The core - should it be minimal vs universal?

[twMat]

What, actually, is the objective for the core - should it be minimal or should it be universal?
AFAICT the implications of these mutually exclusive philosophies are:

1. minimal would mean a system that is devoted to meet the needs of plugins
2. universal would be a system that has all "lowest common denominator features" for the user base use cases

[Jermolene]

Hi @twMat it is tempting to look at this question from the perspective of efficiency or elegance, but I think the most important consideration is supportability: the ease with which the community can provide support to users. A single, standard core that we all use makes it much, much simpler to replicate minimal test cases, for example.

Another issue with breaking up the core is that plugin authors would no longer be dealing with a single platform, but would have to cater for different combinations of core plugins. We could address that with the dependency mechanism, but that is hard for plugin authors to maintain, and anybody using a broad set of plugins risks being back where they started.

[twMat]

@Jermolene thanks!

Interesting. While I must assume supportability is a necessary aspect for any system, I wonder to what extent it has such a fundamental impact on the core architecture in comparable software projects? You mentioned elsewhere that you hope a future TWX to be "minimal" so I guess the ideal goals for a core would be "efficiency or elegance". What would it take for this to be possible? - Perhaps strict APIs around the core? A different organization for decisionmaking? Please don't say "a different user base" ;-)

But regarding the current implementation then:

Your reply implies that the core should cover the users "lowest common denominator needs". How do we know what functionality this is? I see a risk for both over-featuring the core and, conversely, falsely concluding that "well, nobody is using TW for Foo, so Foo is not a use case!" when they really didn't not use TW for Foo because needed functionality is missing!

Properly mapped user needs, really a form of market research, is probably one of the few things we can do to make TW competitive. Our competitors can apply a bunch of other tricks to develop great products (e.g collect data in sneaky ways, adapt their product agilely, overall use money to achieve things...)

I assume the TW 2025 survey partly is about this but the question of user needs is evidently so fundamental that I think we'd benefit from continuous input on this. Perhaps some permanent place where users can express actual or desired use cases in a structured way. The most valuable input is possibly from people that just briefly try out TW but decide to leave because TW didn't meet their needs.

Q: Do you measure behaviour on tw.com, i.e what tiddlers that visitors click on? One idea would then be to list all identified use cases and, well, just see what visitors click on. Or to feature some kind of search functionality for use cases and log what is searched for.

[Jermolene]

Hi @twMat the key point that we are both making is that development of TiddlyWiki is not an abstract quest for technical perfection, but an ongoing conversation in the community to gain a better understanding of peoples needs.

The 2025 survey is indeed intended to give us all insight into what people are using TiddlyWiki, and how they would like to see it improve. It's part of the conversation, but cannot be the only way we learn about user needs.

To answer your specific question, neither the broader conversation nor the survey gives us direct answers, a good deal of experience and judgement needs to be applied. That is part of my role, but in tricky or contentious situations it becomes a wider conversation, and ultimately a collective decision.

Q: Do you measure behaviour on tw.com, i.e what tiddlers that visitors click on? One idea would then be to list all identified use cases and, well, just see what visitors click on. Or to feature some kind of search functionality for use cases and log what is searched for.

No, nor would I want to engage in that sort of surveillance. Any initiative has to be explicitly explained and opt-in.

[twMat]

OK, thanks. It is of course very unclear if this current approach captures the needs properly, perhaps especially with the risk for "well, nobody is using TW for Foo, so Foo is not a use case!" As Steve Jobs stated, "People don't know what they want until you show it to them"

list use cases and see what visitors click on.

Any initiative has to be explicitly explained and opt-in.

Maybe worth doing? Explicitly, and continously, asking people to tell what they need.