> > Before people become full tiddlywikians, then need to decide if they want > to try out TW to begin with. At that stage, impressions and feelings matter > a lot. Things that look abandoned or outdated are generally less appealing > than things that look up to date and alive. I'm pretty sure people are more > interested in a software where it says "October 19, 2021" instead of , say, > "May 7, 2018". >
I arrived recently after trying some tools specialized towards tabletop GMs, they look nice enough but have a dizzying array of completely unnecessary clutter features built-in. No plugin system. I wanted something like mediawiki that I could easily host locally, setting up a virtual machine for a php server would have been a pain. Looking at the list in Alternativeto I had initially completely passed over tiddlywiki because it looked too different and unique in the one and only screenshot there. I eventually came back to it, and I'm glad I did, but I did so reluctantly. *Everyone* is familiar with wikipedia, or near enough everyone, who in their right mind puts the sidebar on the right and makes it half the bloody page? Looks even sillier on a widescreen display with fluid sidebar by default. Maybe this is great, maybe there's a good reason for it, but for the average user I think what matters much more then whether something is "nicely designed" or "not abandoned" is whether or not it feels familiar! Mediawiki looks way more dated than tiddlywiki, but people intuitively know how to navigate a wiki built on it because they have experience with that kind of interface. It's in their comfort zone to use and that matters more than appearances. The "99%" you want to appeal to are already familiar with something else and probably aren't especially technologically savvy. That's a recipe for an uphill battle no matter how many web gurus can pretty it up, as long as the cool designs out there are one-off designs instead of plugins/templates to work from they won't matter one iota to a non-technical user. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tiddlywiki+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/be40f7e2-3303-4b38-9128-3e9ee71a00dcn%40googlegroups.com.
