Darn! We lost the connection just as the potential user was about to explain what we could improve to convert visitors into community members.
So…What problem was this person just about to describe? Where’s the visitor-to-community-member bottleneck? Gimme your best guess.
I think it’s very healthy to have these kinds of conversations which reflect a range of views on where Tiddlywiki is at and where it should be.
I do feel however that decades of mega-corp values and insistence on growth in just about anything from economies to software have ignored the other viewpoint which is sometimes small is better and sometimes sustainable is better than growth.
I would be concerned if Tiddlywiki user absolute numbers are dwindling but perhaps less so if the percentage of the potential user base was diminishing if the reason was that the potential user base was growing.
A lot of time and effort went into Tiddlywiki and it has huge value to some people so there would be concerns if it was heading for the trashcan. Also concerns if usability is frustrating some users who would otherwise find value.
However I don’t go along with the continual growth mentality - some things are great at the size they are - small is beautiful is not something you hear so much these days.
@cdaven - Thanks. That discussion is very general though which makes it much more difficult to find actionable things to actually do. In my OP here, I’m hoping to “improve” the situation that is described. The reasoning is that it makes sense to take things sequentially. I think that a lot of people who would love TW really miss out because of the first few steps.
I would like to know why people don’t choose tiddlywiki, perhaps something could be gained, but there will be straight forward cases of where it was not for them, be it with their current problem or with the type of people and thinkers or users they are.
As for many open source solutions it is not the sales or growth that keeps it alive but the enthusiasts and community who remain active, sure we don’t want the number of users to collapse and I anecdotally see a continuous growth that exceeds those that leave, and even many of them come back years later. Also being active is not something we can monitor so well because of tiddlywiki’;s nature, people take it home and that may be the last we see it, but they could be replicating, enhancing and growing their use, or not of course.
Yes, for me for sure.
As long as a sufficient number of people say that tiddlywiki will keep going. Open source and contributor driven projects only die when they perhaps should, because they have run their path, that is OK and we move on. However I see tiddlywiki as in its own growth phase of features continuing and with Jeremy and others design principals it is expanding if not in users in capability.
The only threat I see, which has not born fruit yet, is if the coders make “tiddlywiki too much in the image of Javascript”, too technical, get too jargon bound or loose sight of the naïve and intermediate users.
Finally like Royalty, if tiddlywiki died we would say “tiddlywiki is dead, long live tiddlywiki” as a new generation will rebuild from the ashes given those obsessed with it like myself.
Oh, and by the way some who say “Nah… not for me”, are just wrong, short sighted and unimaginative so who wants them anyway?
Wow, I completely disagree with this.
Look at one of the first responses in there:
And these issues are repeated in the discussion. I agree with all of them.
So, here’s an action list:
It took me a few visits to the site before I actually “got” TiddlyWiki. I thought it was another in a series of self-hostable (running on a server) wikis, and so I didn’t give it a passing eye.
What made me use it was when I found a similar project on HackerNews that was also a single HTML file. I was amazed - how could this all fit into one document, and save itself? I read the comments for the project and folks kept saying that it was like TiddlyWiki - so I dug in deeper.
I don’t know how to change the current TW marketing to cater to folks like me, but this is why I initially disregarded it.
OK, I agree with all of these in a general sense but only #1-3 seem are replies to the OP here - but they are, of course, too vague and don’t actually say what the problem is. #3 is probably the most specific one. Would you think that #3 is what made the hypothetical user give up?
Peter, that is very interesting. So, as it is currently presented, it invites for misunderstanding of what it actually is.
I would promote Twexe as the primary method of saving; You don’t even have to say on the first page that there are other ways - have that in the tutorial pages. I’ve tried pretty much all saving methods and twexe is the one that ‘just works’ on your local computer. Tiddlyspot is a good recommendation for those who want their wiki in the cloud.
Also I think the average person is put off by having to write in markdown language. I personally don’t have problem with it, but the average potential user is used to having everything wysiwig. Maybe a variant that has a plugin for that installed by default? Just thoughts.
If I may chime in here, I would like to tell my TW story:
As far as I can remember when I came to TW about ~9 years ago (by then still TW classic I think), I did like the idea of having everything together in one file.
However in the end I went for Docuwiki because of the inconvenient saving procedure. When I did not use my wiki to the extent I originally planned I left the whole Knowledgebase field for ~1,5 years.
When starting my studies and also taught myself programming (circa 2014) the need for keeping records arose again and when searching for a wiki solution TW popped up again. If I remember correctly by then TW 5 was released so I installed the Firefox extension and used the single file option for a while.
Around 2018 my interest in hosting my own software started and I got myself a Raspberry to host some things I regularly used. Soon after I discovered TiddlyServer by Arlen and migrated to running TW on my server. Today I run multiple TW Node instances in Docker containers behind a reverse proxy.
What I want to say with this: I am pretty sure beginners are confused because there is just too much information about twenty different ways to save a TW even though for the average Joe one simple solution would suffice. At least that is what I can remember of my first encounter with TW. Also my SO (Mac user and not very technically inclined) said something along those lines as well and ultimately went for Evernote. If there is interest I will ask her what made her not consider TW further.
First rule of UX; you are not the user. Don’t guess, ask.
Amazing then that our newest users here, @Peter and @morgainebrigid, jumped into this discussion forum to confirm just this. Thank you! Also, @tjout – of course we want your story.
This was actually the major hurdle to getting started for me as well. Not to brag, but I’ve been a programmer and heavy computer user for decades. And still “Getting Started With TiddlyWiki” almost made me break down and cry.
But again, this has all been discussed here: How to stimulate User Growth of TW? - #36 by DaveGifford
Guess: “The website was a bit too jumbled up for me to figure out where to start, and many of the tutorial ‘tiddlers’ examples didn’t work when I copied them into a fresh tiddlywiki, I don’t know what to do!”
TL:DR, the documentation is very good, but not formatted in a matter friendly to new users, nor does it provide them with a strong direction to start from.
Strange comparison to draw, but game design comes into play here, as someone whose played Minecraft since it’s first launch, I’ve seen how it’s grown, and one of the early early concerns, was how it was an open ended sandbox with no direction or assistance.
the resolve was achievements and later on a crafting recipe book, and while TW can’t really do the same, I feel like we can take a block or two from the much loved game, and tiddly it up, yea?
Food for thoughts!
I’m not actually new; I’ve used TW for years. I was on the old Google Groups list previously.
Saving
I think that understanding why a partial barrier exists can sometimes moderate perceptions of it.
In my earliest days of using TiddlyWiki I found the saving clunky but it never irritated me because I had enough background knowledge to know that browsers are cautious for security reasons when it comes to saving files to local disk as a result of activities on a webpage and different browsers and OS systems deal with this in different ways.
The flip side it is on account of the universality of HTML, Javascript, CSS and increasingly standards compliant browsers we can take our standalone tiddlywiki from one device to another without installing any software (browser assumed).
I viewed the ‘save’ issue as the payoff for the fantastic freedom I had courtesy of Tiddlywiki being both a quine and yet a regular page of HTML/JS/CSS - not dependent on OS or any particular software other than the ubiquitous browser so I saw it as a price to pay for the many positives - especially being a Linux user - great I could use the same base product as everyone else and no installations.
Not sure if it’s a selling point but some new users might think that the OS dependent methods for saving standalone Tiddlywiki’s reflect badly on the quality of the software without realising the dependencies on OS and browser and the plus points this design brings about.
Hugs to jonnie and twMat.
I think twMat loves TiddlyWiki and wants to see it overcome the hurdles that keep it from flourishing and impacting a lot of people.
I think jonnie loves TiddlyWiki and maybe is concerned for it not to change in negative ways and lose its valuable current features because of too much growth.
Both are valuable concerns, and both are out of love for TiddlyWiki.
It would be a shame if, in talking about how to invite others to discover TW, we make it lose one of its biggest strengths: a kind and helpful community that supports it.
Interesting and helpful comparison to Minecraft, Justin. TW is something so open-ended, something that one can do so many things with, that it is hard to know how to point new people in the direction that would be most helpful for them to see.
Maybe there could be a html front page with links to several tutorial TW files, one for notetakers, one for productivity people, one for programmer types, one for people who want to use it for statistics and databases, etc. The tutorials in each could be aimed directly at each group.
Welcome to the forum !
A saving tech that doesn’t work on Mac is a non-starter as a universal solution. Also, a tech that depends on an executable will be off-limits in many business places.
Large companies get around the multi-platform problem by having teams of developers that create solutions for each platform that resemble (though are not really identical to) the solutions on the other platforms. AFAIK, only the open source program Joplin follows this route.
We don’t have those resources, so instead there is a different solution for every platform or situation. In some ways this is a plus. You can make TW work even if you’re in an office that doesn’t allow you to install executables.
Personally, I’m finding rclone to be a great solution. And you can use it as RCX on your smart phone, and even turn your phone into a server so you can use it anywhere.
Right. A lot of people don’t realize that easy=compromise. Not until they want a special report or want to transfer their data do they find the limitations of turnkey solutions like Evernote or Onenote.