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Comment by yborg | Hacker News Reader

You'd have to look at their profit numbers. They have a huge captive base of customers, like Adobe it might take decades for things to get bad enough and alternatives to arise before their profitability is impacted. And the executives who benefit will have cashed out long before then.

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Recently saw an example of somebody who vibe coded a tool to mass export the contents of a 'Confluence' wiki into an instance of self hosted mediawiki, preserving everything.

Mediawiki as a whole has a feature set that 95% of organizations will only scratch the surface of. There's a ridiculous number of possible plugins and customization if you have somebody who knows what they're doing with it.

The majority of companies that need an internal KB/wiki do not have as complex needs or use cases as wikipedia itself or the wikimedia foundation.

I've been at more than one company that migrated _from_ MediaWiki to Confluence. It usually boils down to "non-developers have to use this and Markdown+plugins is hard".

Turns out no matter how much better the thing is, the users have to know what they're doing more than the operators do.

visualeditor has been a thing for a long time now, no non technical user needs to ever touch markdown

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor

It's the same GUI WYSIWYG interface you get by default if editing a page on public wikipedia.

99.99999% of people will never even attempt to edit a page on wikipedia.

Also VisualEditor sucks if you've never used VisualEditor before and sucks even more for anything complicated. This is the kind of tonedeafness non-technical users get to their feedback all the time.

I'm not surprised. We're trying to migrate from Jira and Confluence (because we can't have our data outside our servers), and while Jira has many alternatives, it's difficult to find worthy competitors to Confluence. They either have an awful UI/UX, or don't have as many features. We're looking at Xwiki, but simply try to have multiple users simultaneously edit a table and you'll see why everyone prefers Confluence...

I'm partial to YouTrack but I also haven't used it in 10 years and it was painful to set up.

Been there before too (though an alternative to MediaWiki). A few important pages were migrated but we just ended up with two wikis with lots of tech info on the old one and lots of marketing info on Confluence.

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