Thanks Chris, I’ll also try to come along at the weekend too.
I’ve had one or two discussions with Ward over the years. He started FedWiki at almost exactly the same time as I started TW5 in 2011, both of us making a conscious effort to reimagine what we’d previously made. Ward is phenomenal: he’s been running weekly video chat sessions since 2012 or so, which eventually inspired me to start TiddlyWiki Hangouts (
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVT_2PPd-1p34gGCQ5qpwC8QdykxVAI3u), which petered out for various reasons, but he’s still going strong.
I believe that the kernel of FedWiki is the desire to avoid the social problems that eventually beset the original C2 wiki that Ward founded: as I understand it, it was a big success in the early days until suddenly it became a toxic environment where people had bad experiences. FedWiki eschews the idea of a single shared space in favour of a federation of individually owned spaces, with protocols for linking and transcluding across the federation, and ways of visualising the provenance of a page that started elsewhere.
Meanwhile, for my part, the most important thing about TW5 is that it is an attempt to devise an algebra of tiddlers that was rich enough to build the entire user interface. Everything else that is distinctive/unorthodox about TW5 is really just the logical consequence of the constraint of building it as a truly serverless browser-based app.
With our puny human lifetimes I can’t imagine ever having enough time to do explore everything that I’d like, so I’m very grateful to have the chance to vicariously share the journey of projects like FedWiki, Roam, and Andy Matuschak’s notes.
Best wishes
Jeremy