Learning in Public
Finally done researching about Digital Gardens. Will organize this better someday.
I just spent the last 3 hours making a “digital garden”. My back hurts, my eyes have been open for god knows how long, and I don't really know what to report back to you after this month of learning about digital gardens.
Let's back up a quicc sec
A “digital garden” is a site where personal knowledge is published. It's not like the conventional blog where posts are edited to perfection, shown in reverse chronological order. It's a personal wiki. With notes. That link back to each other contextually. Read: A Brief History and Ethos of Digital Gardens.
While digging around I found that its ethos is rooted (haha) in the homepage. Remember those? Yeah, if you're born after the 90s you probably don't but anyway. The homepage was just your own page, designed by your brain, not restricted to any platform, whatever you wanted to put you put. You found random pages all the time while “surfing the web”. You found free templates, free code, and free themes to use. Nostalgia, now, hits you like a truck and you wonder: whatever happened to web pages like those?
So the digital garden is more than just blog. The idea is to present to the world whatever ideas you have as essays, word vomit, videos, art, web clippings — and then come back to them to prune them, to water, to put fertilizer in. Like gardens, nothing is really orderly; plants just grow where they want to grow. Like gardens, you decide where to put each pot, which seedlings to grow, and when you want a garden chair you decide where it goes. Does that make sense?
Twitter, Instagram, and etcera etcera are walled gardens. You can't really bend and shape the look of both. Your kind of just post aesthetic stuff in hopes that the page looks nice. Content wise, finding inspiration encourages you “stalk people” and stalk each post, wary of giving a like. The inevitable also looms in the background. These facets of our online life will disappear in the way that myspace, friendster, and other websites and links will rot. Elon Musk is already being weird. Substack is also not going to live forever. Whatever you have backed up online using some platform will be gone by the time you're fifty.
In a digital garden, your ideas roam free and others can see it. You are learning in public, the public learns from you, it feels like it's the 90s again. In the context of longevity, it is a way to store your ideas, your thoughts, your blog posts, your essays, digitally. You allow your presence online to take shape in the way that you want. You allow it to live past its due. A living, breathing, archive is basically what it is.
This is not to scare you into printing every tweet you've tweeted since 2011.
Let me tell you this.
It's hard to get started if you don't really know code.
And quite frankly, it's frustrating to be told that we should design sites as our own, but also make sure its simple enough that the content can be preserved when our technology changes.
So I don't know how to code and I tried to make a digital garden with whatever site building places I could find. I tried to make a site on framer, webflow, and wordpress. All of which were annoying to use.
I came across build.mmm.page and it's where my digital garden lives right now.
Okay, so now I have a site, time to create content!
But in reality my brain is fried from designing, re-designing, looking at fonts, looking at color codes and trying to understand what a Jekyll is.
So what's the lesson here without doing whatever it is that I did?
Here are four key takeaways:
Algorithms suck. Point made. I miss falling into rabbit-holes and finding cool websites, cool content and cool people. I just refresh instagram 2 hours a day.
It's important to link back. Ideas are often connected together and the reverse chronological order makes people high on refreshing for the next best thing. Treat these like footnotes you write on your research paper.
Back-up your shit. The existence of a personal archive is still very important as we have been using social media platforms for almost a decade now. You will want to look back on whatever it is you wrote, embarrassing or not. Download your data, print your tweets? I don't care how you do it.
While the “publish” button seems daunting, try to embrace that we're all learning in public. I do appreciate the sentiment that someday when I'm 70 I can improve upon the newsletters that I'm writing now… But that just sounds annoying. I'd rather post and let people wander off with whatever it is I'm babbling about. I can edit, prune, and water all I want. The takeaway is to be inspired and to inspire. Pruning and editing all the time sounds like striving to get your essay perfect. Low-key annoying.
More links on digital gardens:
More on taking back the web:
Scrubstack, a substack post randomizer. Not a lot of diversity imo
Like like, wander through twitter as if it's a bike ride
Examples of digital gardens:
A list of ungodly amount of profiles I've made:
Are.na is basically giving moodboard, pinterest vibes pero maganda
Read.cv is a better-looking LinkedIn
My digital garden made using build.mmm.page
YEEEEEEEES i've also been fascinated by digital gardens since u mentioned them in a previous substack post! this one's my fave https://chester.how/
Interesting read! One of my interests honestly is dipping my feet on web design and code (especially when I encountered developh, an local tech org that aims to reclaim web spaces through activism and writing) but I honestly do not have the time for it. Thanks for the links too, I'll be sure to get back to it later.