Digital Gardens (not the webring kind!)

[Corrupted Unicorn]

I know of the webgarden where you make like a mini-website on an i-frame and you share that with people... there's even an implemented function on the forums to show them:


Webgarden - (this one is empty)

However, the digital garden I'm talking about (similar names, I know  ) is more... like this! I hope the webmistress is okay with me using hers as an example  Basically, it's a section of your website where you dedicate yourself to "grow" interests and projects like plants. Here's a spooky-flavoured themed garden, and I'll add more examples as I see fit.

Again, what's a digital garden? Perhaps here's a better explanation from the first source I linked:

A digital garden is like a mix between a personal blog and Wikipedia. Unlike blog posts, which are written and refined offline before publishing, I write each page in real time. I will continuously return to posts to edit. Water, prune, pull weeds. Just like tending a garden. Some posts start off as tiny, one-sentence blurbs. Over time, these blurbs will grow into full pages.

Basically, you set up a list of interests, projects and/or ideas to pursue, and you add information as you learn more, or figure things out. Seems to me less demanding than a shrine (it's basically a collection of WIPs and changing and growing is an inherent theme), and the concept of having several ideas gathered up together like this is attractive to me. I already had something that could be considered digital garden material on my site (it's kind of a secret, tho!), but I wouldn't mind a neat little place to keep track of all my ideas all together.

I'm a pretty introverted person, even on the Net, and for this reason I'm not used to sharing my ongoing projects over the Net, I prefer to keep to myself. I have this bad belief in me that things need to come into the public eye Perfect (tm), but this seems like a good way to kick that bad belief out of my head (the brain likes actions better than thoughts, after all).

How do you find this? Are you already running a web garden? What's in there? Do you have any ideas for one? Feel free to share 

[Melooon]

I have strong feelings about posting incomplete things I do not believe in perfection at all, BUT I do really believe that putting effort into making a complete production (a page, or a post, or an artwork) is a kind of respect for yourself and your visitors; I don't like people being pressured into sharing unprocessed ideas because ideas often need shadows to form, if they are exposed too soon then the expectations of the world crush them.

To be frank, I find a lot of web gardening sections boring, just from a navigation perspective (too much text, too many lists); but I also very much have my own web-garden-like space with my e-mail page - Its really intended to be a collection of smaller snippets and loose ends - so I cant be totally critical 

I think all that aside, I don't like formalizing things; whenever I encounter digital gardening, it always feels like a wellness trend; it gives people a standardized way to post on their site that they might not have considered before, but it does so at the cost of pushing people into a model. Rather than giving people a model to follow, Id like to encourage them to break out of format expectations and find something unique.

So, sure, do web gardening, but do it with no lists, do it with music, do it with a video game, hide it in the CSS - this information is not essential, its mostly about you and it doesn't need to be readable; do it, but get away from that expectation of explanation 

[Corrupted Unicorn]

Hmmm. On one hand, I appreciate the noble pursue of originality, on the other, this is one of the very things that send me overthinking and spiralling often We could have an in-depth discussion about this, but I'd be afraid of making it too personal since it's a topic close to me.

You have some truth tho, that ideas need some time in the dark, like a seed, to develop  Otherwise, their "strenght" (motivation, if you will) might escape through your mouth (or through your keytaps  ) before you get to start it.

Perhaps it's about finding an equilibrium. Perhaps you can write about the idea online (publish, for short) once you committed to go through it. Once you started at least some of it.

[Seren]

I love digital gardens! I really enjoy exploring things and reading other people's thoughts and ideas.
So much of their personality and who they are as a person comes out in each person's digital garden and none are exactly the same! You quickly learn what someone is passionate about through their writings.
There are some digital gardens here to look through here: https://dg-docs.ole.dev/#sites-other-people-have-created


I have a digital garden, but it really needs an overhaul and it's overall just a bit messy. I took a step back from mine because I realized mine felt like a performance for others rather than something that was serving myself. So I still need to think a bit on the whys and hows I would go about re-making my public-facing one. I told myself I was posting it online so that I would be in a more readable and easier to navigate page, but in reality once I thought about how people might see it and make judgements on it, I quickly began to worry about it a lot and it ended up being catered more to an audience than to myself, which kind of defeated the whole point.

I have a offline personal digital garden now that I have been using for about 8 months now privately on my pc and I have been making it using the writing program called Obsidian. I really like it because I can quickly link ideas and concepts to each other through back-links, so I have been using it to find connections between completely different things I am researching. I find it really helps me expand my ideas. It's mainly for my own research projects and for storing ideas (like story writing ideas, projects for around the house, crafts etc) to come back to later.

[fairyrune]

I think all that aside, I don't like formalizing things; whenever I encounter digital gardening, it always feels like a wellness trend; it gives people a standardized way to post on their site that they might not have considered before, but it does so at the cost of pushing people into a model.

i do think i agree with this in some sense. however, i'm not entirely sure how else it would be formatted. this is just a phrase to describe a certain way of creating something on the web, no? much like "shrine" and "blog".

i like the idea that it's an ongoing dedication to those interests. to me, i could see it being useful; i could treat it like a sort of combination blog-shrine, depending on what i'm up to, and i think the pressure would be off a bit less to make something interesting and shiny. i appreciate that some people mark what is fully "bloomed" and what isn't; that means visitors can choose what to look at, if they don't want to run into endless works in progress.

it's an interesting idea, but i'd have to browse some more to understand it fully. to me, it feels like a "hub" for links to pages about people's interests, and that makes practical sense. for people who don't want to make a blog especially it offers places to talk about what they like.

as for the idea of it being unfinished... well, all our websites are perpetually unfinished, aren't they? i don't really see much of a difference. i understand the hesitance there, though.

[hikatamika]

I love the concept of Digital Gardens! Here's my favorite informational piece on them, from the person who arguably popularized them, Maggie Appleton.

That said, I don't think the culture of the web (I blame the instantaneousness and Post-and-its-Final nature of Social Media) allows for netizens and their thoughts to safely and peacefully be ever-continuous works in progress. So, like @Seren, my digital garden is an offline vault made in Obsidian.

Maggie Appleton should have called it an Online Web Garden if she wanted me to think in public so badly!  /joke /lighthearted

But yeah, I've had a lot of negative social media experiences that resulted from me developing thoughts/knowledge in public instead of spawning perfect, flawless, polished thoughts first-try… so… I don't like the thought of making my full, interconnected, Digital Garden into an online wiki-like thing that people can visit.
My fear probably doesn't help shift the cultural tides of the web into somewhere where people can freely develop thoughts/knowledge in public, but it is what it is.

Instead, once a thought/some knowledge from my offline digital garden is "ripe" enough, I put it on the File Cabinet section of my website, where documents have a publish date and edit date both, along with a version number! I consider these documents evergreen and ever-evolving, unlike the posts in my Blog section, which are really tied to the moment in which I posted them, in a diary/journal/record sort of way.

[Inlusione]

It's amazing to see raw/unfiltered ideas and concepts that people have. I don't love digital gardens for their "learning in public" approach. For me, they are identical to something like a "Second Brain". A place where people capture their thoughts and where they store information they find on the web. More like a personal wiki. The Digital Gardens that are made for the main purpose of sharing someone's experience in building something tend to not be of interest to me as they seem too personal, but digital gardens where someone who is storing/gathering information in a very "curated form" for self is incredible.

[grubbyfox]

I love the type of "guardians"/adoptables and stuff! I guess some people use them as a garden too?? 

I've got a mushroom guardian on my website, from https://shroom.ink/ - but I guess they updated something and now my 'shroom guardian no longer works ;_;

However, the digital garden I'm talking about (similar names, I know  ) is more... like this! 

I really like that one linked, it's prob one of the first ones I've seen that sort of makes sense to an audience, if that makes sense. Not that it has to make sense, it's literally just a web page, you can do what you like, haha, - but this one is at least to me, like "aaaah! i see what you mean"