We’ll see! I have not seen any signs of growth slowing. I definitely think we’re seeing some interesting thresholds tested, though:
-
Will developers of key plugins and themes stick around and keep maintaining, will new devs take over old code, or will community projects languish over time? That’s the key indicator of health, for me, and I am not worried at the moment.
-
Will the community support model continue to work? Here’s where I’m seeing stressors. The forum seems less useful over time, and it’s hard to track how useful the Discord is. That said, I don’t know of a tech company—especially an indie developer—that provides good 1:1 support at scale (see below). After a certain point of growth, it seems impossible to get real answers from companies. I think the Omni Group’s model is pretty good and probably one to follow here.
However, as has been discussed in this thread, a key constraint is the complexity of Obsidian. As you’ve said, the core app is rock solid. Most challenges users face and seek support for are driven by community add-ons. Most developers don’t have to support community complexity like this. The tools that have are usually developer-centric (VS Code, Sublime Text, etc.), and so the users can support themselves. So, I think we’re seeing new territory here. What will users tolerate? Time will tell.
These are good pointers… but the scale is quite different.
I got curious about the volume and velocity of these communities, and the numbers are pretty striking. I added DEVONthink and The Omni Group to the list of comparables. (The stats for Zengobi/Curio and Eastgate/Tinderbox are hidden, so I have excluded them from this analysis, but I imagine they are not far off these numbers.)
Drafts has been around since 2012ish, Keyboard Maestro since 1990 (!), Omni since 1989 (!!), and DEVONthink since about 2001. The communities I’m comparing here have probably been launched later than these dates, but each is still older than Obsidian IIRC.
The Drafts forum has 4677 users. The Keyboard Maestro forum has 7624 users. The DEVONthink forum has 13,504 users. The Omni Group forum has 11597 users.
In the past 30 days, the Drafts forum saw 31 new topics and 436 posts, Keyboard Maestro saw 253 new topics and ~3100 new posts, Omni saw 45 new topics and 784 posts, and DEVONthink saw 279 new topics and ~3600 posts.
Obsidian was launched around 16 months ago. The forum has 25,556 users and the Discord has 49,557 users. In the past 30 days, users have posted 786 new topics and ~5700 new posts on the forum. I don’t want to even look into the Discord, because that place is pure chaos.
It’d be neat to look into per-user contribution and so on, but I only have those stats for Obsi. From what I can see, Keyboard Maestro’s per-user activity is wild: many members have published thousands of posts. Omni has a Slack team that’s pretty active, too, but I’m not in it at the moment. Otherwise I think these communities are comparable in nature, but not in scale.
Here’s the numbers in a table:
| Age (years) | Number of forum users | Number of topics in the last 30 days | Number of posts in the last 30 days | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Drafts | ~10 | 4677 | 31 | 436 |
| Keyboard Maestro | ~30?! | 7624 | 253 | 3.1k |
| DEVONthink | ~20 | 13504 | 279 | 3.6k |
| Omni Group | ~30?! | 11597 (+ ? on Slack) | 45 | 784 |
| Obsidian | <2 | 25556 (+ 49,557 on Discord) | 786 | 5.7k |
Obviously, quantity is not quality—I bet Keyboard Maestro’s community would show that having fewer, more engaged users is probably better for those who are involved.
Another consideration is that of all of these devs, only Obsidian supports platforms beyond Apple. That makes support harder. (It would be cool to look at some other cross-platform indie devs, but I can’t think of any!)
I don’t really have any big conclusions to draw, except to show that Obsidian’s community growth has been meteoric. My question now is what the community will look like when it’s as old as these others.