Going by my experience, the biggest issues to me in adopting TW were the following (and I’ll expand on them in a bit):
- Not understanding its capabilities.
- Feeling discouraged by the theme/visual design.
- Needs some kind of self-hosting.
I think I’ve been stumbling upon TW from time to time over the last few years, I don’t exactly recall if what I saw was TW but it certainly worked similarly (in that it was a wiki inside a browser entirely stored in memory). I always left feeling “okay, that’s neat but I want an actual CMS/Wiki”. What it took for me was to:
- Start taking notes for a campaign in Realmforge
- Get angry at Realmforge for being so slow
- Waste days looking for an alternative that worked the same but was faster
- Waste weeks writing my own alternative in React
- Get dissilusioned with how much work it is
- Find someone on reddit mentioning that they’re building their world in TiddlyWiki and give it an honest attempt
And just how YNAB caused me to expound to everyone I meet the benefits of proper budgeting, TiddlyWiki has caused me to realize that it’s the single most powerful and amazing tool for all kinds of note taking there is. I world-build for my DnD campaign. I use it to track which LEGO pieces I am still missing when recollecting old sets. I use it to keep track of my daily work at my day job. It completely replaced Nimbus Note, which replaced Notion (because Notion was too slow and loved to randomly, in the middle of a DnD session, log me out) which replaced EverNote (which was too bloated and in the middle of a clusterduck of a rewrite) which replaced self-hosted DokuWiki (because I wanted better mobile access). I can’t imagine I’ll ever switch, I just need to figure out how to better upload images so that they are stored externally.
But I digress.
Feeling discouraged by the theme/visual design
When you visit tiddlywiki.com what you see doesn’t look modern. And while chasing modern for the sake of chasing modern, it’s difficult to sell to people how great of a tool TW is if you have to tell them “Check out TiddlyWiki but don’t mind the website looks a little dated”.
On one hand it’s awesome that TW’s website is written in TW. On the other hand I think two things would be great for it to have better reach and adoption and just keep people’s attention for long enough for them to see its power:
- A new main theme that hides most of the complexity and gives the vibe of a modern web tool.
- A simpler front page, which can also be made in TW, that gives a shorter overview of its power and is more to the point.
I am pretty sure #1 could be solved with some money and a good web designer. #2 though is something much more complicated.
(I expect a lot of pushback towards this, because of my experiences in DROD community where whenever I mention that the forums and the game’s website look extremely dated there is a trong pushback)
Not understanding its capabilities
It took me a while of using TW to understand its power that’s partially in just how simple it is (and how fast it works because hey, backend is optional) and partially in the power of macros and widgets. I don’t really have any idea how to explain it better, there are as many usecases as users.
For me a great thing is I can very quickly create interactive mini-pages that allow my inner-perfectionist to have everything look and feel the same.
Perhaps having a set of varied and real use-cases prominently displayed on the front page be a good idea. Or maybe a wizard that interactively tries to determine what you need it for.
Needs some kind of self-hosting
While the idea of being able to just hit ctrl+s and save the HTML file somewhere on your disk, in the world of SaaS and mobile apps it feels like it’s lacking a lot. Setting up your own self hosting is a big pain, even if all you do is just use GitHub saver. The myriad of options doesn’t help (which is something that someone has already mentioned).
An integrated TW hosting service would be great.
Okay, that came out as a wall of text. I wasn’t trying to sound too negative, I am still fairly new in this community so I hope I am not overstepping my bounds, just wanted to list what’s actually pained me in getting to love TW.