Introductions

General
82

Hi, my name is Tom and I live in the Chicago metropolitan area. My job title is "Devops Engineer" and I have been playing with tools like SilverBullet for about 20 years.

I'm a big fan of Emacs+Org-Mode and have put a ton of my virtual brain knowledge in there, but I've always had issues syncing notes between my phone, work and home. I also tried using Org-Web and Organice but had lots of issues making those work for my needs.

I therefore started keeping my "cheatsheets" in Nextcloud Notes, which worked very well from an ease-of-access perspective and soon I started storing more of my virtual brain in those docs since it was so accessible. However I missed being able to create links and the search interface was not very useful.

I discovered this tool last week and think it's fantastic! I love that it's just so simple to use, has a great web interface and is programmable. I'm currently hosting it on top of NixOS with Nginx.

Keep up the great work folks! I'm here to learn and hopefully help a few others out along the way.

83

Hi all. I have been a freelancer for 30 years... I started as a designer using a Mac LC in Oxford, UK, but drifted into IT support for my fellow designers, then the local public as Apple became more consumer focussed. So much has changed since I started. I am now exploring self-hosting as I view Big Tech with increasing suspicion. I am not quite at home with self-hosting yet. My fundamental beef is whether it can ever be mainstream generally, as well as the problem of inheritability - will my wife be able to handle this tech when I pop off? No, obviously. That said, I still like to play, so I will give Silverbullet a whirl!

84

Having experienced several software programs and services that eventually disappeared, I decided a few years ago that a note-taking system should be built to last:

  • Minimizing vendor lock-in
  • Avoiding proprietary formats in favor of established standards
    • Based on plain text files
    • Use of markup language
  • There should be an alternative way to access the content externally using any editor.
  • It must work on both a PC and an Android smartphone

Thatā€™s how I ended up a few years ago with Markdown files, Markor on Android, and VSC on the desktop.

In 2021, I learned about markup language AsciiDoc, was and still am thrilled by it, find it much better than Markdown. And I prefer to use it for technical documentation and web sites. I initiated AsciiDoc support in Markor, and also switched my note-taking system from Markdown to AsciiDoc. In particular, Iā€™m excited about includes, which are natively supported by AsciiDoc. But unfortunately, AsciiDoc support is rare or nonexistent in note-taking software; instead, Markdown support is very common.

Gemini recently led me to SilverBullet. I watched a video by Zef and was immediately impressed. But of course, this was yet another piece of software that supports Markdown and not AsciiDoc. So I converted my AsciiDoc notes to Markdown using Downdoc.

SilverBullet has inspired me:

  • Plain text files
  • Markup language
  • Open source
  • Self-hosted
  • Runs via PWA anywhere in any browser
    • offline support
  • Extensions
  • Live preview
  • Queries. In other words, itā€™s also a Markdown frontend for queries.
  • If, as recently suggested here, a combination with SQL comes to SB, that could get very interesting.

SpaceLua

  • essential foundation of SilverBullet
  • but risk of vendor lock-in

Iā€™m from East Germany. I studied medicine and am a physician-cyberneticist. I studied and worked in Russia for 13 years (from Gorbachev to just before Putin), and have been working as a BI developer and architect back in Germany since 1999. However, I am 100% dependent on Microsoft technologies. And a few years ago, I witnessed how big tech, for political reasons, cut off individuals, organizations, or even entire countries from their services and products overnight. Welcome to the world of vendor lock-in and hybrid warfare.

So I decided to diversify and have since been working in parallel as a real estate financing broker.

I am married and have two adult daughters.

My challenges with SilverBullet:

  • https access to SilverBullet
    • Find solutions when Iā€™m in countries that block Tailscale or WireGuard (for example, in Russia)
  • Installing Git in a Docker container
  • Synchronizing the space folder on my desktop and smartphone to access files even when bypassing SilverBullet
  • Learning shortcuts to get started
  • Finding a way to work efficiently on my smartphone where shortcuts donā€™t work
  • The ability to quickly and easily view non-Markdown documents (json, txt, yaml, adoc, html, bat, cs, etc., preferably as a universal plain text view)
  • Understand how various extensions are integrated (plugs), that existed before the libraries
  • Find out what extensions are even available; theyā€™re all scattered, and I havenā€™t found a complete list yet
  • Find out how and whether you can display a tree view or table of contents on silverbullet.md as well.
  • Figure out how to get a general overview of existing content in SB when there is no table of contents.
  • Explore the many possibilities of SilverBullet
  • Customize CSS
  • Evaluate whether and how SB could also be useful in real estate financing work