I've been very happy with SilverBullet's growth over the last 4 years. Starting out as just a project for myself, it now has (I would estimate) a few thousand active users (although I cannot be sure, because... 0 tracking) and a great community of enthusiasts. To be honest, it's grown to become the proudest technical achievement of my career.
Nevertheless, I keep finding it hard to recommend SilverBullet to people around me, because I feel the barrier to actually install and run it is... high. Not everybody is a self hoster, nor could I realistically expect them to. Self hosting is not something for everybody and never will be, and I think this severely limits the potential target audience. Which is a shame, because... I think people are missing out.
In the past, I made attempts at desktop apps and mobile apps, but they were too messy and too hard to maintain. For desktop, back in the day I built them on Electron, which basically bundles half an operating system (often 500MB+) and uses tons of memory. As much as this is today's reality (check your application folder for 500MB+ apps, they're probably all Electron apps). This never felt great. It was also a pain to maintain and test, so ultimately I got rid of them and went all-in on the PWA and self hosting route.
In the mean time, Tauri came along, which is similar to Electron in concept (build desktop and mobile apps with web tech), but uses the operating system's "native" web renderer (often Webkit). Tauri apps are quite small, and basically just bundle your web assets. As it should be. And... Tauri apps can be retargeted for iOS and Android too!
So a few months ago I got to work, and today I think I have something that's ready for you to try.
Introducing SilverBullet+. For now, macOS only, other operating systems (including mobile) will follow later.
Here's the SilverBullet+ version of the intro tour:
Hang on... +?
For quite a while I've been experimenting and contemplating how to make SilverBullet a more financially sustainable project. Largely the project is still a hobby project for me, but I feel the project would really benefit from more of my attention, so I've been trying to figure out ways to do this while still, you know, earning a living.
So, about half a year ago, I decided to reduce my regular working days and spend more time on SilverBullet. This has been a lot of fun, but has been financially tricky. I have pushed donations a bit more, with some success — and I appreciate everybody who's been funding the project. But realistically, it's not nearly sufficient to really cover a significant amount of time.
This is not an uncommon problem for an open source project. But what to do?
Over the months, I toyed with various ways to somehow commercialize the project. Perhaps a SaaS version? Perhaps some auxiliary services? Perhaps a version for teams and companies?
Nothing felt quite right, or felt managable without hiring a full team.
But then this desktop app idea returned. What if I used this as an opportunity to deliver a more polished, integrated experience, wrapping silverbullet "open source", but launch it as a commercial product? It wouldn't be for everybody, it wouldn't threaten the OSS version (which I'll henceforrh refer to as silverbullet.md), but it would be a great option for two audiences:
- People who don't want to install a web server, setup the TLS certificate etc. They prefer to just download an app, and run it (imagine!).
- Power users, who actually want SilverBullet to do things that a PWA (web app) can't easily do: global keyboard shortcuts, having your files locally in a folder, CLI access (although I ended up figuring out how to do this with the Runtime API lately) and potentially other OS-level integrations as well.
While SilverBullet+ is technically a commercial product, I intend to make free for personal and educational use. Only if you use it for work, or simply want to be a financial supporter, I'll ask you pay a (probably) yearly fee (after the beta). This is a similar model to what Obsidian uses. I think this is a fair model, and there's a good chance you can get your company to pay for it. If enough people do this, there's a possible future where I spend more and more time on making (all of) SilverBullet even better, or — who knows — even get to hire more people to work on it one day.
Is this for you?
If you're already self hosting SilverBullet, you don't need this, but you may want to try. It's a pretty smooth experience, to be honest. You can sync it with your existing SilverBullet server.
But my secret hope is that this is not for you, but a whole slew of new people. It's perhaps a packaging of SilverBullet that you can recommend to your friends or colleagues. It brings all the power of SilverBullet to be a 100% local, desktop experience.
What's the current state?
It's a beta. I've been using it daily for a while and it works great for me, but your mileage may vary. Give it a try if you own a Mac and let me know what you think. I'll create a separate category here on community.silverbullet.md for support.
And tell your friends!
I also invested a fair amount into creating a "proper" website. It's always been hard to articulate what makes SilverBullet, SilverBullet, but I hope I'm making some progress.
