Digital Garden

TL;DR - A Digital Garden is a slice of the internet someone continuously-tends over time. It prefers more notes to polished notes, order from chaos (via links), and continuous updates (like a wiki).

What is a Digital Garden?

There is no one creator of the idea of Digital Gardens (that I know of) but the idea has grown (apt verb!) over time into a semi-cohesive set of principles.

The Core Principles seem to be:

Conceptual > chronological organization - Where a blog is chronological by default, digital gardens aim to focus on interconnected concepts, relying on themes, concepts, and links for navigation.

Continuous Growth - More like a wiki / docs than a blog. Concepts grow and change over time (growing, splitting, merging) vs a blog where each post is typically published then never updated. This also means that many pages will be in an early and unfinished state. This is fine, all plants must first start as seeds before they grow.

Personal, Playful, and Experimental - Pages will frequently be half-finished. The organization structures / links may change at any time. This is a garden for you, the gardener. Others are invited in but you hold the right to change it as you please, when you please. This helps make this whole thing experimental - you figure out what works for you - but also playful as no one digital garden will ever be quite like another's.

For a deeper dive into Digital Gardens, I recommend reading:

• A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden by Maggie Appleton - THE piece that got me hooked on the idea, also has lots of pretty pictures
• My blog is a digital garden, not a blog by Joel Hooks

Takeaways

I have another note explaining My Digital Garden.

What I like about Digital Gardens

I like the idea of independent, personal slices of the web. The web has become very homogenous and corporate feeling as web designs have solidified and cos have run with whatever works best for conversions or promos or looking professional.

But I personally love building things and seeing what others have built and the digital garden provides some great insight into how someone thinks and organizes things.

It's a bit like my rebrand to my Terminal Garden theme of green - I want to build a sustainable practice over decades and this seems like a great way to build a lasting artifact and practice.

Downsides of Digital Gardens

I think Digital Gardens are cool (obviously, I went through the effort of building my own) but I don't think they're a great fit for everything.

Pros:

• Continuous knowledge evolution
• Can link to pages as references - for yourself or for others to view
• Helps connect w others w similar interests
• Can share more writing / knowledge that would overwhelm in other formats

Cons:

• Not a great reader experience - good for browsing, not for targeted knowledge accrual which is how most internet readers work
• Adds maintenance burden - You don't HAVE to keep notes up-to-date but you probably will, at least for some time
• Potential reputational risk depending on what you put out there, how "correct" it is, etc

My best advice is to use the right tool for the job:

• Public Blog - Finished essays you want to share widely. These are your showcase pieces with polish and fact-checking that you're happy to be attributed to.
• Public Notes - Notes that you find useful to have available to link to. Semi-polished thoughts linked from your blog / other internet places. But don't put anything there you wouldn't want public.
• Private Notes - Raw notes. Likely where a lot more of your hard thinking happens as you figure out what you think.

This way you get the benefit of your writing (usually through blogs / essays), still get the deep linking / learning you want from your notes, but also don't feel too much pressure / downsides from taking raw notes.

Todos

• Could use a list of digital gardens I think are cool / worth exploring? Kind of like a blogroll?