Not Only for Developers: Exploring Plugin Maintenance for Knowledge-Centric Communities
Giovanni Rosa, David Moreno-Lumbreras, Raula Gaikovina Kula
TL;DR
This work questions whether knowledge-centric communities can sustain plugin ecosystems with engineering-like maintenance, using Obsidian as a case study. It employs a data-driven approach combining BERTopic-based topic modeling and LLM-assisted labeling on 396 plugins drawn from a 2,667-plugin registry, enriched with README-derived keyphrases. The analysis reveals 26 topics across 6 parent domains, with productive activity in areas like task management and vault synchronization, and demonstrates ongoing maintenance via pull requests across multiple topics. The study argues that hybrid ecosystems do exhibit maintenance dynamics similar to traditional software environments and outlines three future research directions to scale and compare these systems with developer-centric 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.