"Nah... not for me" - Why?

[Maurycy]

So from what I see these appear to be the biggest points of failure:

1. The language of the front page uses confusing terminology
2. People are confused by TW being neither Software-as-a-Service nor a downloadable app
3. The number of saver options is too large and creates an option paralysis
4. Tiddlyhost is a recommended option but seems to not be the obvious way to go

First of all though:

@simon

IMO the TiddlyWiki community has a general blindness to, or unawareness of bad user experience. This isn’t new, but I think it’s been distilled stronger over time as TiddlyWiki and the community attract those who share this blind spot, and (unintentionally) repel those who don’t.

I can’t quite quote specific examples or people, but from what I’ve read so far I did feel some resistance to change and disconnect from non-TW users in various threads. And as a “let’s do something about it” person I feel like most that happens is talking while I crave doing (and yes I know it’s much more complicated).

Some thoughts about the four issues:

• #1 this could theoretically be fixed with a rewrite but, as I alluded in my Comparative Analysis I and in a comment … somewhere, I think TW front page should be remade from the ground up, because right now it feels like it’s primarily aimed at advanced TW users.
• #2 and #3 are I think related. As a technologically literate person I find “Open this page and just save it to your computer” to be antiquated at best, and I think an average user may not quite understand how it’s supposed to work. I remember myself being confused how the savers work and having weird issues with the github saver, the number of options is just too large. There is a reason SaaS apps are doing so well - they’re easy to use.
• #4 My case was probably atypical in that I had some preconceived notions about there not being any TW hosting (because of reading some outdated information on google groups), but I feel like the main reason is that’s another layer of trust you need to extend, since TiddlyHost is a separate entity from the open source project.

I don’t really know where I am going with this, but one thing for sure is I think it’s worth taking a look at Wordpress’s business model. They have an open source, free project + free hosting for said product + paid, tiered hosting for more features and capabilities. I think TW could fit such model really well.