Problem: Lack of effective discovery for well-maintained, popular plugins
Currently, the Obsidian plugin list offers sorting by most downloaded, recently updated, recently released, and alphabetical order. However, these filters operate independently, forcing users to choose between popularity or recency rather than combining both criteria.
This creates a significant discovery gap: users want to find plugins that are both popular (medium to large user base) and actively maintained (recently updated), but there’s no straightforward way to filter by both simultaneously. As a result, discovering high-quality, reliable plugins is cumbersome and inefficient.
Proposed solution: Multi-dimensional filtering by popularity and update recency
Introduce a compound filter or multi-select filter option that allows users to narrow plugins by both:
-
Popularity (downloads threshold):
- e.g., 1,000+ downloads, 10,000+ downloads, etc.
-
Update recency:
- Default (no time filter)
- Updated in last week
- Updated in last month
- Updated in last 6 months
- Updated in last year
This can be implemented as:
- An additional “Last updated” filter dropdown with the above options.
- Possibly a slider or input to set a custom download minimum.
- Or a combined advanced filter UI that lets users stack conditions for more precise discovery.
Why this matters (forward-thinking perspective)
- Quality assurance: Frequent updates often correlate with active maintenance and fewer bugs or security issues.
- User trust: Popular plugins vetted by the community reduce friction and increase adoption.
- Plugin ecosystem health: Encourages developers to maintain and update their plugins regularly to remain discoverable.
- Scalability: As the plugin ecosystem grows, this refined filtering system will become critical for user satisfaction.
Current workaround (suboptimal)
Users currently manually scan plugin descriptions for recent update mentions and check download counts separately, which is inefficient and error-prone.