Something that has always fascinated me: what causes projects, particularly big ones, to fail.
A thought I have had for a long time: if you have no way of measuring the cost of an activity, don’t do it.
So even before thinking of changing the name of something, it is a good idea to have a way to measure (account for) the costs.
The immediate cost of changing the name TiddlyWiki to something else: search results.
Do a search for “TiddlyWiki”.
As much as I like “Ruston”, do a search for it.
Do a search for other names.
And then, as much as some folk may dislike the name “TiddlyWiki”, you are going to get a bunch of folk who don’t like the alternative name.
I personally like “TW HyperLinked Solutions Platform”.
It is a long moniker, but it doesn’t matter. TW is the foundation for solutions, and people are looking for solutions to problems. The solutions that are built on TiddlyWiki, the names of those solutions are the ones that matter.
Take BASIC Anywhere Machine, aka “BAM!” (I just added the exclamation mark, which I might just make “official”). My pet project is extremely niche. It doesn’t look like TiddlyWiki unless you want it to. And the name says what it does (well, at least tries to).
“TiddlyWiki” or “TW Hyperlinked Solutions Platform” then only matters when a person wants to customize BASIC Anywhere Machine. A technical name for technical work is fine.
Something like “noosphere” or other, these ought to be names for TiddlyWiki use cases, a name that is about a very specific problem that is getting solved by TiddlyWiki.
Anyway, all of that blathering is mostly about: change the name, you immediately lose access to search results and history, and then have to change the names and url’s of so many things (plugins, related web sites, etc.)
And if it isn’t called TiddlyWiki anymore, then the word “tiddler” bites the biscuit. And I like the word “tiddler”.