Not many people know it, but... I think I'm the godfather of the #roamcult. Here's my case: @Conaw wouldn't have been active on twitter if I hadn't pitched him on how @visakanv was already using twitter kind of like roam with interlinked threads:
10 tweets · January 2021 · 105 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter
Not many people know it, but... I think I'm the godfather of the #roamcult. Here's my case: @Conaw wouldn't have been active on twitter if I hadn't pitched him on how @visakanv was already using twitter kind of like roam with interlinked threads:
This was 2018-2019, before Roam had shipped publicly—Conor would just show me a demo every few months and I would stare at it and tell him that he was doing amazing work but that something was still missing.
I was thinking a lot about twitter threading at the time, inspired by @visakanv and @GRITCULT among others, and I told him there was something he needed to grok there. I could see the power in what he was trying to build and wanted that to happen.
Anyway, so Conor got active on twitter and started stuff like this around that time - this thread includes multiple pointers to @visakanv.
But that's only half of my claim to being #roamcult's godfather. The other half involves @QiaochuYuan, who prompted the creation of both the @RoamResearch account and the #roamcult hashtag.
...and I not only introduced QC to Roam (afaik)...
...but also to twitter! (he'd had an account before but hadn't been using it, and I explicitly encouraged him to get on there and get involved in threading as well as what would later become known as strangely earnest twitter)
(I think @visakanv has got to be the god-grandfather of the #roamcult or something, since he's intertwingled in the above story at almost every single stage!)
If you're wondering who I am—this mysterious figure who apparently nudges communities into existence... 🤨 ...here's one way I've tried to describe it:
For more on how I think about emergent self-energizing collaboration, check out this thread 👇💖🚀