Why is TiddlyWiki Beaten by Obsidian?

#1

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?cat=32&date=all&q=%2Fm%2F065h3g,%2Fg%2F11n007kbcy

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I read an article recommending affine, appflowy, logseq, obsidian today, and I’m find it is common that this kind of article don’t bring TiddlyWiki together…So I do some search here.

I know how good TiddlyWiki is, I can use it to build any plugin better than on Obsidian (Because the better DSL design and TW can merge my PR).

But I’m confused why people seem to write more plugin for Obsidian, (I really like some of them, so I build some for TiddlyWiki, like WhiteBoard and (the new) CommandPalette).
And I’m also see more Obsidian tutorial on BiliBili, and few for TiddlyWiki.

Do you have clue on deeper reason for these phenomena?

BTW: The biggest reason I hope TiddlyWiki become popular is that there will be more people develop plugins and I can use them. I don’t earn anything from TiddlyWik, except an all-in-one app as my second brain.

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#2

Just come across this.

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#3

I think those are pretty valid points, honestly.

But to resolve some of that, would be really difficult.

I had a one off thought way back about a group volunteering to create a pseudo-company structure, where youd assign one volunteered person to handle something like advertising tw and creating content about it, and then assigning another volunteer to reviewing old docs and making a list of ones to update, and delegating that to other volunteers, or making something of a bullitin board with all those unupdated docs as a sort of bounty…

But ya know, it was more of a hypothetical thought, and ofc, willing and available volunteers, and someone who could help organize all that.

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#4

I’ve never used Obsidian and I don’t know any facts but here are some guesses:

  1. They have a pricing model (although free for personal use) so they may have money for marketing
  2. TW is browser based. This has benefits but puts on a lot of restritions. The new “app model” was not arund when TW came. A huge consequence from browsers is the issues with saving stuff. We have solutions - several of them, and this is also confusing. Tiddlyhost is doing us a huge favour but that is yet one service that the user must “understand”.
  3. I don’t know if obsidian is open source and I don’t know how open source projects usually work, but for TW there is a single individual who is the gate keeper. He is doing an absolutely incredible job but it would be overwhelming for anyone to keep up with all the PRs and issue reports. The open-endedness of TW also means there is no specific goal to strive for with the development of it. So development is, I would guess, fairly slow compared to many other projects. Deliberate, steady, paced - but slow.
  4. points 2 and 3 are further complicated with the promise of backward compatability. This is an admirable commitment but yet a severe restriction for development. I’d think other projects cater more to “the times” i.e they know people don’t think about tomorrow so they prioritize to adapt to requests and what is popular.
  5. Again, I don’t know Obsidian, but my guess is that TW has a rather steep learning curve. I don’t think it has to have this(!) but the current documentation makes little difference between “newbie stuff” and “advanced stuff” so I would think many newbie are simply overwhelmed. What they don’t understand is that it doesn’t have to be complicated IF they accept less functionality/hacking to begin with.
  6. My guess is that TW is somewhere between a note taking system and “real” programming. I mean, it is not really a note taking system because it is… well, what is it? It can be a note taking system but it can be “anything you make it”. This is also confusing for users. They want exactly “this” or exactly “that”. Or else they’d be coders!
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#5

I think obsidian was able to catch a very specific and active user group at the exact right time. Roam Research created an intense interest for a wiki-note taking combination. Obsidian offered

  • A slick desktop application which just worked (TW has no such adaptions yet)
  • A local first alternative with hierarchy of text files (you need nodejs to actually see the files of TW, and you cannot have hierarchies)
  • Markdown based (vs the less-known formatting of TW)
  • File handling/attachments/images (it is not straightforward to make TW link to or work with local files)

I think there might be considerable interest for a TiddlyWiki application (Tauri? Electron?) where you have the hierarchy of your tiddlers to the right and just a big editor to the right where you can write markdown, html, and have other tiddlywiki features. But it needs to

  1. Be nice to look at (aesthetics is very important for specific use good)
  2. Be easy to install. No nodejs servers or docker
  3. Just work. No complicated setup or too many options up-front. Support basic operations such as drag-and-drop. No separate edit mode.
  4. Handle file attachments

However, we do not know yet what will happen to Obsidian in the future. Not many projects reach 20 years.

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#6

Obsidian is not open source. That is it’s greatest point of concern, as far as I am concerned. The fact that the data is stored as mark-up files is irrelevant, because non-standard markup is used by the app and by nearly-essential plugins.

Over the years we’ve seen many proprietary projects that were free or inexpensive suddenly become commercial and expensive.

The developers’ other project, (Dynalist) is commercial. So there’s a precedent.

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#7

I’ve used both - and as a “consumer”,…

  • Obsidian -
    • Is pretty - right out of the box
    • Works for syncing in DropBox
    • Not much “coding” to do,…
    • (plus the above)
  • Tiddlywiki
    • Is “generic” out of the box - - not necessary “ugly” - just ,… “plain”
    • Lot’s of “coding” to do,… (and a ton of Google Searches)
    • ,…

If we link to some examples:

Oh - and we can mention:

Then, for non-consumers - aka the “developer”-types - we can point them to the doc’s,…

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#8

All these pieces, made by widespread authors, who may just lose interest and move on. No central support for elements that most people would expect in a note-taking app.

For instance, it appears that Timimi might not work under Manifest 3. But the author announced his intention of leaving the TW community quite awhile ago.

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#9

I chat with some user in a public PKM QQ group.

Some of them are active obsidian plugging TS developer and they think they are serving an open source community while they are not (Obaidian is not open source. But some of them think that at least their plugging is open source and obsidian is not charging money currently.)

And why they choose to write open source plugin for obsidian, Because when the first time they search for note app they find articles about obsidian, Look at the beautiful screenshots. And they don’t even know TiddlyWiki exists at that time.

This make me think of, I write a lot of plugins, but i only write 1 article about my all-in-one solution with beautiful Notion-like screenshot. It worth noticing that half of my 1160 people in tiddlywiki qq group comes from this article.

So article like this is even more powerful than the product code itself.

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#10

I agree, so recently when i chat with other people, i always regard tiddlywiki As a Note operating system, and TidGi as the all-in-one note app for End users.

Yes, While the power drives me to hire more user is that I Want to have more developers work together, I should still write more newbie stuff, instead of introducing in deepth techniques that I use daily.

Because new plugin developers are grown from the normal users.

Now I think even many tiddlywiki user don’t know TidGi exists. I should write more articles about it. It works out-of-box, brings 70 “core” plugins.

Many existing tiddlywiki user don’t like that, They say an empty edition is better. But that’s not what new users think.

Maybe I could ask @jeremyruston Also bring some selected plugins on his new Mac App, so it wouldn’t just be another launcher for empty edition, but be “A new note app build on tw note OS”.
(And add a section “Note app based on tw” at tw5-com, so I can put my TidGi app on it, haha)

Some of these links can does produce some beautiful screenshots. If more people post them on sites like quora and reddit outside of this forum, it would be nice.
As i believe each of them can be posted on the product-hunt individually.

I may try this, since I will recently advertising my AI game dev tools on oversea market, I can practice on this.

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#11

I like this list, but there are specific problems solved through specific well crafted plugins and or TW modifications. Obsidian just juses textfiles.
I also think one big plus point for Obsidian is the underlying structure: Textfiles! Easy to read in another program, easy to use in another program. I searched for a long time and it sema that nobody can help me with generating a filtered single file version out of a node is hosted TW which is a big minus point for me as I want to use TW for note taking and zettelkasten, but also publish a specific portion of it on the web for friends. With obsidian, I can just use Hugo or Pelican and pull the files in via a filter. Seems to be impossible for TW to achieve. Open for help here.

And it is markdown by default. TWs Syntax is yet another one yo need to learn and memorize in contrast to all the other syntaxes out there. And YES I do know that there is a plugin, but the person has to know it, has to install it and has to manually change the tiddler type everytime you create a new one.

#12

Seconded - “Free forever” does not give me confidence, Obsidian is clearly on a commercial path - if they reach the stage where a bigger concern buys them out then ALL promises are off. This fact alone would put me off trusting the thousands of hours of work I have put into my knowledge base wiki. The fact that I have the TW source code available - that I can use a browser on any machine etc gives me the confidence that if the current TW community just stopped tomorrow then new communities would gradually re-appear.

Obsidian does not appear to be open source.

Even Google has pulled the plug on some projects and apps leaving people stranded.

A lot of consumers will not think through these points. I think for these reasons TW will have a following for the foreseeable future - people who understand the fragility of start up enterprises will see through the promises and realise that they are not actually buying into stable future, that the current motivation of the owners of Obsidian is to make money and if like is often the case for startup’s their dreams are not achieved they may just chuck it and leave everyone stranded.

This incidentally is one of the reasons I am writing on a Linux laptop - I stopped trusting MS a long time ago on account of the way they forced updates and changes to my system upon me which wrecked specialised software particularly device drivers, I just got fed up mending my system after each MS update.

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#13

:point_up_2::exclamation:

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#14

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#15

I think that is not the point, because TidGi-Desktop also use plain text files in a user selected folder. And support markdown/wikitext out of box.

Anyway, now I think the difference is mostly on propafanda. Is the stereotype on what is TiddlyWiki.
To many people, Tiddlywiki is just the empty edition, but it should be something better in the future. At least better than Obsidian’s default setting.

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#16

Another point may be that the non-hierarchical structure of tiddlywiki feels chaotic. In Obsidian, you have folders and structure, so you can always find back to your note. In tiddlywiki, however, you need to deal with filters, lists and search

Additionally, tiddlywiki requires unique titles. This is not always a big deal but adds some mental load

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#17

TidGi is a nice piece of software. If you are interested in more feedback (on design, web page, …), a “Show HN” can be helpful: Show | Hacker News

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#18

There is no other note-taking software where it is up to the user to find their own saving solution.

With the demise of Timimi, there really needs to be an official, supported mechanism for saving. Asking users to find their own solution is a major speed bump for anyone looking for simple note-taking software.

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#19

I use both TiddlyWiki and Obsidian daily.

  1. Notion is extremely popular. If you go on YouTube, there is a large number of people who were using Notion who have migrated to Obsidian and made videos about why and how. Don’t underestimate the power of, “Hey this person whose videos I watch every week (or more) is using this new app and is going to show me how. Maybe I should try it too.”
  2. Markdown files ARE a major selling point, because other applications use them too so if you get sick of Obsidian or if another app comes out you can just take your files with you. I have about a dozen plugins installed and everything is still just markdown.
  3. I’ve been constantly trying to get everyone I meet to use TiddlyWiki to the point where my friends make jokes about it. The number 1 reason that turns them off is that in its default out-of-the-box state in a browser is you have to remember to save. NOT having auto-save scares people while the majority of alternatives such as Obsidian or OneNote by default have it. I’ve been making TiddlyWiki’s for years for all kinds of things, showing them to people, sharing, offering to make them for them, etc. and not having auto-save by default is consistently the big “Nope.”
#20

That is also not the point, because TidGi have Folder menu on sidebar out-of-box, and many of its plugin don’t require input the title because I know What's the standard way to not writing Title .

Also TidGi save to folder like Obsidian out-of-box.

That is why we may need to teach new user TiddlyWiki is the Operation System that build the “note-taking software”, it self is not “note-taking software”.
so new user won’t complain it don’t have such thing. And the “note-taking software” TidGi and the upcoming MacOS app from Jeremy may bring all this out-of-box, so there will be no complain.

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