t quite support a network diagram like Obsidian. You can install a TiddlyMap plugin, and the Stroll author has some tips to get it to work, while also saying very plainly that he does not support them working together. I haven’t been using a network visualizer anyway, so I don’t mind.
The “A stroll through Stroll” walkthrough is very helpful, and also serves as a pretty good introduction to TiddlyWiki 5 (which underlies Stroll).
A big first hurdle is figuring out how you’ll save (and load) your Stroll / TiddlyWiki. I ended up choosing the GitLab saver. (After trying the GitHub saver, which interacts with TW5 to create 409 errors not infrequently. GitLab has been working well instead.) Just the HTML5 file saver is fine for infrequent saves, but for my main second brain, I really need to have autosave on. To use a Git saver, you need a repo in the cloud, but you don’t really need to know Git besides that. When you do reload your Stroll, you do have to remember to get the most recent version from the repo, either in the web interface (or if you know Git, you can have a local repo, just make sure to pull before loading the file in your browser).
The other thing I added was the Markdown plugin, which works well after the fix in the “Troubleshooting” tab of the “stroll through Stroll” walkthrough. N.B., I think the Relink plugin does not rewrite Markdown links, so I’m trying to use more TW5 native page types, rather than Markdown pages. (If you want Markdown, grab the Markdown plugin from this page, the link is broken in the plugin catalog: markdowndemo.)
[Aside: TiddlyWiki could take over the world, except that it’s basically single-player. (Modulo some experiments with PouchDB/CouchDB, i.e., NoteSelf.) A topic for another time.]