Not Only for Developers: Exploring Plugin Maintenance for Knowledge-Centric Communities

TL;DR

This paper investigates the maintenance and development of plugin ecosystems in knowledge-centric communities like Obsidian, revealing diverse plugin types and active evolution despite non-developer focus.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of non-developer community ecosystems, identifying key plugin topics and demonstrating active maintenance through repository mining and LLM-based modeling.

Findings

Six main plugin topics identified related to knowledge management and tooling

Active software evolution evidenced by pull request analysis

Recognition of engineering structures in non-developer ecosystems

Abstract

The adoption of third-party libraries has become integral to modern software development, leading to large ecosystems such as PyPI, NPM, and Maven, where contributors typically share the technical expertise to sustain extensions. In communities that are not exclusively composed of developers, however, maintaining plugin ecosystems can present different challenges. In this early results paper, we study Obsidian, a knowledge--centric platform whose community is focused on writing, organization, and creativity--has built a substantial plugin ecosystem despite not being developer--centric. We investigate what kinds of plugins exist within this hybrid ecosystem and establish a foundation for understanding how they are maintained. Using repository mining and LLM-based topic modeling on a representative sample of 396 plugins, we identify six topics related to knowledge management and tooling, which is (i) dynamic editing and organization, (ii) interface and layouts, (iii) creative writing and productivity, (iv) knowledge sync solutions, (v) linking and script tools, and (vi) workflow enhancements tools. Furthermore, analysis of the Pull Requests from these plugins show that much software evolution has been performed on these ecosystem. These findings suggest that even in mixed communities, plugin ecosystems can develop recognizable engineering structures, motivating future work that highlight three different research directions with six research questions related to the health and sustainability of these non-developer ecosystems.