Besides quantitative approaches to user growth, I would add qualitative ones, which could take the form of use cases bridging TW variants and communities/persons around them, which also provides a better entry point to new user that the kind “TiddlyWiki in the wild” / “choose your own adventure” we have so far (at least we can be inspired by the adventures/paths of others).
For example:
- recently a member of our community shared his use of TW as a hypertextual memory for indigenous communities in Colombia and we have a similar project in my University (more details will be provided as the projects advance),
- we use it for civic tech projects regarding past Colombian presidential elections, for publishing data activism visualizations and storytelling.
- It is our wiki for the Grafoscopio community, collecting the real time performative documentation that starts usually as HedgeDoc Markdown documents.
- It is used to migrate web sites from static site generators and complex CMS to what we call “pocket infrastructures”.
- It is our wiki for our table top RPG group and collects/publish RPG open data from other repositories (using the same tools for site migration described in the previous point).
- It is our intranet micro/personal/small business.
- It is used for personal blikis.
- It is used as an academic CMS to:
- Draft and formulate research projects, optimized to the particular requirements and structures of the academic institutions (guides, words limits by section and so on).
- Create students agile public digital learning portfolios of their classes, via the excellent TiddlyHost.
- Publish syllabus and class memories for several courses (including one on learning TiddlyWiki).
- Manage thesis advances and notes (as a thesis tutor and/or writer).
- It is used by the Cuban recycling community to map the plastics recycling points (using social cartography), overcoming the embargo that doesn’t allow them to use Google Maps (or any US tech provider, which also means more community autonomy).
- It is used by a food sovereignty and solidarity economy collective for memories of their edible fungi growing practices and knowledge and maybe in the no so distant future for their internal finances.
- It is used to index metadata of the offline media catalog El Paquete Semanal (The Weekly Package) in Cuba (reaching almost 11 million people in the island).
- It will be used in an upcoming celebration of the “wiki cultures and tools” in September (more details in its own thread).
Those are the ones I can mention for our reencounter with TW from almost a year ago and what we have done in small scale with local communities/people that I think “vertical growth” (more users) doesn’t capture pretty well and that’s why I advocate for “horizontal growth” as the main advantage/rarity of TW is its flexibility and how it serves diverse people and communities and plain quantitative approaches don’t even make this visible and despite of its relative importance, not being the main indicators of the kind of valuable growth that is already happening.
TiddlyWiki has been and important bootstrapper and amplifier of several community/(inter)personal dynamics over a action PhD research started in 2010 and I’m happy to find it again with new eyes and to be able to connect it with other meta systems, like Pharo/GT. Hopefully in our concern for growth, we could escape the big numbers narrative (so important in the Global North, particularly US) and capture the growth in diversity value that TW is already embodying and hopefuly our infrastructures and tools give a better account of it. Of course, detailed and constructive forum discussion is an important part, but casual navigators of the web site should have a glimpse of such present TW unique value proposal.