🧠 Brain STREAM: 2️⃣ Trends
I'm not great at keeping up with trends, but I do like to analyse them as they develop.
As an ecologist, finding trends in how species interact with one another is the life blood of our field of research. Often what ecologists see as an amazing, beautiful trend, would cause medical researchers to roll their eyes.
In today's newsletter, I want to discuss two recent trends I have identified in Obsidian. I actually found the first one by accident. This accident then led to the second.
Trend 1: Themes
The first is within themes. I wrote about the 35 most popular 'out of the box themes' on Medium a month or two ago. I then left the article in my Obsidian vault to mellow for a while, as I tend to do. When it came to publishing the article, I quickly realised the figures were out of date.
Not wanting to publish an already out of date article, I set about collating the new download numbers for each theme. It was then I realised I could tell the popularity of the theme by considering how much downloads increased by in the time period I had left the article to mellow.
It was through this process, I discovered the rising popularity of the incredible theme AnuPpuccin. I mean, it has rainbow folders, what was not to like? Due to its level of customisation, linked to the Style Settings plugin, it was bound to be a popular theme. At that point however it still sat at 33rd out of my list of 35 so I wasn't going to find it without doing some diving. I'm so glad I found it, because now my vault has all the features I liked from the other themes I considered.
AnuPpuccin now sits at the 19th most downloaded theme as of this newsletter and I'm really happy I fell in line with this trend, and even saw it coming!
Trend 2: Plugins
Inspired by the themes article, I thought I would do the same for plugins. I selected the first 15 most popular plugins. The reason I selected the top 15 was firstly because I only had time to write about 15, and secondly I wanted to focus on plugins most likely to be installed by new Obsidian users. More obscure and newer plugins are more likely to be used by seasoned Obsidian users. However, it doesn't ultimately matter whether the users are new or seasoned, the result is still the same!
Using the above approach, it suggested recent plugin downloads were related to using Obsidian for task management and ironically, considering the trend in themes mentioned above, tweaking themes.
Whilst I don't use Obsidian for task management nor do I think it is the best system out there for doing so, people are clearly exploring Obsidian as a place to manage their tasks. Downloads of the 'Tasks' plugin, increased by 2.2% over just three days, from 463,196 to 473,312. I mean it just goes to show how many people probably download Obsidian each day!
As for the installation of the 'Style Settings' plugin, I suspect this has a lot to do with the rise of the AnuPpuccin theme mentioned above. I mean it's pretty essential. Downloads of this plugin increased 2.8% over the three days.
The plugin trends were not as marked as those in the themes; I'll have to go for a further explore to find the new trending plugins!
So there you have it, two trends within Obsidian for you to explore!
Until next week!
