Who's using Online mode?

General
41

This is also a good reason to have me do some serious testing and debugging of the sync engine. It’s been fairly reliable for me, but I know people have been having issues. I think I already uncovered a few issues here and there, but there are likely more. I should probably do more testing of scenarios where indeed you’re editing files from outside SB. Theoretically this should all work, but there’s theory and then there’s… reality.

Keep backups of your space just in case. And if your client somehow seems to not want to pull new stuff in use the Debug: Reset Client command to a hard kill of your service worker + delete all local databases. Also here I had to a do a few fixes, but on the v2 branch this is already working reliably.

42

This is what I needed! Thank you!

43

I’m also thinking about this usecase for online mode.

TBH, I am not using Silver Bullet yet (currently keeping notes in Joplin), but I am pondering to set up a sort of digital garden where I can publish a subset of my personal notes on a website to be useful for others. Silver Bullet looks great for this usecase at first glance, since it seems to offer nice features for adding metadata to pages, crosslinking based on tags, etc.

However, in my ideal view, I would have a single collection of notes, some of which are tagged to be public and some of which are tagged to be private. With sync mode, I think this is hard to support, but maybe online mode (which I presume does some more checking and maybe even rendering server-side) might support this (maybe with some plug or local tweaks). Alternatively, I could split this into two spaces of course.

Also, as @thecandlestick mentioned, for people just browsing this digital garden online, doing a full sync first is not very feasible.

44

Its been just 2 amazing days, since I started learning and transferring stuff into Silverbullet.
Its a lot of pain, but also, in some cases, it feels absolutely amazing not to be limited in places, where I expected to hit the ceiling.

Unfortunately, sync seems to concern me quite a lot, since I’m trying to work with SIlverbullet not alone, but with my family, on multiple devices at once and with poor internet more often than not. I never used “online mode”, but I assume it wasnt the way either.

I am extremely obsessed with everything offline-first and optimistic-ui(ie, UI assumes request always succeed or eventually retried without waiting), so I completely understand desire to keep this functionality.

The problem I have are conflicts on same device and between devices, often resulting in rollback. Ofcourse, another limitation is speed and multi-user interaction.

Since its only been 2 days since I was shot with a silver bullet, I’m not ready to make a suggestion, but would like to start a discussion.

It feels to me, that some of the issues could be solved by migrating onto message-broker, like Nats/Jetstream for update processing, flexible conflict-resolution, update replay, guaranteed delivery, persistence of history, and customization (interception of incoming messages before pushing them to update queue, authentication and priority, server-issued-updates), - all without having to substantially affect main codebase or having to tinker a lot to make silverbullet truly yours.

45

I also think silverbullet would benefit from a robust sync engine (where is an insane amount of names for these kind of things), which is battle tested and known to not fail or lose data. I think it would resolve a lot of the sync issues that happen here and then and aren‘t really reproducible and thus absolute hell to debug. Only problem is that most of these don‘t fit. I‘ve looked through a lot of those and they either have a shitty license, no way of storing files on a disk in plain format, are incredibly bulky or anything else you can think of. It‘s pretty hard finding something where it would be even worth considering a PR.