Why Do People Not Give Their Minimum Support to Developers?

Café
#1

While we have a great community and forum here on Talk! I am just wondering of low support of Tiddlywiki users!

For example:

EDITED

Ref:

#2

What is expected here? Did you have a question or was there something to discuss?

All the examples you gave I personally don’t have a use for. I’m glad people found plugins that help them but I am unsure how to express the “good for you; I don’t need it myself though.”

I mean there have been many little projects and tools I’ve built myself over the decades and they barely get a “Meh” from anyone even though I think they are invaluable. I think part of that is that computers and the tools within are extremely coupled to each individual’s own personality, experiences, and needs. Thus it makes sense that not every thing out there will resonate with everyone.

Then again, you have projects like jQuery, Backbone, React where they can literally :poop: in a bag and the vast majority will eat it like candy. :upside_down_face:

#3

Ditto.

And I do not do Github. I dislike it almost as much as I dislike Talk TiddlyWiki.

#4

Me neither but you know sometimes you have to cater to the masses. sigh Least it is better then say Sourceforge or some Visual SourceSafe thing.

Curious, why is that? I’ve found it better than most bulletin board forums out there

#5

If the cost to me personally outweighs the benefit, then no, I do not cater.

A couple of cognitive disabilities, too long to bother explaining. Google Groups works much better for me.

#6

One of the examples I gave above is TiddlyWiki itself! So, you do not have a use for!
I wrote the above post for people use TiddlyWiki and its tools and plugins! I did not know there are members here not use TiddlyWiki nor its tools ecosystem!

1 Like
#7

I’m sure the Discourse team would be interested in accessibility feedback. Several years ago I worked with the team and they seemed responsive to feedback.

#8

That’s another case of “if the costs outweight the benefit.” Too high a price for me to pay for the benefit I will get out of it.

But for anybody who wants to dig into it, I already posted: [tw5] The kind of forum made for me would look like this

#9

I know for me I’ve cut back a bit on reading this forum and if something catches my eye I will leave a comment. With some plugins there is not always any guarantee the plugin author will continue to develop it. I’m still running a few versions behind on my main TiddlyWikis l. I also don’t use GitHub too much but I do bookmark projects and repositories when checking to see if there are any updates (just not with a GitHub star)

#10

When I read the title of the post, I thought you were talking about monetary support. Then I read the post and realized you are talking about stars to like plugins. My answers would be:

  1. I don’t frequent github and it is intimidating to me.
  2. I obtain plugins via demo TW files, not by Github. So I don’t even go anywhere near where the stars are to even notice them or think abou them. If there is no demo TW, I don’t even look at a plugin.
  3. I have no clue, other than an ego boost, what the advantage would be to a plugin creator if I clicked a star on their plugin. What does it do for them?
3 Likes
#11

I am pretty sure Github stars improve where a given repo lands when using search and such.

Hey, that’s unwillingly important for some! :upside_down_face:

5 Likes
#12

That is the next step. It is not only the GitHub stars, but also a thumb up here in Talk. It is not about the plugins, or themes only; it is about the efforts many devote to introduce nice solutions to many questions raised here. Your Doc for TW is one example.

2 Likes
#13

I don’t know if people don’t like GitHub for usability reasons, or Microsoft reasons, or what.

But I’d just throw https://codeberg.org/ and https://sr.ht/ as other possible plugin hosts if you’re looking to host your code elsewhere.

#14

I have been hosting my projects happily via Fossil SCM without all the incidental complexity of Git, which, apart from minimizing my support for tech oligopolies and the paradoxical re-centralization of Internet via “distributed” technologies (like Git), is my main motive to keep Git/GitHub usage at minimum.

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#15

I hadn’t heard of Fossil SCM before, this is incredibly interesting. Thank you!

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#16

Interesting perspective, I too are concerned with “Big IT” but I found Microsoft’s Purchase of GitHub and its continued support of Open Source as a “phase change” in the way Microsoft behaves, I find it hard not to cheer them for waking up, reduced proprietary behaviours and other substantial changes in the way act.

  • Not they are not perfect but compared to Apple?

Not withstanding the above it was a prediction of mine a few years ago that large proprietary lock in business such as social media eg Facebook and twitter only exist because of open standards, such as the many that drive the Internet and there is no reason why competitors cant just come into being. I think Mastodon is demonstrating this now.

Why Do People Not Give Their Minimum Support to Developers?

I think we need to help people understand how to support developers, we need to help bridge the gap between the end user and those who build the solutions.

#17

I still think their commitment to Free/Libre Open Source Software is purely opportunistic. In fact, their purchase of GitHub and their use in copilot disregarding the developers, is another showcase of the shallowness of MS commitment. In fact I never saw an apology for treating Linux as a cancer. Now software is a commons where lot of people contribute their free time and unpaid effort while data is centralized in oligopolies. Some of us predicted that MS bought GitHub to “datify” developers work via meta-data extraction regarding code production and copilot is the perfect example.

This is an issue embedded in the economic models behind such support (beyond hegemonic economical models). I don’t have problems contributing to solidarity/circular economies based on commons. But in building such futures, we need to be aware of the risk of opportunistic oligopolies build on such commons. GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) are a good example on how bad things can go, when our data, software, tech and social interactions are expropriated in favor of the interests of such oligopolies. One interesting question is how can we build such commons and alternative economies in the small/periphery.

#18

AFFiNE got its 6k star in a week, and get to Github trending that week, in this way, it draw a lot of attention, including investigation and open source developers.

So stars may mean “more developer resource” to a project. I may prove TiddlyWiki and its dev community are worth investigating, for new people comparing TiddlyWiki and Obsidian, etc. As user, they will choose a project that is more “dev-resource rich” so is more “future prove”.

For opensource developers, they may also choose one that is more promising to contribute.

3 Likes
#19

I think good ways to support tw and plugin developers are:

  1. give star to prove you are using or like this plugin (and more like it than the competitor in the obsidian community)
  2. write short intro article in other medium about the feature of tw or plugin, so when new user search for a feature (like dynamic table), they will find tw has so many feature (based on the search result count), not lose to the obsidian or others.

The reward to developers are not only an ego boost, but also other plugins or usage-sharing articles produced by the community.
It feels like you tried write 10 lines of code/wikitext to empower your wiki, but you get N times of features as the outcome, so your wiki gets N times of boost.

My English is not native, hope I expressed it well.

7 Likes
#20

Thank you for your excellent description of how important staring and support on GitHub and even in Talk and in other places.

It is really sad, to see we like new features, we like new plugins, we like to get answer to our questions, but we don’t like to put some time and give our minimum support to people / projects make our wishes real.

@linonetwo correctly explained the reasons we need to support Tiddlywiki and its plugins.

1 Like