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.

翻译：第三方库的采用已成为现代软件开发不可或缺的一环，催生了如PyPI、NPM和Maven等大型生态系统，其中贡献者通常共享专业技术以维持扩展功能。然而，在并非完全由开发者构成的社区中，维护插件生态系统可能面临不同的挑战。在这篇早期成果论文中，我们研究了Obsidian——一个以知识为中心的平台，其社区专注于写作、组织与创造力——尽管并非以开发者为核心，却已构建起庞大的插件生态系统。我们探究了这种混合生态系统中存在何种类型的插件，并为理解其维护方式奠定了基础。通过对396个代表性插件样本进行仓库挖掘和基于LLM的主题建模，我们识别出与知识管理及工具相关的六个主题：(i)动态编辑与组织，(ii)界面与布局，(iii)创意写作与效率提升，(iv)知识同步解决方案，(v)链接与脚本工具，以及(vi)工作流增强工具。此外，对这些插件Pull Request的分析表明，该生态系统已承载大量软件演化活动。这些发现表明，即使在混合型社区中，插件生态系统也能形成可识别的工程结构，从而推动未来研究沿着三个不同方向展开，并提出六个与非开发者生态系统健康度及可持续性相关的研究问题。