I read three levels deep into everything in their readme and still have no idea what it is. I found out it's _like_ a lot of other things that have no description.

It's weird. They've obviously written a bunch, but there's no clear "this is what this is and what we want it to be and this is where we're going". It's all very ... academic and "meta" in a very vague way.

https://github.com/athensresearch/athens/blob/master/VISION....

Apparently it's a Roam alternative but that's the best I've been able to determine. No idea what Roam is either.

I tried searching a lot of things, can't tell what the thing is.

Seems like something between org mode and a graph/adjacency database.

I figure it's like a self-hosted wiki of sorts.

Seems like the example shows off what it's supposed to be:

https://athensresearch.github.io/athens/#/page/0

The caveat that "Athens doesn't persist any data yet" is, uh, significant though.