# Digital garden Recently-ish popular term for a kind of public personal PKM / wiki. [[A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden]] is a great read to learn more about digital gardens. Also see [[the Garden]] metaphor for some history. ## What > **an online space at the intersection of a notebook and a blog**, where digital gardeners share seeds of thoughts to be cultivated in public. > > – [How to set up your own digital garden - Ness Labs](https://nesslabs.com/digital-garden-set-up) - a concept that describes the practice of maintaining and growing a collection of digital content, such as notes, ideas, and thoughts, in an organic and unstructured way. - often used as a creative tool for exploring, sharing, and developing ideas, and can be viewed as a more flexible and fluid alternative to traditional personal blogs or portfolios. - a way to document learning and growth over time, and a way to share thoughts and experiences with others. ### You mean a wiki, right? > I think "wiki" is a term that focuses on a particular tool, whereas "digital garden" is a more user-intention high level phrase > > – https://chat.indieweb.org/dev/2021-11-26#t1637964070215800 ### You mean blogging, right? Sounds a bit like blogging, no? > I prefer to think of digital gardening as a new variation of blogging. Blogging that is: > > - Constantly evolving > - Less performative > - Community-focused > > – [🪴 Planting Your Digital Garden](https://www.conordewey.com/blog/on-digital-gardening/) > Contrary to a blog, where articles and essays have a publication date and start decaying as soon as they are published, a digital garden is evergreen: digital gardeners keep on editing and refining their notes. > > – [How to set up your own digital garden - Ness Labs](https://nesslabs.com/digital-garden-set-up) ### You mean personal websites, right? I tend to think of it more as that intersection of notebook/blog/wiki, but it is sometimes also framed as 'old school [[personal website]]'. > A growing movement of people are tooling with back-end code to create sites that are more collage-like and artsy, in the vein of Myspace and Tumblr—less predictable and formatted than Facebook and Twitter. > > – [Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet](https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/03/1007716/digital-gardens-let-you-cultivate-your-own-little-bit-of-the-internet/) > Digital gardens explore a wide variety of topics and are frequently adjusted and changed to show growth and learning, particularly among people with niche interests. > – [Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet](https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/03/1007716/digital-gardens-let-you-cultivate-your-own-little-bit-of-the-internet/) ## Why > “With [[blogging]], you’re talking to a large audience,” he says. “With digital gardening, you’re talking to yourself. You focus on what you want to cultivate over time.” > > – [Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet](https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/03/1007716/digital-gardens-let-you-cultivate-your-own-little-bit-of-the-internet/) > Through them, people are creating an internet that is less about connections and feedback, and more about quiet spaces they can call their own. > > – [Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet](https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/03/1007716/digital-gardens-let-you-cultivate-your-own-little-bit-of-the-internet/) > “Gardens … lie between farmland and wilderness,” he wrote. “The garden is farmland that delights the senses, designed for delight rather than commodity.” > > – [Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet](https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/03/1007716/digital-gardens-let-you-cultivate-your-own-little-bit-of-the-internet/) ## Why not Should you really publish your half-baked notes-to-self to the Internet? > To me that is unthinkable: my notes are an extension of my thinking and a personal tool. They are part of my inner space. Publishing is a very different thing, meant for a different audience (you, not me), more product than internal process. At most I can imagine having separate public versions of internal notes, but really anything I publish in a public digital garden is an output of my internal digital garden. > > – [100 Days in Obsidian Pt 6: Final Observations – Interdependent Thoughts](https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2020/11/100-days-in-obsidian-pt-6-final-observations/) > To be honest, I don’t see much appeal in publishing your entire unfiltered notes to the web. Synthesize interesting portions of them occasionally into coherent blog posts that other people can consume without digging through a forest of links, backlinks, and footnotes. > > – [hpfr](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26493416) ## You're probably already doing it > Believe it or not, you've probably already started planting the seeds of your digital garden. **You don't necessarily need an organized wiki on your self-hosted personal site.** Posting on social media is still the most common form of digital gardening. > > – [🪴 Planting Your Digital Garden](https://www.conordewey.com/blog/on-digital-gardening/) Agree with that wholeheartedly. Although the [[indiewebber]] in me says that if you're doing it on a big social media platform, it won't work out in the long run. ## Misc - The garden is more about the [[use-value]] of information, the stream more about [[exchange-value]] of information. ## Twin Pages - https://www.mentalnodes.com/a-gardening-guide-for-your-mind