Feedback from community about team collaboration

General
1

Hi,
i use SB for my personal notes on different computers and different browsers in online mode
I have many times problems of synchronization and they generate conflicts.
For my use, it’s not a big problem and fix them.

I want to propose to use SB to share content in my future team of 4 people.
it’s not the main use case of SB that’s why I want your feedback and i have some doubts.

Thanks to share your feedback and User experience.

2

My concern would revolve around security. SB was designed primarily for individual use. Why not use something like Obsidian which is geared for collaborative use or other Note-taking apps that are primarily designed for the kind of use case you are considering?

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3

SilverBullet was not designed for collaboration. At some point I spent significant time trying to change this (e.g. by adding real-time collaboration), but this was too big of a project that was very hard to make work reliably, so ultimately I removed all that complexity again.

If you would try to do this today, you’ll likely run into issues when multiple people are editing the same page at the same time. You’d overwrite each other’s edits.

I decided to focus on making SB good as a personal knowledge management system, and not spend my time on figuring out all the complexities that would come from turning it into a multi-user tool. Real-time collaboration would be one thing, but likely people would also want to some sort of permission system.

I think this could be done built, but it would be a huge undertaking. Definitely not something I can do on the side.

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4

The following is just my experience - I don’t want to influence or change the direction of SB as I love it the way it is.

I introduced SB to my team and it allowed us to grow our documentation quickly. We could create all kinds of functions, templates, snippets, etc. and it was great. All that freedom.

However, we are currently moving the docs to Confluence.

So what brought us back to the hellhole that is Atlassian?

  • Acceptance: ‘Yes, but we’re already paying for Confluence’ - everyone knows it, and the benefits of SB can’t shine through, and the general view on open source also played against it
  • Difficult onboarding: I guess every SB instance is highly customized, ours was too. Explaining all the features, designs, how it works was difficult and overwhelming (space-scripts, space-lua, git-versioning, templates, etc).
  • Documentation for the documentation platform: in addition to the previous point, we had to document every feature and change, and it was a time sink.
  • Too many cooks: missing features like permissions and built-in versioning+blame allowed anyone to change anything. A quick test or personal changes could escalate very quickly (broken features, wrong design, etc).

Confluence sets boundaries that can’t be changed and is built for collaboration.

Just to be clear, I don’t want SB to be a Confluence clone or ask for features. I alone have 3 SB instances that I love and wouldn’t want to miss, and the team collaboration was just an experiment. I just wanted to share some experiences with this post.

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5

@CaffeineFueled thanks for sharing that and this sounds like a very likely scenario.

By design, SB enables a lot of customization and interesting tricks, and people use them. Obviously, all these “oddities” are things that themselves need to be understood by its user(s). If you’re building something just for you, this is not a problem — you know what you built. However once you start sharing this with a team, now you have to onboard everybody. Therefore, indeed, it makes a lot of sense to have something less flexible and more standardized for a team to use.

Perhaps, a tool like SB is inherently not a good fit for teams.

3 Likes
6

Thanks for your reply.
It’s very interesting.
I’m not thinking the possibilty tibuse SB with unioquebonline instance but something like:

  • git repository for Space To solve sync issue, conflict, distribution
  • SB as local editor
  • SB online read-only mode for public information

But I think that will use other tool.