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Cyberbaser
🧠 Research & Foundations phase — building the KB from the ground up. See the roadmap →

01 · Identity + operational model

Updated

The assignment

Section titled “The assignment”

Cyberbaser claims to be “the contributable wiki, reinvented.” Your job: stress-test this claim. Is this a real product position that someone would pay for, or is it a feature-list dressed as a vision? Where exactly does the sustained value live — and is it defensible?

The vault vision is more ambitious than the current docs describe (live anonymous collab, contributor attribution, plugin execution across environments). The operational landscape maps five tiers of work. This challenge resolves the identity question that blocks every downstream decision.

What to investigate

Section titled “What to investigate”

  1. Publishing tool, wiki platform, or collaboration framework? These are three different products with different customers, competitors, and funding models. Which is cyberbaser PRIMARILY, and which are stretch goals? Compare the technical requirements of each. A publishing tool is Tier 1+2 work. A wiki platform adds Tier 3+4. A collaboration framework adds real-time infrastructure (Tier 2+4 at scale).

  2. What’s v1 vs what’s deferred? The vault vision includes: 3+ contribution paths, live anonymous collab, contributor attribution with photos, plugin execution across environments. That’s 2+ years of work. What’s the minimum viable product that still justifies the “reinvented” claim? Concretely: which roadmap tasks are v1-blocking vs nice-to-have?

  3. Compare to incumbents on value, not features. Obsidian Publish ($10/mo), Quartz v4 (free, OSS), GitBook (free tier + paid), wiki.js (free, OSS), Notion public pages (free). For each: what do they charge for? What’s the WORK they eliminate for the customer? Where does cyberbaser’s value proposition differ, and is that difference worth paying for?

  4. Which operational landscape tier is the business? Tier 1 (translation layer library) is hard to monetize. Tier 2+4 (hosted service) is a SaaS business. Tier 3 (community ecosystem) is a platform play. Which one, and what’s the revenue model — subscription, per-seat, open-core, or sponsorship?

  5. Steel-man the “this shouldn’t exist” argument. What if Quartz + Decap CMS + GitHub Pages already covers 90% of the value proposition for free? What if EmDash (Cloudflare’s Astro-native CMS) subsumes cyberbaser’s contribution layer? What’s the honest counter?

  6. License implications. Given the value analysis: is AGPL-3.0 the right license? Should the translation layer be MIT (maximize adoption) while the hosted service is proprietary? Or is the current AGPL + CLA dual-license sufficient?

Context to read first

Section titled “Context to read first”

What success looks like

Section titled “What success looks like”

A decision document with:

  • One-sentence identity statement that could go on the README
  • v1 scope boundary — 5-7 bullet list of what’s in vs out
  • Competitor comparison table (product, price, Obsidian fidelity Y/N, contribution Y/N, git SSOT Y/N, moat)
  • Revenue model recommendation with the tier it maps to
  • The strongest counter-argument (steel-manned) and why cyberbaser should proceed anyway (or shouldn’t)
  • Validity: this recommendation holds until [specific condition — e.g., “until EmDash ships Open Authoring” or “until Quartz adds contribution”]

What this does NOT decide

Section titled “What this does NOT decide”