I’ve started this practice of Learning in Public as a way to develop and share my writing with the world. I’m increasingly interested in owning my own data, and being an active creator rather than just a consumer. I’m working on creating a personal Digital Garden Manifesto to guide my practice.
What is a “Digital Garden”? 🤨🏡
If you’ve never heard of a digital garden it’s essentially an imperfect, growing body of writing that is exploratory and interconnected. this definition from Maggie Appleton’s Article, “A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden” is very helpful.
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A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations.
What drew me to this practice is the low level to entry, emphasis on imperfection and growth, and the satisfaction of creating a publicly shareable repository of information and thoughts. I’ve already been exploring this on my YouTube channel, and wanted an even more simple way of publishing work that would aid in my creation practice. Sometimes filming a vlog or scripted video is very personal, and intimidating when you’re still working out what you want to say. So, my digital garden was born. 🌱
Why you should consider making a Digital Garden
I fell in love with the idea of making a Digital Garden immediately, but not everyone is interested in publishing their ideas publicly. So I thought of some reasons why making one is beneficial, even for people who aren’t “creative” or “writers”. I may come back periodically and update this.
Digital Gardens are only as public as you make them.
”What if my family sees this??”, Okay, a real concern. But thankfully, if you’re hosting your digital garden on your own domain or on Github, only real nerds will find your site when searching for you. While everything on the internet is public, not everything on the internet is immediately visible.
Posting on Instagram, Tiktok or any other social media is so daunting because all of those platforms have incentive to make your content indexible, or easily found on the internet. That means when mom searches your name, it’s much more likely that your social media shows up than this. Of course, I do not claim any responsibility for what you post on the internet, it is all permanent to a degree, make sure you don’t post anything too cringeworthy!
Back to the “big social media” aspect, the worst fact is that they own your information, or anything you make or do on their platform. If you lose access to your account, they’re rarely helpful in getting you access. With a digital garden, you own the information! At any moment, I can delete this whole repository on Github and you will never hear from me again. 😄 While I am hosting this through Github, which means they in some form own what happens to my information. All of this website’s content is hosted on my hardware, and on my domain. You could absolutely find a way to host your website without using Github.