As said in Logseq raises $4.1M to Accelerate Growth of the New World Knowledge Graph
Logseq’s monthly user base is growing 20% month-over-month
How do Logseq and Obsidian and Roam achieve this? How can we help TiddlyWiki achieve a similar user growth rate?
From my point of view, I think we need to write more article about user experience outside of the forum, to medium, reddit, mirror.xyz, which have a wider new user pool and have better SEO.
Some possibilities:
Hi - I took a look very interesting.
I don’t take it as a given that accelerated growth is always a good thing, it might be but the history of open source software is full of apps that started off open source and eventually ended up being owned by a US mega corp. At the moment the crowd funding and “pro” features seem to be aimed only at funding development - this does not always end up in a full commercial operation - Mozilla seem to have kept most of their integrity. Even so Tiddlywiki at the moment clearly does not attempt to lock anyone into any particular box - as soon as money is involved you get management teams and full time professional staff - how long until a core essential feature ends up being cast in stone in one direction forcing the users into a certain way of working - one that most don’t mind ( otherwise user base would crash ) but still dictatorial to some users.
I am wary of the way functionality in Logseq is ( and in the future will be ) split between their servers and local storage - for me one of the beauties of Tiddlywiki is that it is genuinely stand alone if you want it so.
Of course it would be fool hardy to ignore Logseq’s growth and progress - but I think caution is also a good thing. Right now you know that what ever happens in Tiddlywiki it happened because it was thought to be the best thing for the most users regardless of revenues, and wishes for revenue growth.
I work on linux - a lot of the open source software I use is not funded and works brilliantly - money does not always make software better inmho - thats why I left windows when windows forced updates appeared in version 10 - now I look upon windows users with a degree of sympathy because I don’t have anyone messing around remotely on my machine and my degree of frustration has gone down considerably - I look at windows now as an advertising platform not an OS.
This has being raised many times over the years and it is important to keep open minded and aware about such issues.
Personally I feel “TiddlyWiki is a platform” on which to build and is not as likely to fit a single popular niche, although a custom edition or suit of plugins could perhaps get very popular if crafted well.
However it needs underlying principals of open and hackable to be maintained and this can reduce the likelihood of a singular popular implementation.
This may sound superficial, but I think that a lot of potential users may not take the software seriously because of the name. I love Tiddlywiki, but I find myself sheepishly saying the name when someone asks about it.
Say it proudly with a smile, say it a few times, and the oddness fades 
@Tiddlybob this too has being said many times as well but there are good reasons not to change, for example try searching for “anything + TiddlyWiki”, the result have good results because we have a uniqueness that many brands desire.
I have come to say “TiddlyWiki [software] Platform” and it never sounds trivial that way.
This isn’t about your personal feelings. It’s about people, faced with about 3 dozen alternate choices, not even giving TW a chance because the name screams:
I AM A TOY – IGNORE ME!
If you have advertising budget, you can use any name you want. But if you have zero advertising, then the right name is important.
Whenever I try to point this out, I’m bombarded by people telling me how wrong I am – everything thinks they speak the one true English. No, you do not speak the English language – You speak one version of English. Everybody’s version is a little different. If you did not grow up hearing “Tiddlywinks” as a derogatory reference to a kid’s game, then you won’t understand where I’m coming from. But I’m pretty sure my view is representative of somewhere between 100 and 300 million of my cohorts.
It’s frustrating. I’m reminded of the this H.G. Wells story. I’m trying to warn the village of a rock slide, and everyone is busy telling me I don’t understand geology.
I thought about the role of AI in product such as Tiddlywiki - I have not spent enough time looking at how Logseq uses AI to comment on that use specifically but I mused over the general idea of AI finding links and connections between my tiddlers - suggesting to me a graph if you like and I decided I would only want it to be an option making suggestions and even then I might prefer to turn it off.
Why would I turn down “deepthought” that could show me a myriad of connections and commonalities between my tiddlers.
The answer is that my Tiddlywiki now grossing over 25 Mb concerns the topic of interest I have been researching for years. I learn a great deal by finding these connections myself using my own brain, because for me Tiddlywiki is a learning tool.
I have to work out ways to allow the most useful tiddlers to percolate to the top, I have to work out why something I was actively using 3 months ago got forgotten and figure out ways to reshape my graph of tiddlers so it gets more attention in future. Over time I have become more skilled, I spend longer thinking about the future usefulness of a particular tag and how it will shape my knowledge base, sometimes I regret separating two ideas into one tag, other times I wish I had split a concept into two tags. Is this frustrating? No it’s mirroring the learning process that my brain would use if I had memory and recall as good as my computer and did not have to lean on Tiddlywiki at all - I am a human being I spot patterns and learn from that but on the downside my memory is not as good as the memory in a computer.
This is the balance of synergy I want - let Tiddlywiki do the heavylifting in terms of accurate recall and search including great ways of linking including automatic back links but allow me to learn and keep my brain on the ball by spotting relationships and identifying different strategies for the structure, for instance should I set up a tiddler to act as a hub for a load of related tiddlers so I develop a node with multiple children, or perhaps I just need a suitable tag - the possibilities are as flexible as our own minds. Every day I am performing maintenance on existing tiddlers, spotting new connections in my knowledge base which often lead to new questions and avenues of research and so on as my learning evolves - it is fluid plastic and open ended.
In short I think I would probably try an AI approach to spotting connections between tiddlers and then probably turn it off after a while so that I continue to learn and exercise my brain.
Anyway I don’t know that is the way that Logseq uses AI I was just musing on what I want out of Tiddlywiki and what I possibly do not want.
Ohh yes and despite the consequences I love the single file idea - not without drawbacks but I am happy to accept the limitations in return for such a neat concept - I could pass on my Tiddywiki to someone else interested in the same field and they wouldn’t even have to download any software and could work on any platform that had a browser - that’s neat. 
@Tiddlybob who says “I love Tiddlywiki, but I find myself sheepishly saying the name when someone asks about it.”
Yet you call yourself TiddlyBob 
That is a fair point 
We are amongst fellow tiddlers here though.
I can tell you that from my personal experience I avoided TiddlyWiki for many years, because every time I came across the website I thought: what’s that for a ugly website with this strange cat and that annoying/unusual navigation. I could never understand from the website what the benefits are from TiddlyWiki compared to other software. Therefore I avoided to use TiddlyWiki.
After using TiddlyWiki and watching videos from @sobjornstad only then I understood what the benefit of TiddlyWiki is:
It’s a framework for buildung your own knowledge base, reflecting your way of thinking. There are nearly no limits on customizations.
For me a website of a software should tell me quickly what the software is about and what the key benefits are. In my opinion a good and short 2 minute video on the very beginning of the website could improve the situation (like the video from Soren, but shorter). I really hate videos for documentation but as a quick answer of “what’s this software about” it would be perfect in my opinion.
That’s interesting and worth taking note of. In my case I came across Tiddlywiki because I had tried everything else that was available for free at the time, or at least everything Google told me about so I already had a fair amount of time invested trialing software that was not according to my needs and so I was willing to spend a fair amount of time trying Tiddlywiki out.
Despite this I would echo your concern that a quick intro into capabilities would be great if possible although I have yet to see a demo of any software in this area that gave me a good overall feel within a matter of minutes, perhaps with the experience I now have of Tiddlywiki I would be much better at evaluating an application like this but I suspect you need to road test something for quite a number of days before you really know where the deal breakers and bottle necks will be.
The thing I picked up quickly was that Tiddlywiki could be offline, enthusiasts had already created a good array of plugins so I proceeded with Tiddlywiki not certain it could do everything I wanted but at least reassured that people were adding new plugin functionality all the time and so perhaps it could become everything I wanted - I appreciated the flexibility like you.
This definitely qualifies as anecdata, but as a counterpoint, I introduced someone to TiddlyWiki the other day and he said he was going to use it partly because he loved the name!
It is anecdotal. It misses the point. The word probably had no meaning to him. It was a blank slate. It had no emotional impact. But there are millions of people, many of who will be influencers, movers and shakers, who will instinctively avoid the product because of the name.
In any event, people can get past the name if they are evangelized. But you can’t depend on that happening.
Gosh I wish we had the geo-stats we used to have. You would only have to look at them to see the glaring omission.
Ok, I don’t have stats for TW, but I do have stats for a competitor – Joplin. Joplin is a great name! Joplin has only been around since 2017. But it has had 100000 downloads on the PlayStore! It has 3000 reviews on the playstore! It’s had a whopping 2,315,940 desktop downloads!
So ask yourself this, if TW is a great product, and TiddlyWiki is a great name, why hasn’t it had the same type of pick up?
As I have argued before a unique name is gold, even platinum or “unobtanium” when it comes to internet search. What a name means remains to be crafted by its use. I would recommend tying it to a non-diminutive word such as always say “TiddlyWiki Platform”, How ever perhaps we could have a red pill on tiddlywiki.com that takes you to a short evangelising video;
Perhaps starting like this;
Why a red pill,? because I ask you to bare with me for moment, You just saw a glitch in the matrix but may not have realised it. It was not a black cat but looking at the page at tiddlywiki.com you see a website, you may love or hate its layout and appearance but it servers a purpose, it has an unusual name some think is “diminutive” but it it provides a resource into the world of Software supremacy, which is hardly a small thing.
TiddlyWiki is an open source platform on which you and others can build content and software for what ever you need with or without being a software developer.
TiddlyWiki is about democratising software, apps, websites and a lot more by putting the power to build solutions in everyones hands, not just to a select few with years of focused experience.
The TiddlyWiki platform lets you build your own apps, websites and solutions whether you want a quick good enough solution or the “bees knees”, You choose where it is stored, own the rights to your work and choose who gets to see it. A large percentage of solutions built on the “TiddlyWiki Platform” are only seen and used by the owner in their own private space, enhancing productivity, helping research or building diverse knowledge bases of resources.
Built on top of common internet, application and website standards such as HTML, CSS, Javascript if you “learn TiddlyWiki” you also learn other “transferable skills” that will empower you for a lifetime of making use of modern technologies.
But yes, you can use the “TiddlyWiki Platform” for publishing solutions and websites publicly for anyone or everyone with a lot of functionality there right “out of the box”.
In closing
I think the marketing is yet to be done. There is a core story to tell but any effective “Edition” can be marketed in its own right and have whatever name it wants to use, and all it need say is it is built on the TiddlyWiki platform.
What is the killer edition/app that can be built on top of the “TiddlyWiki Platform”, most will swallow the blue pill for an effective solution or “Edition”, only a few will look behind the curtains to see the wizard, or “Take the Red Pill” and the real power. 
Why is it necessary to “take a red Pill”, because nothing as open, broad, extensive and empowering is obvious at first glance. No one can represent all of what “The TiddlyWiki Platform” is in an image or a “Cute catch phrase”, you must stop and look closer, perhaps trust these words a little while, until you discover you can take control of the “System behind the matrix” which is the internet and software today.
Luckily I still have a chance to translate TiddlyWiki into Chinese which means something macro…太微
Yes, perhaps editions like TiddlyMemo and Tidgi can try promote their own website, and if they grow popular, they are still contributing to the TW.
Very soon after discovering TW, I immediately switched to ‘zoomin’ storyview (without animation) and I’ve never understood how anyone could use ‘classic’. Every time I look at the docs or someone else’s wiki, after a few clicks I’m completely lost and don’t know where I am in the navigation. I find it strange that it is the default setting as I would think that many others looking at it for the first time and unfamiliar with the underlying philosophy, would also be initially baffled by the navigation - and potentially put off.