Interesting, but what does this solve what Bookstack does not solve? I mean sure, it looks nice and hacky and all that. But if i am going to host some note thingy, www.bookstackapp.com is right there and apparently the dev nowadays lives from the thing (which is nice i guess). Not to belittle your project in anyway, even if something like your thing would exist exactly as that its still commendable but i am already running Bookstack and this seems to add anything to any use case i could think off.
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 👍
Researching anything that happened on the internet right now in the future is going to be absolute hell considering how much useful user information and interactions are “locked” behind Discord. Is there a term for something worse than link rot? With link rot it’s a case of a known unknown. With information on Discord it’s an unknown unknown.
I’m curious (serious question): Are there any standards that have been developed during the last years, e.g. how to link a different page, the syntax of the tagging or similar or are all the note taking apps doing their own thing and nothing is compatible with each other?
Looks really kool. Reminds me of tiddlywiki but yet totally different. The authentication is very briefly touched upon. What kind of auth is it? Maybe more robust to just use http auth via caddy?
Okay this is looking great. Spun up the docker container though and it’s a preeeeetty steep learning curve. Any suggestions on how I could move my obsidian vault into my silverbullet space?
Since both services store your notes as markdown files on your disk, you can just move your files over. When spinning up a docker container, you likely defined a path for your SilverBullet space. If not, try creating a note and see if you can find it on your disk.
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: “it’s just markdown files on disk, you can take them anywhere at any time”. 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 they’re not allowed to install anything. For SilverBullet I’d 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 you’re 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 didn’t feel quite right (like the templates). I think we’re 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 I’ll do my best to mark the parts of this that are experimental or prone to still change.
Thanks for your answers! Very fair thoughts, particularly about the flexibility of keeping things as just files on disk.
Regarding the work thing, I should clarify my use case: I’d like to take work related notes that could contain privileged company data. With a standalone app, I can install it and manage the files on my device (with cloud syncing in an approved corporate way). I could still probably do that here, but it requires the work of running the web server locally. Unfortunately, an external source like a VPS wouldn’t be allowed.
I have one more question, if you have some time: One of the things I like most about Logseq is that when there is a list of back links on a page, the context capture is excellent (likely due to it being an outliner). I’ve noticed that with SilverBullet, the context capture might begin/end in the middle of a word, etc. Is there a way to configure that or plans to enhance it?
Makes sense. Regarding the linked mention snippets. Please create a GitHub issue (github.com/silverbulletmd/silverbullet) for that. Right now it does the simplest thing, which is just to take x characters on each side. That can definitely be improved.
With the rise of these .md based personal knowledge database applications it would be amazing to see some conversion software.
I understand that each has their special sauce. Does anyone know what would be the most difficult part about building a tool like that to copy in Logseq data to SB for example?
I’ve used Joplin, logseq, and Obsidian and I’ve switched to this. It’s great for self hosting at home and using at work without having to install apps or applications. I enjoy that it is truly open source and the interface is much cleaner than Joplin and the files on disk are actually more readable unlike Joplin. I love how programmable it is.
For now, Joplin is working fine and there is no scandal yet that makes me move away from it…
Disadvantages I’m seeing at the moment if I switched over to Silverbullet:
Yes, it’s super portable because it’s running in the web browser, but if I have 3 devices and hosted SilverBullet on a 4th device, that device needs to be online all the time to access my notes, right? With Joplin, this is different. I can use Joplin on 3 devices and once a month, I can turn on the device that hosts Joplin Cloud and everything syncs. Making notes when being offline (e.g. at work) when there is no connection to the SilverBullet server seems to be impossible, too, right? Or can the PWA handle this scenario better than I think?
Joplin has a wunderful feature on Android for tablet: You can draw with your pen on your note and it will be embedded as an image in the markdown. This makes Joplin the Nr. 1 for me at the moment.
I have not used Joplin, but did write a few high-level thoughts on comparing it to Obsidian and Logseq elsewhere which I’ll just copy and paste here:
I have not used Obsidian nor Logseq as much as I’ve used (or developed) SilverBullet. However here are a few headliners, but the main difference may well be that in SB I’m 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: it’s fully open source and it’s a web app that you self host. It’s still markdown files on disk, but that disk is located on your server and they’re 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 they’re 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 it’s minimal by default.
Compared to LogSeq: logseq is an outliner. You can do outlines in SilverBullet (and I do, a lot, there’s some nice shortcuts for this too: silverbullet.md/Outlines). However, SB is more of a wiki than an outliner. You don’t 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 they’re more mature. They’ve been around longer and have bigger communities (so far). Try them out and see what you like.
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