Discord: for more real-time support and discussion.
Sigh...
It does look a lot like Logseq, but at least it's not written in Clojure. Looks like an interesting project and hopefully it'll mature to something better than Logseq š
This is very cool, and I've been watching the project for a month or so.
I like the query setup and the templates look very interesting. One of my biggest complaints about Logseq is how much of a pain simple query operations can be.
A few things make me hesitate a bit:
I've been burned on single-dev passion projects in the past.
As a self hosted web app, it's a bit more difficult to manage on a company owned machine. I know Electron apps get hate, but that would ease some pain here.
The rapid pace of development is both exciting and worrisome. For example, a recent update completely changed the underlying templating engine from a well-known open source solution to a custom solution. I worry if I rely on this, something might catch me by surprise.
Regarding the first, the best I can offer is what many other project in this space say: āitās just markdown files on disk, you can take them anywhere at any timeā. Obviously this is only partially true, because the more SB-specific features you use, the more you get locked in. Your notes will never go away (if you back them up). But all time building queries and templates, would have been wasted.
Regarding company owned machines: a concern I heard for Logseq and Obsidian is that people cannot use them at work/with a work machine because theyāre not allowed to install anything. For SilverBullet Iād recommend not installing it on your laptop (work or otherwise), but rather on some other machine. Perhaps you have a Raspberry Pi lying around unused. Or maybe you buy a cheap VPS (silverbullet.md itself runs on a $5/month Hetzner VM). Then you can access it from anywhere with a web browser, and I assume your work laptop has one of those.
Regarding the high pace of development: also fair. The reason I have not been very actively promoting SB so far is because of the high change churn rate. If youāre a power user, you kind of need to keep on top of stuff. Mostly I attempt to give people migration tools, but this is always a opportunity cost decision. Until recently some fundamentals still didnāt feel quite right (like the templates). I think weāre getting there now though. Another one I still need to figure out is how to do the distribution of templates, slash commands. This idea of a Library you import works, but you cannot easily keep it up to date. This so something to still figure out. Generally Iāll do my best to mark the parts of this that are experimental or prone to still change.
I have not used Joplin, but did write a few high-level thoughts on comparing it to Obsidian and Logseq elsewhere which Iāll just copy and paste here:
I have not used Obsidian nor Logseq as much as Iāve used (or developed) SilverBullet. However here are a few headliners, but the main difference may well be that in SB Iām really assuming that the target audience is technical enough not to be scared by the idea of writing a query, or creating a template.
A few differences with Obsidian: itās fully open source and itās a web app that you self host. Itās still markdown files on disk, but that disk is located on your server and theyāre accessible from anywhere you have access to that server without having to do convoluted things like setting up (or buy) sync services (like you do have to for both Obsidian and LogSeq).
Obsidian tends to solve everything with plugins, whereas SB has more batteries included (although technically much of this is implemented as plugins that ship with SB itself) specifically: powerful indexing, querying and template support. Obsidian has Dataview and Templater, and some other plugins I think, but theyāre developed by a third party.
Another difference difference would be UI minimalism. The number of panes and tabs in Obsidian dizzies me, although I know you can fold or hide all of them. In SB itās minimal by default.
Compared to LogSeq: logseq is an outliner. You can do outlines in SilverBullet (and I do, a lot, thereās some nice shortcuts for this too: https://silverbullet.md/Outlines). However, SB is more of a wiki than an outliner. You donāt have to write everything in bulleted lists. To me this is important, because I also write my blog posts and other articles in SilverBullet and doing that in an outline is somewhat awkward.
But to be clear: Obsidian and Logseq are both great, and theyāre more mature. Theyāve been around longer and have bigger communities (so far). Try them out and see what you like.
But... I'm kind of sick of web applicatioms. Why does everything need to be a web application or a "not" web app using electron.
(In this case I see the use case and reason, but in general)
mobiles and desktops are very diffrerent and need different user incerfaces. So you are not savin, much work. In fact trying to handle both in on may be worse because of all the special cases. Be glad you don't have to support teletypes, they demand different user interfaces.
I canāt speak to the general case, but let me answer why I picked the web app route in this particular case.
This was/is my reality:
I want access to my space from my laptop (mac), phone (iPhone) and tablet (iPad) and browny points for my Boox e-reader (Android) and even more browny points for just having access from any random computer in the world (with a web browser)
I have a full-time job, and this would just be a hobby project
I have been doing (or been involved in) web development for 25 years
What are my options? I could go native and develop this either as a native iOS app and Mac app, and then do an Android app because why not. This is hypothetically possible, but would mean that 2 years in Iād probably not be anywhere near the functionality that SB has today.
I could go with a cross-platform stack like react-native or Flutter. This would have been an option, I suppose, but neither of those stacks I fully trust in terms of long-term viability yet. And RN is not really built for desktop apps.
Another part of the reality: CodeMirror exists (https://codemirror.net/). This is an amazing piece of engineering that took years to build, itās a pretty amazing code editor that is very extensible andā¦ itās a web thing. Having to implement this natively would likely literally take me years.
So I decided on the web app approach. Iāve had native wrappers (Electron and one for mobile apps) along the way, but ultimately removed them because they take too much time to maintain and test, and Iām just a one person army with a few hours available here and there. PWA support is pretty nice these days and gives you a reasonable experience at a reasonable development cost. Itās a good trade off.
Would I make different choices given infinite time and resources? Absolutely, but you knowā¦ reality.
This is my story and it doesnāt apply to everybody, but likely other projects have similar reasons.
silverbullet.md
Hot