A. K., Lisbon writes: My vault graph used to be beautiful. It's been two years, I have about 3,400 notes, and now when I open the graph view it looks like a dead jellyfish. Half the screen is one giant mass. Is there a way to make it beautiful again or is this just the fate of every serious Froots user?
Dear A.K. — this is the fate of every serious user of every graph-based notes app, and it is fixable. Three settings, one habit, one acceptance.
Three settings. Open the graph view. At the top-right, click the little slider icon. Turn on "group by folder" — this pulls your notes into soft visual clusters by where they live, which is usually the right mental model. Drop "edge weight" by two notches; most of those fine gray lines are one-off mentions that don't deserve to count as structure. And bump "minimum node degree" to 2 — it hides notes that are only referenced once, which is 40% of any real vault. A dead jellyfish becomes a constellation.
One habit. Once a week, open the graph, right-click the biggest cluster, and pick "split." You'll be prompted to name two folders, and Froots (Cherry, really) will propose a split based on semantic clustering. Accept it or don't, but even looking is useful — the graph is telling you your notes have overgrown the folder they're in.
One acceptance. A mature vault graph is never again going to look like the tidy four-node cluster it did in month one. The graph is not for admiration; it's for navigation. If your goal is a beautiful picture, screenshot it at the six-month mark and frame it. If your goal is a working second brain, the hairball is correct — it means you're thinking about enough things, with enough overlap, for ideas to find each other.
We'd rather you had too much than too little.
— The editors