Update 14th July 2025: I regret starting this thread. I was not clear enough in the original post. I’ve renamed this thread to better signpost the content to future readers.
There is an interesting long running discussion comparing TiddlyWiki with Obsidian. A leitmotif that is shared with a recent GitHub post by twMat is a well-articulated concern about the experience of TiddlyWiki for a first time user.
Reflecting on this, I have realised that perhaps over the years our ruthless focus on backwards compatibility may have led to us putting the needs of existing users above the needs of prospective new users.
If that’s a reasonable analysis, and if we really do want TiddlyWiki to be more popular, perhaps we need to shift our priorities to focus equally ruthlessly on improving the new user experience. This discussion shows that many in the community are invested enough in TiddlyWiki that they would love to see it become more popular.
If were to take this direction after v5.4.0, the sort of things we might do include:
- Form a working group of people who can be advocates for new users, setting the vision and priorities for the effort
- Make a concerted, coordinated effort to improve our reference documentation, filling in some of the gaps
- If @sobjornstad is willing, to adopt GrokTiddlyWiki as the official user guide for TiddlyWiki
- If @simon is willing, adopt TiddlyHost as our official community hosting site
- Figure out ways to help us measure improvements in popularity, to provide ongoing motivation. We wouldn’t ever want to use industry standard tracking techniques that are invasive and do not respect privacy, but I hope we could figure something out. Maybe just providing simple feedback buttons that users can opt to click if they want their voice to be heard
- Do some usability analysis with real users. For example, we could work on a standardised task list, and invite people in the community to try it on their friends and family, observing the areas that prove difficult
- Reevaluate trade-offs between backwards compatibility and first user experience, leaning more towards the latter. There was a discussion that touched on some of this a couple of years ago
- Radically improve the experience for first time visitors to tiddlywiki.com by figuring out a better way to give a familiar experience of a lively landing page while still showcasing TiddlyWiki. There is a PR with some experiments on this, with a preview available here
- Figure out how we will communicate breaks in backwards compatibility to users to help them make the upgrade. For example, we might take two or three releases to progressively fully deprecate a feature, at first just issuing warnings
And perhaps eventually we might indeed go as far as a name change. The ultimate break in backwards compatibility is to excise the word “tiddler” from the system, given how prevalent it is.
Looking at the above list of ideas, it is does seem that much of the effort in an initiative like this would not be software development tasks, but rather things like writing, organising, planning, and figuring out funding etc. This would have to be something that involves the wider community: I believe that there are people here with the skills we need, but we need to do a better job of coordinating work together to achieve these sorts of ambitious goals.
Just to be clear, all I’m doing at this stage is floating an idea for discussion. We need to think through the implications, decide what we want the future to be, and then work together on formulating the new policies.
One footnote is that this could be a topic where @springer’s professional skills might help us reason about some of the trade offs. I think I’ve overheard philosophical discussions that centre on the tension between the needs of the lives of the people currently alive vs. those who will be born in the future. If that’s right, perhaps people have already discovered principles that could be useful.
with TW’s current ways.