Sad to say, that it is time for me to say good bye to Silverbullet. When I joined in December of 2024, Silverbullet hadn't quite reached version 1. As I worked with it, I was able to make it work for me very well. I was thrilled.
Then, over time, more and more features were added to Silverbullet. Along with them came breakages as well. I've never been a fan of feature full software. I'm a minimalist by nature and features that I don't use feel like bloat and vulnerabilities.
The fact that my tastes and preferences are not popular is nothing new to me. I'm 71 years old. I'm off to find another note app with fewer features that suits my needs.
I wish all of you the very best and many thanks for everything.
I would be interested in becoming aware of other FOSS PKMS which are more minimal than SilverBullet. SilverBullet's minimalism is satisfactory for me; I'm loving it now.
I don’t want to make advertisement to other projects or apps, but before I discovered Silverbullet I was using flatnotes which was a plain simple note taking app as also the name suggests see demo here
For me the feature set of flatnotes wasn’t enough and wanted more customization, features, etc. so that is how I discovered Silverbullet. But for you @dmick1954 if it’s exactly the opposite path, you want simplicity and uncomplicated things, it might be the app for you.
I understand that if Silverbullet new releases slowly getting “too many” features for your use case, you don’t really need to update, or are you? You can keep using the release version what you are comfortable with, be it pre 1.x or post 1.x doesn’t really matter as long as you’re self hosting it you don’t need to upgrade to the latest and greatest. BTW that’s just only my opinion, you do what you’re comfortable with, that’s the beauty of self hosting and FOSS, you can chose your own poison(if you know what I mean).
@dmick1954 If you’re still reading this I hope you had a great time with Silverbullet and hope you’ll have a great time and note taking experience with other apps too.
I keep an instance of Silverbullet V1 running for the use cases where those features were more suitable. I too preferred the minimalistic syntax of queries and live templates, and also used attribute extractors to build something useful. The move to Lua made those use cases harder and more convoluted. Some great features have been added to Silverbullet lately, specially the automatic version history via git, so I decided to upgrade and lay off the queries, templates and such. For as long as Silverbullet V1 keeps working on the browsers I use, I'm fine. That's an option for you too, maybe.
Continuing with V1 was my initial intention until I realized that one day it was either going to disappear or no longer work. I'm looking for something that is closer to what I truly want, what Silverbullet started out as being. Or what I thought it started out as being. LOL Rather than investing any more time in something that was inevitably going to fail, I decided to look for something that would last longer.
Well if you have deployed with docker, then it is never going to disappear. When docker updates its APIs, you can stick with the same version, and it will just keep on working. In 5-6 years, your browser policies will change and it will throw some errors (which can be skipped with a warning). That's it tbh. When you already have the image file, nobody is going to stop you from deploying it.
This thread caught my eye because it shows something nice about software communities: some people leave and others arrive. In my case, I only discovered SilverBullet recently, and I've become a fan precisely because of its simplicity. I completely understand Don (and wish him the best in his search), but from the other side of the road I wanted to note that this minimalist spirit keeps drawing new people in. Thanks for such a pleasant tool to use!
While you're technically right I would also feel uncomfortable forever be stuck on a specific "dead" product release. No security patches, no fixes, no support. In that case I'd also rather move to something better supported.
